Do you want to be a highly effective leader? Do you want to develop the self-confidence, vision, wisdom, motivational impact and delivery skills that the most effective leaders have? And do you want to be the person to whom, quite naturally, other people turn for direction?

And do you want to learn the leadership "magic" of building an enthusiastic and highly motivated team, where team members work together effectively and positively, bringing the exceptional performance improvements that good leadership and successful teamwork can bring? And what about the rewards, respect and personal growth that come with effective leadership?

Helping Good Managers Become Exceptional Leaders...

Looking at where you are right now, do you feel that you're not getting the rewards and recognition you deserve? Perhaps your ideas are not taken as seriously as they should be, your experience is undervalued, or you're not getting the opportunities you want? Does life seem a struggle, with sometimes uncooperative and difficult people making work a chore?

You may be very competent as a manager. However, leadership is a different thing from management (they complement one another.) If you rely only on being a good manager, you'll never inspire people to give their very best. Because of this, good leaders are selected for the best jobs, leaving people who are only good managers trailing in the dust - time and again...

The good news is that with just 24 hours of study, you can learn to be an exceptional leader! With just a little application, you can learn the 48 simple skills that will make you the wise, self-confident, inspiring and successful leader you want to be. You'll say goodbye to the mundane struggle of everyday management existence, becoming the natural center of a positive, enthusiastic, well-motivated and highly successful team.

Read on. It's all explained below!

Business Leadership – Made Clear

With Mind Tools’ “How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You” leadership system, you'll learn the essential, tried-and-tested leadership skills and techniques you need to become a well respected and highly effective leader in business.

You'll see the the mystery and mysticism surrounding leadership (for example, the myth that good leaders are born, not trained) fall away as we reveal the clear, simple, up-to-date principles that lie behind good leadership.

And with "How to Lead"'s sharp focus on leadership in the corporate world, you'll learn the skills you need to lead effectively and positively in today's workplace, including the often tricky skills needed to persuade, influence and lead people over whom you sometimes have little direct authority.

(These skills should work well for people in the military, healthcare, nursing, education and public service generally - it's just that our focus and experience lies in the corporate world...)

Among many other things, with "How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You", you learn how to:

Create a reliable, robust and attractive vision of the future that people will respect and believe in (meaning that they'll enthusiastically follow your lead);
Communicate your vision, and see the benefits as people work to the best of their abilities to complete the projects you initiate successfully;
Grow your self-confidence, becoming a calm and self-confident leader, and one who inspires confidence in others;
Build a reputation for expertise and a track record of achievement that teams members and your peers will come to respect, value and trust;
Make good decisions under pressure, with the confidence that you’ve done the homework needed for these decisions to be right;
Build a strong, flexible and highly effective team, expanding your ability to deliver many times over;
Develop the sureness of touch shown by the best leaders, and learn to build the empathic, mutually trusting relationships needed for maximum team performance;
Enjoy mutually rewarding, co-operative working relationships with team members and peers. And enjoy the happy, energizing atmosphere that comes with this;
Keep people on target and performing well together in a “firm but fair way” that gets the job done while respecting the rights of team members;
Learn to inspire and motivate team members so that they'll "go to the ends of the Earth" to give their very best;
Become a truly inspirational leader, and enjoy the perks that come with this.

As you learn and start using these skills, you'll become the natural choice for advancement and promotion. Your career will take off, and you'll quickly gather the financial and emotional rewards that come with success. You can join the ranks of the high flyers.

In the past, you'd have spent years of painful trial and error learning the techniques taught in this course. And, not knowing these skills, you would not have been performing at your best during this time (even worse, you could easily have made mistakes which were, if only you'd known, all too avoidable.)

But now, with Mind Tools' "How to Lead" leadership system, you'll quickly learn the essential skills you need to be a truly effective leader.

With How to Lead,
you can be a truly exceptional leader.

"How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You" by James Manktelow, Felix Brodbeck and Namita Anand

Case Study:
Joe Broderick,
South Brunswick,
USA

"I had been working in an administrative position for about three years and was thinking about what to do, professionally, to move to the next level. I felt I was managing things very well, but was inexperienced in working with or leading people. In particular, I wanted to try to build a team where all the members were contributing according to their ability.

