Rating: 
Summary: An Important Book for Keeping Good Employees
Review: Other books on leadership only tip their hats to the notion of motivating people. "Encouraging The Heart" actually shows you how to do it successfully. This book fleshes out, with stories and examples, the specific ways to let people know that they are truly appreciated and valued. Some employees quit just to find a better paying job, but it's usually the lack of rewards and appreciation that start employees looking around in the first place. Rewarding and recognizing others is essential to keeping good employees-and Kouzes and Posner show you how to do it. While some leaders are naturals at touching people's hearts, most of us have a lot of learn. This important book is a great guide.
Rating:
Summary: An Important Book for Keeping Good Employees
Review: Other books on leadership only tip their hats to the notion of motivating people. "Encouraging The Heart" actually shows you how to do it successfully. This book fleshes out, with stories and examples, the specific ways to let people know that they are truly appreciated and valued. Some employees quit just to find a better paying job, but it's usually the lack of rewards and appreciation that start employees looking around in the first place. Rewarding and recognizing others is essential to keeping good employees-and Kouzes and Posner show you how to do it. While some leaders are naturals at touching people's hearts, most of us have a lot of learn. This important book is a great guide.
Rating:
Summary: An absolute "must read AND heed" for every leader!
Review: Scores of books have been written that preach The Golden Rule--and corporate America has largely turned a deaf ear. Why? Because while these works correctly hypothesized that encouragement should cause performance increases, they lacked the "punch" of hard data to back up that assertion. Now comes Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner to the rescue! Case studies involving real people, not management superheroes. Reams of data, extracted superbly to reinforce the theme. Any leader who is satisfied with the performance of his or her organization, and chooses to ignore their message is courting danger on two fronts. First, they are leaving a huge amount of untapped potential for their competition to devour. Second, they will experience organizational decay at some point--and wonder why! Encouraging the heart is a fast read, and it's easy to assimilate its principles into a leader's daily life. I used their concepts for 24 years in a military environment--they work. Now my clients reap the same benefit. Jim and Barry--tremendous job! John Katchka, BlueSky Leadership
Rating:
Summary: excellent and actionable
Review: This book will touch your heart and your mind, which is where every leader must learn to work from to truly be a leader-- to "walk the talk" with integrity and to inspire others to take action and to want to follow you. Encouraging The Heart is one of the five key leadership practices presented in the Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner both leaders and experts in this field. Encouraging the Heart is more than a set of skills. It is a way of being and valuing, a perspective that moves leadership from the left side of the brain to a combination of mind of heart. This encouraging of the heart is also one of the most difficult leadership practices to "walk" and "talk". Kouzes and Posner acknowledge this difficulty and the vulnerability entailed in adopting and enacting this way of leadership at work and at home. Encouraging the Heart goes beyond a simplistic "just do it" to show us how to REALLY do it-- to encourage the hearts of self and others. This newest book of Kouzes and Posner is powerful because it provides realistic ways to enact and live the principle of leadership. These changes can be a springboard for enhancing effectiveness in their other four practices of leadership-- "Challenging the Process, Inspiring a Shared Vision, Enabling Others to Act, and Modeling the Way." I suggest a standing ovation and shouts of "encore" for Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner so that we may encourage their hearts to give us four more books, one on each of the other leadership practices on which they have enlightened us. Thank you and Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: excellent and actionable
Review: This book will touch your heart and your mind, which is where every leader must learn to work from to truly be a leader-- to "walk the talk" with integrity and to inspire others to take action and to want to follow you. Encouraging The Heart is one of the five key leadership practices presented in the Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner both leaders and experts in this field. Encouraging the Heart is more than a set of skills. It is a way of being and valuing, a perspective that moves leadership from the left side of the brain to a combination of mind of heart. This encouraging of the heart is also one of the most difficult leadership practices to "walk" and "talk". Kouzes and Posner acknowledge this difficulty and the vulnerability entailed in adopting and enacting this way of leadership at work and at home. Encouraging the Heart goes beyond a simplistic "just do it" to show us how to REALLY do it-- to encourage the hearts of self and others. This newest book of Kouzes and Posner is powerful because it provides realistic ways to enact and live the principle of leadership. These changes can be a springboard for enhancing effectiveness in their other four practices of leadership-- "Challenging the Process, Inspiring a Shared Vision, Enabling Others to Act, and Modeling the Way." I suggest a standing ovation and shouts of "encore" for Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner so that we may encourage their hearts to give us four more books, one on each of the other leadership practices on which they have enlightened us. Thank you and Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Encouraging the Heart
Review: This is a tremendous guide for analyzing and evaluating our personal attitudes, behaviors, and practices we display in both our personal and professional lives. Encouraging the Heart offers a fresh perspective that embraces the heart of leadership. It is motivationl and inspirational, yet gets beyond the "pep rally fluff" by providing real-life applications for a better understanding of what it means to lead and influence others.
