First, for attendees interested in the slides so you can practice the exercise, here they are. Here is the post I mentioned with videos of me doing the exercise with Marshall Goldsmith and a link to the chapter in my book.

The attendees asked great questions in today’s workshop with Columbia’s alumni. I wanted to follow up with one: “What other resources do I recommend?”

While I mentioned my book, Leadership Step by Step, I downplayed it. I want to deliver value to attendees and don’t want to sound conflicted in promoting something I make money from.

Downplaying my book was a mistake. I wrote it for a reason. For years I searched for a resource that taught leadership the way I considered most effective: experientially, active, project-based. Instead, every resources I found was based on what I consider passive learning, if learning at all: reading papers, writing papers, talking about cases of other people while not living and facing personal challenges. They had some value, but more for appreciating leadership than practicing it.

I believe that to learn and master performance-based activities you need to face and overcome social and emotional challenges to develop social and emotional skills. In leadership, those skills include empathy, listening, making people feel understood, persistence, resilience, managing disappointment, and motivating yourself.

So while I don’t want to sound like I’m promoting my book, I wouldn’t have written it had I found something that delivered what it does, which I consider the most effective way to learn to lead: a progression of exercises that build on each other to develop the skills, experiences, and beliefs of an effective leader.

Amazon makes the first two chapters available for free from their site, so you can learn more about it for free, and read the reviews.

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