Book Review – lead like you were meant to

Becoming a great leader requires you to turn off autopilot and focus on all of your four dimensions.

In his book Lead Like You Were Meant To, the executive leadership Coach Rob McKinnon, helps the reader to become the leader they were truly destined to be.

His formula is quite simple: Switch from Autopilot to Intentional

According to Rob, every leader has four different dimensions, which are the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual dimension.

The first step is to become aware of all four dimensions and how you carry yourself in each of them.

Because this is so critical, Rob says that building awareness is 2/3 of the work and he also spends about 2/3 from the book talking about it.

Only when you become aware of yourself across all four dimensions, can you go on to the next two steps, Assessing and Adjusting.

Assessing is simply about putting a number on your performance and rating yourself.

Once you have done all this great preparation you can go on to the last step, which is where the real magic happens. Adjusting is about changing how you do things and the way you lead. Depending on how well you assessed yourself and prepared this step may vary greatly in difficulty.

The end-goal through the adjustment(s) is to be strong and balanced across all four leadership dimensions.

Rob takes you on a journey of discovering yourself, looking at yourself and reflecting on yourself. With different exercises that range from short and crisp to deep and time-consuming you will actually go through the whole process while reading the book. For me personally it got really interesting when I reached the self-assessment part. There are three different methods of assessment, which serve as such a powerful tool to review your current state and where you need to make adjustments.

Lead Like You Were Meant To ranks within the top leadership books that I’ve read, even though it’s not as popular as most of them.

I’d like to finish with the same questions that Rob finishes the book with: “What are you going to do next to lead like you were meant to?”