Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership II

I find it Excellent Content, as a Trainer myself of Situational Leadership. I have attended many other Leadership Development courses in the past which were full of nice but hollow phrases such as "Your staff are your most valuable asset" etc. Very often people are promoted into Leadership roles based on their own good functional performance, but are unprepared for taking charge of other people and their performance. This book's content - when fully understood, is an excellent "Toolkit" for handling a variety of people and most importantly "Developing them" into a better place which is good for both parties.
I am not a great fan of Parable style, but I would not let it take from the main content.

I have used situational leadership for a while and love the framework. It's a great practical guide to coaching and development that you can use in every day work. However, I'm not personally a fan of business parables and this style of conveying information. I'd rather have it in a short text book without the narrative. Dig in with more scenarios instead of mundane dialogue. That said, this is good stuff and worth learning and applying.

I appreciated this book as a simple guide to helping leaders understand how to work with their people. It helps you realize that people are at different stages of development and need help to improve and how we need to adjust our styles as leaders to fit their needs.

I give 5 stars to the concept of situational leadership, but the book falls short on every aspect, they were trying to do a novel, or to explain the concept with a short story but it's boring and shallow. I wish they would just write a book about situational leadership without mixing it with a dull story.

This book ... ouch. Where to start?

The content is basic: buried beneath an awkward fictional story are basic lessons like “set goals that are specific, relevant and traceable.” The lessons the book teaches are more like business leadership fortune cookie quips. The gist of Situational Leadership really seems to be that we should treat subordinates as individuals and give them more or less direct supervision based on what they need. This is an okay idea, but it’s common sense to a lot of people.

The content is thin: although this book is 130+ pages, it has wide margins, large font, and a lot of useless repetitive content. About ten pages have one sentence apiece on them (“different strokes for different folks”... wow, thanks). Another twenty pages are less than half full when it comes to text. Then the awkward fiction includes interchanges like one character asking for an email address, the other character giving it, and the first character thanking the second for the email address. This does not add anything to the content of the book and feels a lot like cheap padding. The whole fiction adds nothing, the characters just discuss “Situational Leadership” and have no substantive personality of their own. They might as well have skipped the fiction ... see conclusion.

The content is self-worshipping: this is a weird one ... the entrepreneur character and other managers basically worship the almighty zen master “One Minute Manager” character. They talk about how ingenious the One Minute Manager is, which feels like a thin veneer for talking about how great the same author’s last book was. This gets very off-putting. We get it, you think your last book was the greatest.

Conclusion: Really, you can skip this book and search the internet for topics like goal setting or even “Situational Leadership.” It’s the content of a magazine article ...padded into an egotistical fluff book.

Really breaks down the different needs of individuals at different developmental phases and provides an easy framework on how to handle each situation. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would highly recommend to new and experienced managers.

I devour this book before I knew it; the real life strategy factored into this short read won my highest recommendation to those hungry for proactive business leadership.

I purchased a copy from local book dealer on the street of Accra-Kaneshie together with many other motivational and Christian books with no regrets. In case you visit Ghana reach Mike Atiga on +233540909218 for a good wealth creation, business, Christian and motivational books to enrich your stay here!