How to re-construct yourself to be a leader – and it all rests on personal credibility – and transparency.

I always wonder if I want to read another one version of a “business-personality-extreme-makeover”, because most of those books are so out of touch with reality, it’s bewildering.

One of our lines of business is communications coaching – for dealing with the media, public presentations, confrontations and other crisis situations. We’ve probably written at least a book’s worth of advice on these topics. And we freely admit that we’ll use the occasional book as a reference to some of our key points. This is one book that we will add to our reference collection.

A cautionary note: it is about personal business communications development. Many senior business leaders shy away from books like this. But we feel that opinion leaders would do well to pick up this book and read it behind closed doors, if they feel real insecure about learning about leadership skills.

This is a common sense book – with chapters that serve as reminders about what makes people great leaders. For example, how you handle mistakes, the authors say, actually may be more important than getting things right the first time. (I can think of a hundred examples of this that apply to business and political leaders, just off the top of my head.) Or how about how you deliver bad news? Now there’s an indicator of what good leadership is.

Being honest. There’s a little test in the book for you to evaluate how honest you really are – and how honest others may perceive you to be. Then there’s the checklist on how effective you are in keeping promises and honoring commitments. Ouch.

And then there’s the chapter titled: “Watch Your Mouth”. Okay, I’ll admit it, I had to read this one because that’s one of those topics that I have a little difficulty with sometimes. It starts with a Dale Carnegy quote: “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.” Think about the columnists and politicians you know that this quote applies to. This is a brutal chapter, in that it covers what’s often worst about our communications – talking down to people, being nasty about people, “blamestorming” (guess what that is), setting up “us-vs.-them” situations, etc.

The bottom line of the reconstruction steps the Paganos give is the building blocks of credibility their steps will give you. Many of the points they make will not surprise you. It’s the packaging and the presentation that make this a very readable book – and a useful one to compare your own credibility with.

If you’re proud of your leadership abilities, you still need this book, because – dare I say – none of us are perfect leaders. If you’ve read any of my other book reviews, you know I like checklists, stories that illustrate lessons and research to back up the theories. This book has all this, and the Pagano’s should feel proud to have written one of the best – and simplest – personal communications books I’ve seen in a few years.

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Rating: 5.0 Stars (out of 5)
Reference: McGraw-Hill, New York, 2004 (no, this is not a typo)
ISBN: 0-07-142254-4
Publisher’s Link: http://books.mcgraw-hill.com/cgi-bin/pbg/0071422544?mv_session_id=8Gg8TQmP&mv_pc=1&sectioncode=#description
Author’s Link: www.transparencyedge.com

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