Many current writers on leadership suggest that because leaders are born, that position and power are the key factors. Leveraging Your Leadership Style challenges EVERY person to recognize that since leadership is influence, EVERYONE is a leader. Each person who has influence in the lives of others has a leadership opportunity. Self-leadership, family leadership, work-team leadership, and community leadership are all about people learning to tap into and trust their leadership potential and their leadership style! Seizing the leadership opportunities in your life by understanding your own style and the style of others, coupled with commitment to integrity and a clear vision of a preferable future, will facilitate maximum impact in your leadership life. Leadership is a matter of motivating, encouraging and guiding people to a destination together. Leaders take people where they might not dare to go if left to their own devices. In order to accomplish this, leaders utilize a leadership style. Many styles of leadership exist, but what Leveraging Your Leadership Style will do is go a step further into understanding how each person leads based upon their unique, God-given personality or specific temperament. Each person has a leader within, but they must tap into their unique strengths and improve on their weaknesses in order to be the leader God intended them to be.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
JJ was born in 1929 in rural Devon. In 1931 he and his younger brother moved with their parents - who were ‘flat broke’, out of work and in poor health – to a rented cottage in Lyme Regis on Dorset’s Jurassic coast.
The family survived on what they could grow and rear on a small allotment and what they could catch in the sea. For cash they took in lodgers. They were not the only family in difficulty. JJ was shocked to discover that the playmates next door were not available on Tuesdays because Tuesday was the family washday. Their parents could only afford one set of clothes for them.
By 1935, the family had progressed from ‘lodgers’ to ‘guests’,- in a small private hotel. That enterprise, backed by a local entrepreneur, was not a bonanza for the entrepreneur but generated sufficient resource for the family to leave the West Country in 1937 and look for work in the London area.
JJ’s father found a job as a salesman of chemicals used in the making of perfumery some six months before JJ’s brother was killed in a road accident.
That death had a traumatic effect on the stability of the family but the man responsible for it offered, by way of compensation, to pay for JJ, who had only been taught at home, to be educated privately at boarding schools until the age of 18. The last of these was The King’s School, Canterbury and from there JJ went on to study law at Queens’ College, Cambridge with the benefit of a scholarship awarded by the University supplemented by a grant from the Ministry of Education.
JJ's Career
JJ left Cambridge with a law degree in 1952, took a job with the British branch of Philips, the Dutch electronics company and in 1953 took a further Cambridge law degree and qualified as a barrister.
JJ stayed with British Philips full time for 29 years, joining its board in 1966 and leaving it in 1981 to start a new career as a self employed consultant. In that role he joined the boards of a number of companies, both public and private in different industries, becoming chairman of many of them.
In 1981 he organised the rescue of the popular history magazine History Today. That experience intensified his interest in small businesses, particularly those in difficulty, and cemented his belief in the importance of personal freedoms and the dangers in pressures to conform.
In 1992 he became the first non-solicitor chairman of the law firm Mishcon de Reya, a position he holds today.
JJ's Campaigning Work
In the 1990’s he helped to create the Countryside Alliance which, under his chairmanship, campaigned vigorously for liberty and livelihood in the countryside. During that period also, he chaired a working party of employers, trade unionists, academics and journalists studying the impact of new technologies, particularly web based technologies, on the work place. Their report was published in 1996 by the Fabian Society as ‘Changing Work’.
At that time he also became a trustee of One World Action, a charity which campaigns and works for the rights of women, particularly in developing countries.
In 2001 he became one of the first directors of the global web based publication openDemocracy.
For a very critical review of this book…I personally found a lot of problems. It had you take an assessment to find out your “leadership style”, claiming it was not attempting to box you in one style. But the problem is, you are a different leader depending on the situation. And try or not it to box you in, it just does in the end. Not to mention, treats “employees” as leaders with their separate leadership style as well, it gets weird. The book also seemed to favor leadership style “Coach” and “Counselor” over “Commander” and “Conductor” because they were more “people people.” And as much as I agree that an organization is about the people…personally, I think the priority goes: 1)if a person at work needs help or has a problem, 2) actually, you know, doing your work? and 3) listening to any additional unnecessary jokes or stories from your colleagues. In the end, if the entire book was based on multiple faulty assumptions, you aren’t going to receive a very good review in the end. I strongly recommend everyone to read this book and form their own opinions. This is an assumption but it appears as if the coauthors of this book just wanted to simply continue a series, and pump out a book together. As far as compliments, I do think they are very educated people that write very well together…I just don’t understand the point of the book. I understand the point it’s trying to make, but it doesn’t quite get there.