"I happened to go to the Time Management Resource website completely by accident. I was hesitant to purchase something through the web that was unproven. But I think the usefulness that I found in the publicly accessible part was very reassuring and gave me confidence that if I were to purchase something, it would really be of value. And the amount that I was risking was relatively small, so I went ahead."

"My confidence in How to Lead has been validated. I have found the material to be stimulating, informative, and encouraging. It’s very well organized and fits well into the 30-60 minutes per day that I have to devote to my personal development. I feel that I got excellent value for my purchase."

Joe Broderick, South Brunswick, USA

How You Learn

Within the “How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You” workbook (around which the system is built), you'll find the following eight modules:

The Meaning of Leadership, in which you learn the essential concepts that form the foundation of effective business leadership;
Get to Know Yourself, which, with five insightful self-tests, gives you the self-knowledge you need to be a balanced and successful leader;

Get the Right Stuff, in which you learn to counter weaknesses, build your self-confidence, project a dynamic attitude and capitalize on your leadership strengths;

Creating Winning Ideas, which shows you how to build a clear and compelling vision of how the future should be, which other people will enthusiastically adopt;
The Power to Rouse, in which you find out how to inspire people with this vision, and motivate them to give their very best;
Getting Things Done, which teaches the rare skills needed to transform vision into reality;
Develop Your Team, which helps you develop your people so that they become highly-motivated and exceptionally-effective team players;
Get the Extra Edge, which, in explaining things like risk taking, networking and cross-cultural leadership, helps you move from being a good leader to being a great one.

Step-by-step in these modules, you'll learn the tried and tested skills needed for effective leadership:

The Meaning of Leadership

In the “Meaning of Leadership” module, you'll learn the up-to-date theory that forms the foundation of effective business leadership. Starting with stories such as those of Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln, you'll then draw on your own experience to understand what leadership is and how it works.

You'll see how leadership ideas have emerged and changed over time, helping you make sense of the often-conflicting and old-fashioned ideas about leadership that cause so much confusion. And, in learning to distinguish good ideas about leadership from bad, you'll develop a clear, reliable and confident understanding of the things you need to know.

With this picture of who a well-balanced leader is and how he or she behaves, this module charts the structure of the rest of the course, in which you will develop the characteristics, skills and behaviors that will make you a highly effective and respected leader.

Get to Know Yourself

You'll find out more about these characteristics in the “Get to Know Yourself” module, which gives you five important self-assessment tests. These help you understand:

Your motivation to lead;
Your level of self-confidence;
The disposition you project;
Your emotional intelligence; and
The extent to which you already show good leadership qualities.

These tests help you understand where you stand with respect to leadership. They show you strengths in which you can be confident, and help you identify the areas of development that you need to target later on in the course. This is your starting point in building an effective, self-confident and well-balanced leadership style, which we look at in the next module.

Get “The Right Stuff”

Once you’ve identified strengths and areas of development, the ‘Get “The Right Stuff”’ module gives you the skills and techniques you need to build this well-balanced leadership style.

With these skills, you will increase self-motivation and self-confidence, project a positive and dynamic attitude, communicate effectively and become appropriately sensitive to other people’s feelings.You'll learn to increase your self-motivation and become positive in outlook, helping you become a dynamic and energizing leader. Your self-confidence will increase as you recognize and extend your strengths, counter your weaknesses, and eliminate corrosive self-doubt.

You'll develop the emotional sureness of touch shown by the best leaders, and learn to build the empathic, mutually trusting relationships with team members needed if your team is to perform "as one".

And you'll learn to make time for the essential but easy-to-overlook tasks so essential for effective leadership, like making time to communicate vision, setting clear performance expectations, providing support for team members and helping them understand the real value of the work they do.

These techniques help you develop and project yourself in a well-motivated, positive and self-confident way that other people will respond to and respect. And they help you develop the traits and poise of a successful corporate leader - someone clearly on the fast track to success.

Create Winning Ideas

But if you are to lead people, you also need a clear, well-tested and fundamentally sound vision of where you want to go.

You'll learn how to build this vision in the “Create Winning Ideas” module, which shows you how to gather the information you need to build a robust vision. It teaches you how to monitor change and think about how the future may unfold. And it helps you create and communicate a vision that’s well aligned with your values and the values of your team and organization.

These tools lay the foundations of “common sense” and “wisdom” that people around you will come to trust. They help you make good decisions, even under intense pressure. And they help you build a clear and credible vision of the future that your team will find truly inspiring.

