The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success

This is a good book that provides a structured way (as opposed to an assortment of tactics) on how to approach leading a team.Unfortunately, like most self-help books, the author has stretched 50 pages worth of solid content into a more sell-able 250 pages. This same author however, has written a much shorter book ("Do Lead" - it's the size of a pocket book) that essentially summarizes many parts of this book. Save yourself a lot of time in getting lost reading this book by reading parts of that book first - which will allow you to speed read through much of this book.Specifically,Part 1 of this book focuses on the 3 natural leadership styles (Visionary, Operator, and Processor) - Chapter 2 of "Do Lead" ("The Four Leadership Styles") really has what you need to know in ten pages, and also manages to introduce the Synergist.Part 2 of this book focuses on two things: introducing the Synergist and the Synergist's leadership toolkit. Chapter 6 of "Do Lead" ("The Skillset") is a great summary of the toolkit.Part 3 of this book is around how and when to apply the toolkit at different stages of the team process (what he calls the 3 I-s of a team lifecycle: investigation, interpretation, and implementation). This is the new material in this book, and if you've read "Do Lead" (or at least the sections outlined above), you're going to want to pay attention here.Why not just buy "Do Lead"? Because I think there is enough new content in Part 3 of this book to be worth it (though it too could have been written more concisely). So my recommendation would be to read Do Lead first and then attack this book.

The Synergist will open your eyes to understanding the natural roles that we all 'default to' in different environments: from interacting with certain personality types, group settings, business and personal situations.Whether you're running a lean startup, a small business or a part of a multi-million dollar corporation that is suffering from stagnant communication channels and personality types that are butting heads, Les McKeown will help you understand what the roles are that we fall into and brilliant individuals with remarkable experience in the best companies suffer, stumble and struggle to communicate, interact and work with one another in constructive ways. Better yet, McKeown's deep experience in working with all personality types gives way to how we can each rectify these issues by assuming the role of the Synergist.I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in business, leadership, group cultures, psychology, and organizational change and development!

This is a great book! We started with Predictable Success and then this books helps you guide your team. Any business, organization, teams, can benefit from this book! Wish we had it 10 years ago when we opened up our business.

I love studying how peoples' minds work and have read so many books on personality types and quite a few tests and quizzes. All of those helped me in understanding others and the way they work but The Synergist is a new level of perspective. Les' writing style holds my attention while illustrating through his personal experience, and the experience of those he's worked with, the different mindsets and how they apply in the business realm. Not only does he explain the strengths and weaknesses of each team personality, but also explains how everyone can adopt a synergist mindset to help the team achieve predictable success. I'm super appreciative to have had the chance to read this book and am already working towards applying it personally.

One of my all time favorite books. I had a number of "aha" moments as Mr McKeown reveals why some teams don't function together and various types of people and how they can work together. Quite an eye opener