Leadership Lessons From The Seven Arts Of Change

The Seven Arts Of Change book by David Shaner is all about leading business transformation that lasts.

It’s well worth your read. Some of my favorite leadership lesson takeaways include:

Personal Progress: Most leaders miss the fact that every employee possesses a latent willingness to change. Leaders often ignore the fact that personal progress is one of our strongest human desires. Your job as the leader is to connect the new business need with an opportunity for personal progress.

Compassion: We all willingly follow and model a leader who makes an effort to truly understand us. That is because such leaders exude compassion.

Change: There is no other more compassionate activity than listening and then responding in a way that demonstrates genuine understanding. There is so much power in this small act because it can immediately establish trust and diffuse the negative energy exuding from individuals at the outset of change.

Listening: Organizations that evidence compassion listen to each other in order to understand and connect to more effective outcomes, not in order to place blame or assert their own way of doing things. Listening is the root of collaboration, root-cause analysis, and effective teamwork. It is also the single greatest source of establishing unity from top to bottom and bottom to top.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me a copy of the book.

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