John C. Maxwell - Developing the Leader Within You 2.0

2018 by John C. Maxwell

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Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Published in association with Yates & Yates, www.yates2.com.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from New American Standard Bible. Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked THE MESSAGE are from The Message. Copyright by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Epub Edition November 2017 ISBN 9780718074005

ISBN 978-0-7180-74005 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-01822 (IE)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-7180-73992

Names: Maxwell, John C., 1947- author.

Title: Developing the leader within you 2.0 / by John C. Maxwell.

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : HarperCollins, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017033337 | ISBN 9780718073992

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 .M394 2018 | DDC 658.4/092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033337

Printed in the United States of America

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This book is dedicated to Mark Cole, the CEO of my companies.

No one has served me better.

No one has helped me more.

He shares my vision with clarity.

He directs my mission with consistency.

He handles my business with integrity.

He loves me!

I can hardly believe its been twenty-five years since I wrote the original manuscript of Developing the Leader Within You. When I first put my four-colored pen to paper, I thought I was writing my one leadership book. At age forty-five I had been on quite a leadership journey. When I started my professional career as a minister in rural Indiana in 1969, I didnt think about leadership. I just worked hard. It wasnt until I was at my second church in the early 70s that I realized everything rises and falls on leadership. I started my intentional growth journey at that time and targeted leadership as one of the areas where I wanted to grow. While I was leading that second church in Ohio, I began teaching others leadership. In the early 80s, I took on the leadership of a church in San Diego. It eventually became recognized as one of the ten most influential churches in America. While I was there I wrote Developing the Leader Within You. At that time I also started getting many more speaking requests. And I started a company to help me train leaders and distribute training resources. The demands of my schedule and the opportunities to train leaders nationally and internationally prompted me to give up my church in 1995. Ive spent my time writing, speaking, and training leaders ever since.

But going back to when I wrote the first edition of this book, as I prepared to write it, I thought a lot about the greatest discovery I had made in leading those three organizations: that leadership can be developed. I had developed the leader within me. And my greatest desire was to share my leadership journey with others and teach what I had learned so that they could develop the leaders within them also.

I thought I had much to share from the first twenty-five years of my leadership life, but when I look back now, Im struck by how much more Ive learned in the twenty-five years since then. That should have been no surprise to me, since Ive written many additional books on leadership. But sometimes you dont realize how far youve traveled until you go back and look at where you were. Its like going back to the home you grew up in twenty-five years later: its a lot smaller than you remembered!

I cant tell you how excited I am to share with you the things Ive learned since I first wrote this book. Theres so much to tell that I can hardly contain myselfor contain it in just ten chapters.

I have extensively rewritten this entire book. Thats why Im calling it 2.0. It still contains the foundational lessons for becoming a good leader. Its still the first book I recommend that people read to start their leadership development journeys. And its still the book I recommend that leaders use to mentor others in leadership. But Ive taken great pains to give it greater depth, to focus it more specifically on a leaders needs. For example, instead of doing general teaching on integrity and attitude, as I did in the original version, I look more specifically at how those characteristics can make someone a better leader.

In addition, I also removed two chapters that were focused on developing staff (which I cover in depth in other books) and replaced them with two new chapters on topics vital to developing you as a leader: servanthood, the heart of the leader, and personal growth, the expansion of leadership. I look back now and think, How in the world did I miss those the first time around?

If you read the original version of the book, youre going to be pleased by all the new material and insights Ive included in this new 2.0 edition celebrating the books twenty-fifth anniversary. I cant imagine offering a better leadership tune-up than this.

If this book is new to you, youre in for a treat, because youre going to receive everything you need to take a significant step in your leadership journey. And if you do everything I suggest in the application section at the end of each chapter, you will be amazed at how much your influence, your effectiveness, and your impact will increase in such a short time.

So lets go. Turn the page, and begin developing the leader within you.

Thank you to:
Charlie Wetzel, my writer
Stephanie Wetzel, who edited the first draft
Carolyn Kokinda, who typed my manuscript notes
Linda Eggers, my executive assistant

E veryone talks about it; few understand it. Most people desire to cultivate a high capacity for it; few actually do. I can put my hands on more than fifty definitions and descriptions of it from my personal files. If you google it, youll get more than 760 million results for it. What am I talking about? Leadership.

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 1992, people who wanted to succeed in businesses and other organizations focused their attention on management. Every year another management fad seemed to be in fashion. But few people paid any attention to leadership. It wasnt on most peoples radar.

I have earned three degrees: a bachelors, a masters, and a doctorate. Yet I had not taken a single course in leadership during my studies before the 1993 publication of Developing the Leader Within You. Why? Because none of the universities I attended offered a single course on the subject.

Today, however,