Ben SimontonPresident| Simonton AssociatesSun City Center, Fl, United States
The leadership industry has a consistent record of being unable to achieve long term positive effects from leadership development in spite of over $14 billion being spent on it annually. The reason for this horrible record became clear to me after reading many many of the over 20,000 books on the subject - leadership is wildly misunderstood.Why? Because the leadership industry studies leaders and that is a huge mistake. If you wanted to become a world class car mechanic, would you study what car mechanics do or would you study cars? Obviously you would study cars! So how can we understand leadership if we don't study what people follow and why they react the way they do to what management does and does not do. For my first 12 years as a leader/manager, I followed what the leadership industry professed. Then I started listening to my people and responding to what they had to say, to their satisfaction or better. Slowly but surely, they taught me what leadership is and why they react the way they do. The more I listened and responded, the better they performed, eventually proving that they are at least 4 times more capable than I had originally thought humanly possible. Wow! Managerial Nirvana. I wrote a book of what they taught me titled "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed". See my website for articles and access to the book - http://www.bensimonton.com Saving Changes...
