Skip navigation
Strengths Based Leadership
Book

Strengths Based Leadership

Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow

Gallup Press, 2009 more...

Buy book or audiobook


Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

This useful leadership book supports its advice, guidelines and recommendations with solid research. Gallup Inc., the well-known polling company, has done far more research on leadership and the social sciences than any author could do alone. Here, Gallup executives Tom Rath – already a best-selling author – and Barry Conchie extrapolate significant findings on leadership from their company’s mountain of research. They explain what superior leadership requires and what a leader’s followers seek. Their book comes with unique access codes to leadership strength assessment. In a world of mixed opinion and amorphous authority, getAbstract recommends this empirical approach to understanding leadership by way of reliable data.

Summary

Accentuate Your Strengths

Gallup Inc. knows about leadership. Its staffers have conducted more than 20,000 interviews with key leaders. In 50 years of polling people about their leaders, Gallup studied more than one million workplace teams. Its researchers asked 10,000 followers about the leadership characteristics that matter most to them.

Based on its research, interviews and studies, Gallup lists the three most significant factors in exercising strong leadership:

  1. “The most effective leaders are always investing in strengths” – Managers must concentrate on their own strengths and on those of their employees. Some 73% of employees say they are more engaged when their firms focus on their personal abilities. Only 9% of staffers feel engaged when companies fail to make this effort.
  2. “The most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and then maximize their team” – Well-rounded individuals do not make the best leaders. This may sound like abject heresy, but Gallup research shows that well-rounded individuals turn out to be mediocre leaders. However, the best work teams always are...

About the Authors

Tom Rath heads Gallup’s workplace research activities. He is the author of StrengthsFinder 2.0. and Wellbeing, and the co-author of How Full Is Your Bucket? Barry Conchie leads Gallup’s executive leadership consulting practice.


Comment on this summary or Start Discussion

  • Avatar
  • Avatar
    O. O. 7 years ago
    Thanks for good work !
  • Avatar
    E. S. 1 decade ago
    A good summary of guiding of the way to becoming a leader. Useful!
  • Avatar
    P. D. 1 decade ago
    i would appreciate if i could get a compressed pdf version
    • Avatar
      6 years ago
      Dude,.. There is a big, fat download button to do just that

More on this topic

By the same authors

Related Channels