How to Lead without Domineering: 29 Smart Leadership Rules

How to Lead without Domineering: 29 Smart Leadership Rules is a tool book that contains valuable suggestions for self-reflection by leaders in a variety of roles — on the job, in a honorary post, or in any other context. Leaders reach their own limits and the limits of others, but how can they overcome these limits? What is characteristic for a good leader and how is it possible to achieve one’s objectives in cooperation with others? Wise leaders support contexts, form relationships, and promote spirit by consolidating the momentum or the dynamic of groups, teams, and organizations. These leaders rarely use commands or lay down the law. Clever leadership implies taking risks, as leaders who adopt the principles of this book give up one-dimensional arguing and if-then-logic statements. Dr. Arnold presents different tools for clever and effective leadership and shows how typical challenges for today's leader can be met. His book is based on recent scientific findings in the field of leadership research and on almost thirty years of practical experience as a leader, supervisor, and coach within different fields and organizations worldwide.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction Rule 1: Demonstrate how you became certain, but instill confidence Rule 2: Practice forming the vision Rule 3: Identify and reinforce talent and potential Rule 4: Use time-outs to reflect, focus, visualize, and formulate your organization's strategic guidance Rule 5: Question the beliefs that shape your decisions and actions Rule 6: Stimulate creativity when performing tasks and requirements Rule 7: Ensure a systematic external audit and specify criteria or key measures to provide information to evaluate success Rule 8: Develop an understanding of the social environment Rule 9: Conduct regular exploratory conversations with employees Rule 10: Practice employee counseling sessions Rule 11: Practice the art of "eloquent silence" in meetings Rule 12: Attempt to orchestrate conflict with new ideas Rule 13: Practice skills development with your employees Rule 14: Promote team development Rule 15: Create a learning organization Rule 16: Practice capacity building, support individual and organizational networking Rule 17: Be a friend to the unexpected Rule 18: Avoid elaborate PowerPoint presentations Rule 19: The more confident and decisive your actions, the more you should distrust your choices Rule 20: Acknowledge your inner images of leadership and loyalty Rule 21: Analyze your attitudes and your motives Rule 22: Make an attempt at more elegant communication Rule 23: Reinvent “difficult” colleagues and practice the “emergence” view Rule 24: Exercise change management through self-transformation Rule 25: Banish the “ice-cold manager” in you – become a more humane leader Rule 26: Accept the limits of leadership and learn to manage dissent Rule 27: Work with synergy markers. Avoid the trap of individualizing and personalizing! Rule 28: Learn to lead knowing that you can be replaced and ensure the system you are, temporarily, responsible for will live on Rule 29: Mistrust in rules and explore your own relationship to rules Afterword Bibliography

About the Author :
Professor Dr. Rolf Arnold, born in 1952, obtained his PhD at the University of Heidelberg, worked thereafter in an International Adult Education Centre, obtained his postdoctoral qualification at the Distance University of Hagen, Germany, in 1987, and has been working since 1990 at the Department of Pedagogics (in the fields of Vocational and Adult Education) at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He is also Scientific Director of the Distance and Independent Studies Center (DISC), and the Speaker of the Virtual Campus Rhineland-Palatinate (VCRP).

Review :
This is a book for which we waited a long time. For too long, emotionally-poor leaders have damaged our people and weakened our organizations. Rolf Arnold’s book is a new starting point for emotional literacy for leaders. It opens our minds, providing us with prudent rules, tools, and instruments about the art of leading yourself, other people, and organizations. Arnold’s views are a breath of fresh air. I have learned much.