Hachette India

The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance

Barry Conchie

Sarah Dalton

A former Gallup Global Leadership Research and Development leader and the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Strengths-Based Leadership demystifies the aura and complexity surrounding high performing leaders through original research and interviews with high-performing global leaders. The leadership space is rife with myths, such as the belief that anyone can be a leader with enough effort or that a leader's strengths can be their greatest weaknesses. According to Barry Conchie and his business partner Sarah Dalton, these statements are unfounded. THE FIVE TALENTS THAT REALLY MATTER explains how high-performing leaders are talented in five essential ways. This book strips away the fluff in leadership and unveils and describes the traits and characteristics that actually determine high-performance leadership. These talents provide a template against which career-driven managers and leaders can assess and develop their own capabilities. The five evidence-based talent dimensions are: - Direction: High-performing leaders describe a compelling, intrinsically good destination and help others understand that getting there will be worth the effort. - Drive: This dimension hardly needs a description. We all know it when we see it: strong work ethic, tenacity, goal-orientation... being a self-starter. - Influence: The ability to motivate, persuade, challenge, and change the minds of others. - Relationships: People matter to outstanding leaders. They can build commitment and trust among the people they work with. - Execution: Excellent leaders are obsessed with getting work done and how work gets done. Through meticulous research, assessment, and testing, Conchie and Dalton have built a database that predicts the talents and behaviours of the most successful leaders. In this book they present for the first the first time a scientific model that demystifies the aura and complexity surrounding high performing leaders.

Barry Conchie

Barry Conchie (Author) Barry Conchie is Founder & President of Conchie Associates, which currently has a database of over 58k global C-suite executives. Previously, Barry headed the Gallup organization's Global Leadership Research and Development business. He is the NYT and WSJ best-selling co-author of Strengths-Based Leadership. Born and educated in the UK with a Masters in Cognitive Psychology and PhDs in Cognitive Neuroscience and Statistical Modeling at Oxford, his work for Gallup began in London where he developed their leadership consulting business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, before moving to Washington, DC to assume global responsibilities in 2002. He has 40 years of experience in the areas of psychometric assessment and testing, executive coaching, top-level succession planning, individual and team optimization, organizational effectiveness, and strategic alignment. He has been ranked as one of the top 50 leadership thinkers in the world by Leadership Insights magazine. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. Sarah Dalton (Author) Sarah Dalton is a Partner at Conchie & Associates. She is certified in conducting executive level talent assessments and advises leaders and managers to better understand the attitudes and behaviours that drive performance, and how to select for talent in the hiring process. She trains teams on interpreting talent assessments and using those insights to bring about greater confidence in hiring decisions. Sarah has a Masters in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Colorado State University and lives in Denver, Colorado