Get the Power to Rouse

This inspiration is the subject of the “Get the Power to Rouse” module.

In it, you'll learn how motivation works, and find out how best to motivate and inspire your team, with the huge performance improvements that come with this.

You'll understand and be able to discriminate between good and bad sources of power, and between strong and weak methods of influence. Understanding this helps you develop a positive, honest, ethical and open leadership style that your team will trust and seek to emulate. It helps you avoid the traps and mistakes that lead people to become (unintentionally) manipulative or autocratic.

You'll find out how to build a deserved reputation for expertise that your team members and peers will come to respect, value and trust. You'll learn to win honest power and respect, and understand how to influence other people in an open, mature and positive way.

And you'll learn to inspire and motivate your team to give their very best. You will be a truly inspirational leader. And you'll gather the fair rewards (financial and emotional) that come with this.

Getting Things Done

Having developed the vision and inspired your team, you still have to manage the tricky task of implementing your vision.

The “Getting Things Done” module helps you do this. You'll find out how to pick a good team, where the right people are doing the right jobs. You'll develop a confident way of giving orders that is neither weak nor overbearing. And you'll find the balance needed to resolve conflict, maintain standards and achieve an excellent delivery.

You'll become a master of effective implementation, "firmly-but-fairly" keeping people on target and performing effectively. You'll give orders in a humane way that ensures that the job gets done, while still respecting the rights of team members. And you'll know when to step in and lend a hand, and when to let people get on and learn. All of this will earn you the respect of your successful, hard-working, and increasingly-effective team.

Develop Your Team

Business leadership is rarely a one-off transaction. It is usually a relationship where leader and team learn to work together and, if all goes as it should, develop ever-growing effectiveness and mutual trust.

In the “Develop Your Team” module, you'll find out how to build your team’s capabilities and develop these trusting relationships and teamwork skills. You'll uncover the abilities, strengths and weaknesses of your team members, and understand their training, coaching and development needs. And you'll learn how to help them grow as happy, self-confident, skilled and highly-effective team players.

Get the Extra Edge

The final module picks up other factors which are important for leadership effectiveness.

You find out how to take “calculated risks” without taking foolhardy ones. You see how to build a strong and supportive network. You look at the tricky task of leading teams made up of people from different cultures. And you learn about the specific techniques needed to manage large-scale change.

These techniques help you navigate some of the difficult issues which can cause leadership failure. And they help you develop the wisdom, respect and success that you, as a good leader, will come to deserve.

Yourself: A Complete Leader

Imagine yourself at the end of the course: You have a clear and accurate view of what you need to do to become an exceptional leader in your industry. You understand your strengths and weaknesses, and you have embarked on the process of developing yourself where you need self-development. More than this, you know your strengths and you're starting to capitalize on them.

You know how to develop a strong vision, and you’re actively engaged in building the perspectives you need to do this. You're confident that when this vision is ready, you'll be able to communicate it in a way that truly motivates and “fires up” the people around you. And you have the skills to build a great team capable of delivering this vision.

More than this, as you use your new skills, you know that you are automatically well on your way to becoming a truly respected, effective, well-balanced and successful leader.

A Unique Combination of Leadership Expertise, Simplicity and Accessibility

More than this, you'll have learned your leadership skills from a truly unique leadership course:

Your team is made up of a respected entrepreneur, a world-class leadership professor and an experienced business journalist, bringing the highest levels of leadership knowledge and expertise, balanced with real world experience and the proven professional ability to present information in a way that is both simple and immensely practical;
"How to Lead" focuses on leadership in today's globalizing corporate world. You learn how to lead in a rapidly changing environment where you must rely as much (and perhaps more) on influencing, persuasion, motivation and inspiration as on the direct exercise of power;
You'll experience the proven approach that has made us the Internet's leading career skills resource: "How to Lead" is properly written, accurate, authoritative and simple. What's more, we've field-tested the course extensively to make absolutely sure that you'll get the best possible learning experience; and
It's incredibly convenient: You study when and where it suits you. There's no waiting for training courses to be scheduled, and no waiting to begin. Within just 10 minutes from now, you can be on your way to being a successful and respected leader.

We believe that this is the only place you’ll get this winning combination of world-class, business-focused leadership expertise, simplicity and accessibility.