Leading YOU: The Power of SELF-LEADERSHIP to Build Your Executive Brand and Drive Career Success is a non-fiction business/finance book written by Brenda Bence. Bence is a Harvard Business School graduate with executive experience gained working with major international corporations. She then started up her own business, Brand Development Associates, a company offering individual and group coaching services, and she is also the author of a number of books on personal branding. In Leading You, Bence suggests that the reader do a bit of self-examination. While many executives are accomplished at leading others, their ability to lead themselves is often found wanting in at least one or more crucial areas. A lack of self-leadership can be the defining thing that keeps an executive from getting past the next promotional hurdle or eliminating those dreaded lackluster performance evaluations. Bence discusses 15 limiting self-leadership behaviors that can be changed into desirable ones. She defines each behavior and gives examples from the experiences of clients she's coached.

Brenda Bence's non-fiction business/finance book, Leading YOU: The Power of SELF-LEADERSHIP to Build Your Executive Brand and Drive Career Success, is the book I wish I had found years ago. My plum promotion quickly became an unmanageable nightmare, and I really didn't have a clue how to address the problems I saw, and those which of course I didn't. As I read through Bence's 15 self-limiting behaviors, I found myself nodding as I identified with some of her clients and thinking to myself that I wish I had thought to do each of the things Bence was suggesting. She illustrates how some of the most insurmountable issues I faced had relatively simple solutions; that they were often a matter of communication and interaction with others. The more I read, the more I wished I had thought to get a coach to work with me during those difficult times. Leading YOU should be on the required reading list in every human resources department, and handed out to every newly promoted executive. This book is written in a easy and conversational style that makes her readers feel as though Bence is actually there with them, and it’s quite effective. Leading YOU: The Power of SELF-LEADERSHIP to Build Your Executive Brand and Drive Career Success is most highly recommended.

Leading others doesn’t just start and stop with other people and it doesn’t just start and stop with how well you do at leading them. Instead, it’s about understanding how to lead yourself and that starts and stops with something simple; coachability. Learning how to brand yourself and how to use CCODE is going to help you become a better leader not just for others, but for yourself as well. There are a number of different steps and processes to becoming a great leader, and each of them starts with understanding what a good leader is, your own strengths, and just how you’re going to get from what you’re good at to what you need to be good at in Leading YOU: The Power of SELF-LEADERSHIP to Build Your Executive Brand and Drive Career Success by Brenda Bence.

This book is definitely a great asset to anyone who wants to be a good leader. A lot of people that are higher up in companies want to look at the way they lead other people, and they may even spend a lot of time and money on seminars and programs to teach them just that, but they don’t focus on making themselves into the type of person that can continue to move up in the business world. Instead, they settle. With this book, you learn a whole lot of the skills and traits that you need in order to make yourself a better type of person. It’s about taking responsibility and creating a plan to save time and becoming proactive in your future. In fact, it’s about a lot of little things that you’ve probably stopped focusing on somewhere along the way. With Leading YOU by Brenda Bence, you’re going to find out about them again.