How to Lead without Domineering

29 Smart Leadership Rules

By (author) Rolf Arnold

Publication date:

21 May 2014

Length of book:

148 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475809725

How to Lead without Domineering: 29 Smart Leadership Rules is a kind of tool book which contains almost 30 suggestions for self-reflection of leaders in any kind of leading situation – on the job, in a honorary post, or in any other context. Leaders reach their own limits and the limits of others, but how can they overcome these limits? What is characteristic for a good leader and how is it possible to achieve one’s objectives in cooperation with others?

Clever and wise leaders support contexts, form relationships, and promote spirit by consolidating the momentum or dynamic of groups, teams, and organizations. Clever leaders rarely use commands or lay down the law, even though instruments of power and their handling are not unknown to them. Clever leadership implies taking risks, as leaders who adopt the principles of this book give up one-dimensional arguing and if-then-logic statements.

Professor Dr. Rolf Arnold presents different tools for clever and effective leadership, and he shows how the typical challenges for a leader in the nowadays world can be met. His book is based on recent scientific findings in the field of leadership research and on almost thirty years of practical experience as a leader, supervisor, and coach within different fields and organizations worldwide.

Preface
Introduction

Rule 1: Demonstrate how you became certain, but instill confidence
Rule 2: Practice forming the vision
Rule 3: Identify and reinforce talent and potential
Rule 4: Use time-outs to reflect, focus, visualize, and formulate your organization's strategic guidance
Rule 5: Question the beliefs that shape your decisions and actions
Rule 6: Stimulate creativity when performing tasks and requirements
Rule 7: Ensure a systematic external audit and specify criteria or key measures to provide information to evaluate success
Rule 8: Develop an understanding of the social environment
Rule 9: Conduct regular exploratory conversations with employees
Rule 10: Practice employee counseling sessions
Rule 11: Practice the art of "eloquent silence" in meetings
Rule 12: Attempt to orchestrate conflict with new ideas
Rule 13: Practice skills development with your employees
Rule 14: Promote team development
Rule 15: Create a learning organization
Rule 16: Practice capacity building, support individual and organizational networking
Rule 17: Be a friend to the unexpected
Rule 18: Avoid elaborate PowerPoint presentations
Rule 19: The more confident and decisive your actions, the more you should distrust your choices
Rule 20: Acknowledge your inner images of leadership and loyalty
Rule 21: Analyze your attitudes and your motives
Rule 22: Make an attempt at more elegant communication
Rule 23: Reinvent “difficult” colleagues and practice the “emergence” view
Rule 24: Exercise change management through self-transformation
Rule 25: Banish the “ice-cold manager” in you – become a more humane leader
Rule 26: Accept the limits of leadership and learn to manage dissent
Rule 27: Work with synergy markers. Avoid the trap of individualizing and personalizing!
Rule 28: Learn to lead knowing that you can be replaced and ensure the system you are, temporarily, responsible for will live on
Rule 29: Mistrust in rules and explore your own relationship to rules

Afterword
Bibliography

This is a book for which we waited a long time. For too long, emotionally-poor leaders have damaged our people and weakened our organizations. Rolf Arnold’s book is a new starting point for emotional literacy for leaders. It opens our minds, providing us with prudent rules, tools, and instruments about the art of leading yourself, other people, and organizations. Arnold’s views are a breath of fresh air. I have learned much.