Eve Poole - Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership

At a time when leadership is scarce, Eve Poole offers some practical insights for all on what it takes to become a true leader. Indeed an acquired skill.

Paul Polman , CEO, Unilever

Leaders should be readers and Eve Pooles Leadersmithing is a must-read for anyone that wants to improve their ability to lead. Whether you run a business, a small team, or aspire to lead in the future, Leadersmithing will help you become the leader you want to be, with strong practical insight, humour and honesty.

Jayne-Anne Gadhia , Chief Executive, Virgin Money

I stumbled into leadership by accident rather than design. My learning was all on the job with many mistakes and a few successes. How much easier my job would have been if there had been books like this around to help me navigate my journey.

John Barton , Chairman, Easyjet and Next

I found the book fascinating. Whether you are looking for leadership advice when tackling a new challenge, or merely developing your personal leadership skills, Eves deck of cards will provide the inspiration.

Major General Paul Nanson , Commandant, The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Director Leadership for the British Army

This is a leadership book from the frontline, written from a deep base of academic understanding but grounded in the daily practice of the leadership art. I will be buying it for all my Board and recommending it very often

Stephen Bampfylde , Chairman, Saxton Bampfylde

This is a different kind of leadership book. It encourages and inspires. It shows us that we all need to continue to learn and develop our leadership skills, however high or low we may be. And it reminds us that its a journey of one step at a time, with a lot of work on the way. Its a must-read.

Chris Smith , Baron Smith of Finsbury, Master of Pembroke College Cambridge

Inspirational, practical and fascinating, this book will help you no matter what your age or achievements. I couldnt put it down.

Joanna Lumley

Leadersmithing

For all the leaders I have taught and coached, with thanks for sharing with me your confidences and your lack of confidence. I hope this book helps.

And for my godchildren, Daisy, Monty and Lulu.

Leadersmithing

Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership

Eve Poole

Bloomsbury Business

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Figure 1 How to read this book

This book is for anyone who wants to improve their own ability to lead or to help others to do so.

Perhaps you are a leader in training . Try scheduling all seventeen of the Critical Incidents or curating your own learning journey, using the self-assessment found in .

Are you a leader transitioning into a more senior role or changing to work out what most scares you about your next step and to diary in some practice.

If you consider yourself to be an emerging leader , you might like to work your way through the exercises found in of this book. How many Critical Incidents can you diary into your day job?

If you are talent , use to nurture your strengths and overcome potential career blockers.

Are you a weary leader ? Use the book to boost your energy, by focusing on where you feel least well resourced.

Perhaps you are already a senior leader . You might use the book to coach and mentor colleagues and to refresh your own practices.

If you are reading this as an executive coach , you might want to use the book with your clients to focus their development on where they most need resourcing.

If you work in Learning and Development , you may have a particular responsibility for nurturing leaders in your organization. This book will help you by providing a framework for you to audit your offer or to curate a fresh leadership curriculum.

Over the years, I have been close to many leaders and watched them make that most difficult of transitions, to the C-suite. Whether CEO, CFO or any other C-level job, I have observed at close quarters how they managed, or failed, to grow into the position, for they surely werent job-ready when they arrived. And that is exactly the purpose of this book. It aims to help executives to prepare in advance for the top job, to minimize the personal pain of transition and to maximize organizational effectiveness.

Eve Poole is correct in her assertion that there is very little written about what the C-level job actually entails. She starts by demystifying leadership and turning the position into a pragmatic job description. Once that is done, she offers advice on how to develop effective strategies for each of the seventeen job requirements. She brings alive the old adage, manage yourself, lead others with down-to-earth exercises designed to help you to complete the apprenticeship before you take on the job.

Because the book is designed to be read in different ways, it is a helpful guide whether you are a young leader just setting out on your career or already only a breath away from being the most senior leader. And, because it is based on a mixture of research and experience, it is a trustworthy guide.

Dont be fooled. Just because the advice is grounded and pragmatic that doesnt mean that this will be an easy apprenticeship. You still have to ask for feedback that you wont want to hear. You still have to deal with poor performers. You still have to motivate and inspire others. The buck will stop with you as the figurehead and you will have to have the courage to step out into the unknown and to take risks. None of this is simple or straightforward among other things, it requires brutal self-honesty and lots of practice. You will have to take yourself less seriously and pay a lot more attention to others. But then, if you want to be a leader, you already know that you have to invest in the hard work of preparation. This book provides you with a clearer road map.

The bottom line is that its all about learning. Not sticking with the same old bag of tricks, but discarding stuff that no longer works and adding new practices that do.

While learning to be an effective leader may be hard work, reading this book isnt. Eve bounces you along the storyline, with erudite references alongside amusing and practical anecdotes Machiavellis The Prince alongside The Wizard of Oz.

Leaders bear great responsibility. They are responsible for creating wealth that sustains prosperity and thus life. They wield huge power and can make the lives of their followers a joy or a misery. We always need more and better leaders. This book will help anyone who is serious about being a good leader to achieve that goal.

Dr Liz Mellon

Chair, editorial board of Duke CE journal,

Dialogue , and author of Inside the Leaders Mind (2011)

Did you know that leadership books have been around for centuries? Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan and Elizabeth I would have read them any leader of yore. They used to be written largely for kings and there were so many of them that the genre had a name: principum specula , or mirrors for princes. All kinds of people wrote them, often to curry favour or to make a political point. One of them famously bombed: in 1513, Niccol Machiavelli wrote The Prince , the book for which he is most known today, and it went down like a lead balloon. This was because it did not fit in with the genre at the time. Everyone else was writing moralistic leadership books that were heavy on theory and were generally about being heroic. Machiavelli, however, wrote his book about the harsh realities of rule, saying: since my intention is to say something that will prove of practical use to the inquirer, I have thought it proper to represent things as they are in a real truth, rather than as they are imagined (Ch. XV). To his audience, it must have felt like a self-help book entitled Pull Your Finger Out . They were very cross and persuaded the Pope to ban the book, which, of course, made it an extremely hot ticket.