2 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
The Secret of High Impact Leaders: Five Proven Leadership Actions To Make Your Team Highly Engaged And Productive, by Yoshiharu Matsui, is a self-help book that aims at providing advice to leaders in any organization on how to increase productivity and bolster confidence and happiness within the organization. The book singles out "poor employee engagement" as the root cause of poor productivity, inefficiency, higher cost, and lower profit that have plagued many organizations in recent years. This is where leaders in organizations are supposed to step up and take charge of the situation to turn things around, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. However, the author strongly believes that by employing the five leadership actions (Envision, Engage, Empower, Enable, and Enhance), which are discussed in this book in detail, leaders in any organization can improve their leadership skills and achieve organizational goals, while maintaining a healthy and happy work environment.
As someone that invests a lot of time into reading self-help books like this one, I hoped to learn a few new things I haven't seen in other books. The book's title alluded that I would get what I wanted, but after reading The Secret of High Impact Leaders, I am not completely satisfied. While the book introduced a new concept of five leadership actions, when the author went into detail about them, it turned out to be information I've already gotten from other books but just tagged differently.
The author included a few case studies involving problems faced by different leaders of organizations and walked the reader through proper ways to overcome the problems by applying some of the leadership actions, and this will definitely help readers to better understand what he talked about. There were also illustrations and charts throughout the book to help simplify any part of the book that may be complex to some readers, and I must applaud the author on his use of a simple and unambiguous language to pass his message in this book, which meant that I didn't even need the illustrations most times.
However, there were some parts where the author wasn't as thorough as I would have liked. Besides the case studies, the book lacked relatable examples that would have helped provide more depth to the author's lessons. I liked the part where the author used human health as an example to illustrate the importance of carrying out audits in an organization, and I would have appreciated more of the same, but it never happened. I also expected the author to include more personal experiences with his methods and talk about mistakes that could be made in the application of his methods, but I didn't get that as well.
This isn't to say that I didn't learn anything new from this book. The author's lesson on the differences between coaching and teaching and how both can be applied in different situations was enlightening. The GROW (Goals, Reality, Options, and Way Forward) coaching model was also another interesting part of the book that I can't wait to apply. Furthermore, The Secret of High Impact Leaders isn't well edited. The book started off well but gradually, the quality of the editing tailed off, especially towards the third chapter. Missing and incorrect determiners made up most of the errors I found.
Overall, reading The Secret of High Impact Leaders was like having a conversation with a Jekyll and Hyde character. I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars because there was a dislike for almost every like I found in the book. While some of my complaints were personal preferences, the editing issues and lack of depth in some areas definitely justify my rating. I couldn't rate it below 2 because it isn't a poorly written book. I would still recommend this book to people interested in learning about good leadership.
******
The secret of high impact leaders
View: on Bookshelves
Like prospero360's review? Post a comment saying so!
