The 8 Dimensions of Leadership
DiSC® Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader
By: Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, Emma Wilhelm
Published: May 16, 2011
Format: Paperback, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 1605099554
ISBN-13: 978-1605099552
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
"As you strive to grow as a leader, you'll need to focus your leadership energy in new directions, and this will sometimes be a stretch for you", write leadership training executives from Inscape Publishing, Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm in their insightful and leadershio skills developing book The 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC® Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader. The authors describe how possessing a single leadership skill is insufficient to lead a team to success, and that a good leader requires a wide range of skills and perspectives.
Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm recognize that leadership is a complex and challenging role for anyone. As a result of that complexity, many leaders rely on a single well developed trait and skill to guide their teams toward their goals. For the authors, the reliance on a single leadership skill may work effectively in certain circumstances, but fail badly in other situations. Leaders must be prepared to learn new leadership behaviors, to move beyond their automatic response, when faced with new or unexpected obstacles. For the authors, the development of the eight leadership behaviors is an internal journey to self discovery, of discovering how and why a leader behaves, and of learning the additional and necessary leadership skills.
Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm (all in photo left) present the DiSC® personality assessment model of leadership behavior. The letters of the DiSC® acronym stand for Dominance, influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Utilizing these four poles, the leader is invited to self assess their current leadership behavior, and its location on the DiSC® compass points. The leader will identify their normal, and usually default behavior, and its inherent strengths and dangerous weaknesses. Through a deeper understanding of the leader's leadership dimension, the path is opened to learning and developing the other leadership behaviors.
The authors describe the eight leadership dimensions, each with its own specific strengths and weaknesses, as follows:
* The Pioneering leader
* The Energizing leader
* The Affirming leader
* The Inclusive leader
* The Humble leader
* The Deliberate leader
* The Resolute leader
* The Commanding leader
For me, the power of the book is how Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm combine the methodology of the DiSC® self assessment model with practical advice for learning and developing the entire spectrum of eight leadership behaviors. Unlike most studies of leadership skills that focus on single behaviors, the authors consider that the full wide range of perspectives are essential for effective leadership. Indeed, the authors consider the default reliance on a single leadership style potentially disastrous. The eight leadership dimensions have their individual strong sides, but they also hold an equally powerful and disastrous down side that leads to leadership breakdown and failure.
To counter the one dimensional leadership prescriptions provided by many leadership experts, the authors share the tools for self assessing one's own personal leadership behavior. Once the individual's preferred behavior is well understood, the authors offer their research based strategies for learning, developing, and applying the other dimensions when and where they are needed in real world situations. The book is a hands on manual for beginning the quest to self awareness and improvement for leaders of all types.
I highly recommend the idea filled and results oriented book The 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC® Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader by Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm, to anyone seeking a fresh and self assessment approach to developing well rounded leadership skills. The strategies for improving one's inventory of leadership behaviors creates more flexibility to meet and succeed in any circumstances.
Read the leadership transformational book The 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC® Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader by Jeffrey Sugerman, Mark Scullard, and Emma Wilhelm, and discover the tools and techniques for becoming a more effective leader. One leadership behavior won't get you to the finish line, but the skills described in this book will take you the rest of the way to achieving your team's goals.
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