Member Reviews
Patrick Leddin has written a remarkable book to challenge anyone desiring to lead at a higher level. The 35 Day / 5 Week challenge is broken-up into 35 daily nuggets with a life illustration and practical learning steps for you to reflect on and journal as you grow. It's great book for groups, leaders, and teams. I plan on using this book with a small group of people next year.
The practical application of these lessons will make each of us a better leader. If you desire to improve your world and your personal life, I encourage you to apply this book to your life.
The Five-Week Leadership challenge offers an abundance of real-life experiences intertwined with insightful actionable behaviors to develop your individual leadership abilities. I read this at a slower rate than I normally read fiction books, mainly to ensure I was absorbing and retaining the ideals shared. I have a lot of great takeaways from this read and recommend it to anyone that has the desire to be a strong leader. Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins Leadership for providing a digital copy for my honest opinion.
Thank you HarperCollins Leadership and NetGalley for the eARC!
I'm so glad I requested this book, and I'm so glad that I read this book the way that the author intended people to. The daily challenges, the daily thoughts and the daily questions were my favourites, and I definitely looked forward to it 😊
The style of writing was very engaging, which sometimes can be a challenge when it comes to non-fiction (and specifically leadership-focused) books. I can definitely see myself gifting this book to many people in my life and sharing the challenges, thoughts and questions with my colleagues!
I like that Patrick wants you to read this book over 5 weeks and take the time each day to reflect on the lesson learned, assess how this could be used within your team, and how it could benefit you and your team. I love the baby elephants, I have worked at many companies that allowed baby elephants to become large elephants, causing derision, anger, annoyance, and ultimately resignations.
This book is a collection of lessons and anecdotes that the author has experienced during his working career. There are daily and weekly challenges to help apply these techniques in the real world. I love how each week has a theme and it doesn't jump around and cause anxiety in trying to apply 3-4 different tips each week. The questions and challenges helped with my self-reflection and allowed me to apply these to my team at work.
The Five-Week Leadership Challenge is a great book written with all needed things to be known to be a good leader. Each chapter deals with each sort of things to be learned and practiced in your life daily to be a right leader for your fellow members. There are chapters where he talk about how the communication is important, hear your team opinion before making any decision rather than thinking they will accept. Owning your mistakes, having the right relationship with client, employees, how to manage time and how to present an information in right way.
There are a lot of things to be learned from this book. He is a good story teller who was explained each topic with some stories related to it which was from his personal experience. In each chapter end we can write answers for the questions and problems we faced in life. It felt like a conversation with the author who was narrating and explaining to us to be a right and good leader.
I loved the way it is written and I will reread this whenever it is needed. I found it a helpful one.
This book is a leadership workbook that offers learning through anecdotes and lessons from the author's life and the book included daily and weekly challenges to help the reader apply their knowledge in a real life setting. I enjoyed it. I received a complimentary copy and all opinions expressed are entirely my own
This book is a leadership workbook that offers learning through anecdotes and lessons that the author has collected through his time in business and the Armed Forces, along with daily and weekly challenges to help the reader apply their knowledge in a real life setting.
Each week has an overall theme - Gain Perspective, Discover Purpose, Determine Priorities, Create Plans, and Inspire Performance. I found that each of the themes touches on the critical components for being a successful people leader. Each day, the book guides you through a series of questions related to the topic at hand, and a challenge to help you apply your learnings. I really enjoyed the questions, and thought that for the most part, they led to good reflection. Some of the challenges were very helpful, others I had a bit of trouble connecting the dots on how they were related to the lesson at hand.
This book was interesting and kept me engaged through the stories that Patrick Leddin shared along the way. An established people leader will likely not learn too many new concepts from the book, but will still benefit from using the questions and exercises in the book as an exercise in reflection to find opportunities for growth. I think this would be a valuable companion resource for a new line manager, particularly if the book is followed in the 5 week pattern as intended.
Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Leadership for the digital ARC in exchange for my honest review!
THE FIVE-WEEK LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE by Patrick R. Leddin contains "35 Action Steps to Become the Leader You Were Meant to Be." Leddin divides this text into five weeks which explore these action steps for leaders: Gain Perspective; Discover Purpose; Determine Priorities; Create Plans; and Inspire Performance. Next, each week, has an idea for each day (like Clarify Focus or Rethink Failure) and these are each introduced with a memorable personal story and "lesson" (like jumping from an airplane and heading for the trees, but learning to take a calculated risk). In his introduction, Stephen M. R. Covey (7 Habits of the Highly Effective People) describes Leddin's text as a "leadership workbook, which dares and inspires the reader to improve themselves throughout the journey." I especially liked the questions and action step challenge at the end of each day's entry and Leddin recommends using THE FIVE-WEEK LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE "as a journal that you can revisit time and again." I agree; this book is one that readers will want to write in as they record their own reflections. An interesting choice to consider as we start back to school.
A great book which doesn't just talk the talk - it provides lots of recommendations to implement with daily activities/ challenges and tips. It helps to improve leadership and team communication. Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I liked the way the book was organized with daily activities and challenges during each of the five weeks. However, I found that for several of the daily challenges, I wasn't sure what the "so what" or "what do I learn from this?" component was missing for me. I also thought that there would be tips that I could take away and share with my teams and resources or research that I could look into a bit further.
Overall, a decent lightweight introspective book that discusses leadership with journaling exercises.
Many popular books in this genre can feel out dated and not suitable for direct application, I suppose that is a sign of industry changing fast! It's great to have an fresh yet still serious perspective in this book. The short chapters and very clear actions for each day make it suitable even for the most busy leaders. I am currently working through Week 3 and already know I will be recommending this book to my colleagues!
There are plenty of books on leadership- from how to lead to how not to lead; however, this book builds on 5 major areas that are key for you as a leader and you get to tackle each area per week.
These 5 key focus areas are: perspective, purpose, priorities, plans and performance.
Now, what's even better is that each week (7 days) has 7 challenges to help you assess your strengths and weaknesses and build on them.
This is the kind of book I'd recommend as a guide, a companion best suited when you know growth requires time and other investments.
It's easy to read, insightful and you'll enjoy it as well.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.