So I have another book review, and honestly I’ve found myself traveling so there will be probably quite a few of these as I continue to have time to kill on a plane. The latest book I just finished was “Multipliers” by Liz Weisman and Greg McKeown.
Now I’ve read a book by Greg McKeown before, Essentialism, and found it to be really an excellent and thought provoking read. It caused me to re-examine a lot of the ways I’d approached things in my life. So I was very excited to finally get around to reading the book he wrote before with Lizi Weisman.
This book takes the position that their are two types of leaders in this world, Multipliers and Diminishers. The earlier being the type of leader that causes their teams to aspire to great heights, and to rise to meet an impossible challenge. The later being the type of leader who crushes the spirit of the people they lead, causing them to deliver less and less.
I found this book to be rather insightful and interesting, as it made me question the type of leader that I want to be. Now that being said, I do feel like to say that all leaders fall into one of two buckets, is a bit of a falsehood. I believe all leaders have elements of both diminishers and multipliers in their approach as no one is perfect.
But what I found in this book is that the examples are pretty dramatic, and in that regard its easy to say “I’m not that bad”. But I found it eye opening in that it made me re-evaluate how I approach leadership. I think the focus of the book is on a “binary” nature of these two types of leaders, and to be honest I don’t find that I totally agree with that assessment.
After reading this, I’m convinced, that in a way similar to the nature of introverted vs extroverted aren’t binary but a sliding scale, I believe the same can be said for multipliers and diminishers. Most of the leaders I’ve worked with are somewhere on that scale, but no one is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I don’t feel that comes across in the author’s description, and that could because of the reliance on dramatic examples.
The other element I found in this book, is that it does focus on what I call “Official leadership”, which is having an official title or position that puts you in a position of leadership. But in my experience, leadership includes people who are not in a position of authority but who act as leaders. In the beginning of the book it seems to exclusively focus on the earlier, and it is easy to say “this doesn’t apply to me” but I find that is not true.
Overall I found this to be pretty insightful book. Below is a talk from Liz Wiseman at a CEO summit about the content of the book.
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