Book Review: Les McKeown's The Synergist

Why do so many teams and groups fail to perform--achieving compromise at best and gridlock at worst?

According to best-selling author Les McKeown, the problem lays in conflicting personality types:

the Visionary with big ideas and little execution.
the Processor who insists on putting every detail through a system, slowing things. down
the Operator who just wants to end the meeting and get back to the "real work."

It takes a Synergist, says McKeown to end the gridlock. A Synergist, who can take all three--the bold dreamers, the pragmatic realists, and the systems designers--and knit them together into a dynamic, well rounded team.

"Most importantly, the Synergist is a role anyone can learn," explains McKeown.
And, he teaches that skill set in his new book, The Synergist -- How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success.

A Synergist:

sets their personal interests below the best interests of the enterprise as a whole.
sees the big picture of what the team or group is there to do and works tirelessly to make that happen, without manipulating the process or its outcome to their own personal advantage.

According to Tom Rath, author of Strengthsfinder 2.0, How Full is Your Bucket, "The Synergist speaks directly to the single greatest challenge leadership teams face today: a lack of relationship and communication."

In Part 1 of The Synergist, you'll learn about the root cause as to why most groups and teams are ineffective and fail to produce their best results.
In Part 2 you will see how highly effective groups and teams subconsciously and intuitively address that root cause.
And, finally, in Part 3, McKeown provides you the tools and techniques, as the Synergist, to consciously and in an accelerated and structured way bring success to the group.

McKeown is the president and CEO of Predictable Success, a consulting firm with clients that include T-Mobile, Microsoft, The US Army, Harvard University, Bose and British Aerospace.

McKeown's previous book, Predictable Success, hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-seller lists in 2010.

McKeown is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and has appeared on CNN, ABC, BBC, Inc, Entrepreneur magazine, USA Today and The New York Times.

Thanks to the book's publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

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