New Book: Strengths-Based Leadership

As someone who read most of the Gallup and Buckingham books, I read this latest Gallup book with greatest interst. Although it was not quite what I expected, I still recommend it with four out of five stars. Here is why (only four, not five):

For one, I expected more real-life stories of business, political, historical and other leaders, of how they discovered their talents and developed them into strengths. But the book gives you only brief descriptions of four current leaders of profit and a non-for-profit organizations.

But what bothers me most is that once again, Gallup titles something "strengths-based" while it should more appropriately be called "talent-based". For those who are not familiar with this "jargon": Gallup considers talents to be like raw materials, which need to be developed into real strengths through hard work. When opening this book, I was hoping to learn something new about strengths, maybe whether Gallup research has developed some sort of taxonomy/vocabulary of 20something leadership strengths, similar to 34 talent themes. I bet they have, but the book won't tell you.

When I saw that half of the book consists of descriptions and recommendations for each of the 34 talent themes, I was concerned to find a "refurbished" version of the other Gallup books. But I was positively surprised that many of the recommendations are quite useful, "novel" and specific about leadership.

The two most interesting Gallup research insights I found in the book are:
1) "according to our latest research, the 34 StrengthsFinder themes naturally cluster into [...] four domains of leadership strengths[s]" which are
Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking. For instance, I was surprised to learn that Significance and Competition are considered to be Influencing talents, rather than Executing.

2) the four most commonly mentioned words of why people follow leaders are Trust, Compassion, Stability and Hope. I quote the book: "To our surprise, many of the "usual suspects" like purpose, wisdom, humor and humility were nowhere near the top of the list". Well, that certainly surprised me as well.

These two insights together with their conclusions alone make the book worth buying and reading, even if you are quite familiar with the Gallup literature already. And the book will give you an access code for the StrengthsFinder 2.0 on-line assessment, which is certainly very interesting, especially for people who have not taken the StrengthsFinder yet.