Effective leadership is something that is greatly valued. This book presents itself as a manual to become a good leader- not by finding the right answers, but by asking the right questions.
“Good Leaders Ask Great Questions” by John C Maxwell presents a different approach to taking up leadership positions and actually leading a team, from the intention to the process to the final results.
So, let’s go through the pages of “Good Leaders Ask Great Questions”, why it’s so famous, and if it’s worth your next read. We’ll go through all this and more… with of course, NO SPOILERS.
Spoiler-Free Summary
In a nutshell, “Good Leaders Ask Great Questions” approaches the art of leadership through introspection.
Maxwell argues that leadership is not simply about having expertise, it is about understanding people, learning continuously and creating and environment where others can contribute their ideas.
Maxwell also examines how questions can encourage critical thinking, develop future leaders, and improve quality of decisions within teams and organisations. The book explores how questions can improve one’s communication, strengthen relationships, and help leaders gain valuable insights.
It emphasises the importance of curiosity, active listening and humility, showing that leaders who are willing to learn from others are often more successful than those who rely purely on experience.
So, is this book for you?
“Good Leaders Ask Great Questions” stands at a decent 300 pages in most editions, however the actual contents are quite low density; distributed across well-managed parts, chapters, sections, sub-sections and chapter summaries.
However, before actually heading to the book store, there are a few things you should know to find out if you’re actually going to benefit from this book, or more importantly- if you’re the target audience.
Some things can’t be taught through books
Truth is, no matter how descriptive a book is, leadership can’t 100% be taught through a book.
The book tries hard to actually put down the tenets of leadership, especially how to deal with difficult situations, especially in regards of people who are hard to work with or when it’s hard to get things accomplished.
But truth be told, you can’t learn to drive a car after simply reading a book on how to drive a car. Perhaps this is more of a personal opinion, but just like driving a car, something like leadership is actually learnt through experiencing and actually working on things. Of course, the book does provide tips for difficult turns along the way, but you’ll benefit from only if you’re really good at learning from books before applying your knowledge.
Just common sense
Stemming from my previous point, as the book explains the basics of how leadership works, to be completely honest, most of it is just… common sense.
Absolute basics like self-introspection, measuring your skills, learning that you should build credibility isn’t exactly something you need a book for.
If you have ever participated in any activity, sport, a hobby involving a group of people, or even in a simple group project in school, most of this stuff is actually pretty common knowledge.
This directly creates another limitation which is perhaps the most notable shortcoming of this book, so you should definitely read the next segment where I show how, across the book, there is:
No context exploration
The ideas discussed mainly revolve around the psychology of working in a team as a leader, however the concepts are so abstract that there’s barely anything linking them to real life.
The biggest problem with this book is that there is literally no real life context correlation at all. It mainly consists of analogies and quotes every now and then, but there is no field or industry being discussed at all even in some detail, the book lacks overall depth and a link to real life situations.
Conclusion + Is this the right book for you
In spite of my earlier criticisms, which should definitely be noted if you’re interested in reading this book, if you have little to no leadership experience and are looking to get started, this book still might be worth picking up.
However, it’s definitely not for someone who already has basic experience in leadership and collaboration, or if you’re a professional as it has almost no real life contexts and mainly relies on ideas.
As a reader, I can only give this book a rating of
4/10
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