Rating:
Summary: The oil for the engine of managing
Review: This wonderful book touches a much-neglected and much-needed segment of management today .... the business case for managers to also be human beings and recognize the humanity of their coworkers and subordinates and themselves when managing. I am a human resources manager at a utility company. We have many engineers and managers who are familiar and attracted to harder mangement concepts of process, rules, and equations, but are sometimes confounded as to why, with people, 1 + 1 consistently = 3. This book takes a big step toward answering that question with research, examples and tips to try. It shows that managing without recognition and encouragement is like running an engine without oiling it --possible - if not totally enjoyable - in the short-term, but with very negative long term consequences. For those who like this book, I also recommend James A Autrey's "Love and Profit: Art of Caring Leadership." (available on amazon.com) or the videotape of Mr Autrey's presentation of that material. We changed our company personnel policies to reflect these management concepts and it helped with a culture shift we are working on at the company.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable Insights...Practical Advice
Review: Those who have already read Kouzes and Posner's The Leadership Challenge will immediately realize that this volume provides a deeper examination of the concepts introduced in Part Six ("Encouraging the Heart") of the previously published work. After introducing and then discussing five "leadership practices common to successful leaders" and ten "behavioral commitments" among those leaders studied iwhile preparing to write The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner focus on recognizing contributions (i.e. linking rewards with performance) and celebrating accomplishments (i.e. valuing the victories) in Part Six. In this volume, these two "leadership commitments" receive their full attention. The material is carefully organized within 12 chapters which range from "The Heart of Leadership" to "150 Ways to Encourage the Heart." Why did they write this book? There are four reasons. Practicality: "We wanted to offer a set of principles, practices, and examples that would provide leaders with a repeatable process -- a set of essential actions --they could apply in their own settings." Principle: "In this book, we not only demonstrate that encouraging the heart is not soft; we show how powerful a force it is in achieving high standards and stretch goals." Curiosity: "We've been intrigued for some time by this finding that] "female constituents do not report that their leaders encourage the heart any more than do male constituents, regardless of the gender of their leader] and we wanted to explore the practice in depth to see if we could understand more about these differences." Finally, "...because we wanted to add our voices to the discussion of soul and spirit in the workplace." Kouzes and Posner note that the word "encouragement" has its root in the Latin word "cor" which literally means "heart." (So does the word "courage.") To have courage is to have heart. To encourage -- to provide with or give courage -- literally means to give others heart. For me, there are at least three especially important core concepts: First, love what you do. Love those for whom you are responsible. And love them enough to set high standards for them and then give them hope that you and they can meet those standards. Second, don't think of leadership in terms of position, title, power, status, etc. Rather, think of it in terms of initiative. Encourage, recognize and reward initiative whenever and wherever you find it throughout your entire organization. Third and finally, practice what you preach and do that every day. The most effective leaders care....and care deeply. They have credibility because their values and behavior are in unshakable alignment. They have earned others' trust. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out David Maister's Practice What You Preach, Tim Sanders' Love Is the Killer App, David Whyte's The Heart Aroused, and Larry Davis' Pioneering Organizations.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable Insights...Practical Advice
Review: Those who have already read Kouzes and Posner's The Leadership Challenge will immediately realize that this volume provides a deeper examination of the concepts introduced in Part Six ("Encouraging the Heart") of the previously published work. After introducing and then discussing five "leadership practices common to successful leaders" and ten "behavioral commitments" among those leaders studied iwhile preparing to write The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner focus on recognizing contributions (i.e. linking rewards with performance) and celebrating accomplishments (i.e. valuing the victories) in Part Six. In this volume, these two "leadership commitments" receive their full attention. The material is carefully organized within 12 chapters which range from "The Heart of Leadership" to "150 Ways to Encourage the Heart." Why did they write this book? There are four reasons. Practicality: "We wanted to offer a set of principles, practices, and examples that would provide leaders with a repeatable process -- a set of essential actions --they could apply in their own settings." Principle: "In this book, we not only demonstrate that encouraging the heart is not soft; we show how powerful a force it is in achieving high standards and stretch goals." Curiosity: "We've been intrigued for some time by this finding that] "female constituents do not report that their leaders encourage the heart any more than do male constituents, regardless of the gender of their leader] and we wanted to explore the practice in depth to see if we could understand more about these differences." Finally, "...because we wanted to add our voices to the discussion of soul and spirit in the workplace." Kouzes and Posner note that the word "encouragement" has its root in the Latin word "cor" which literally means "heart." (So does the word "courage.") To have courage is to have heart. To encourage -- to provide with or give courage -- literally means to give others heart. For me, there are at least three especially important core concepts: First, love what you do. Love those for whom you are responsible. And love them enough to set high standards for them and then give them hope that you and they can meet those standards. Second, don't think of leadership in terms of position, title, power, status, etc. Rather, think of it in terms of initiative. Encourage, recognize and reward initiative whenever and wherever you find it throughout your entire organization. Third and finally, practice what you preach and do that every day. The most effective leaders care....and care deeply. They have credibility because their values and behavior are in unshakable alignment. They have earned others' trust. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out David Maister's Practice What You Preach, Tim Sanders' Love Is the Killer App, David Whyte's The Heart Aroused, and Larry Davis' Pioneering Organizations.
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