What makes a great leader? The answer is surely not quick or short. Commonly it is discussed if someone is a born or made leader. But what if it is neither and you or someone discovers you are a leader, and what kind of leader are you? This is the premise of Your Inner CEO by Allan Cox.

Your Inner CEO takes the reader through this discovery – literally. Stories of Cox’s own personal experiences with leaders he has met, know and consulted to are married with exercises throughout the book that take you through this journey. They are broken into 9 steps, each one building on the previous to paint a picture of the kind of leader you could be, the kind others desire to be and be around.

My greatest takeaway from this book is leadership is not just about you. Where the model has been and continues to be where workers follow what the leaders does solely to make the leader succeed, in reality we all gain from all of us gaining. The leader brings out the best in all of the team so that all of the team, including the leader, succeed. If it fails, the team fails, learns from its experiences and moves on. This is something I have always followed myself – and anyone reading who has ever worked with me, feel free to comment on that statement! As a sole proprietor transitioning my business to a true company, I need to shed the role of control-freak entrepreneur and be a true leader and mentor.

Speaking of mentoring, another takeaway is mentorship is not dead. In a world where it seems being a contractor is the way to go and all we should hire, mentoring people pays for both the mentee and the mentor, and this book gives several examples of how to do it well. Many leaders and managers and people in general do not follow this - they hired a specific set of skills where the reality is they hired a person.

A final takeaway is leadership may be in all of us. We need to want to and try to seek it. As I have written before that entrepreneurship may be in us already the same goes for leadership.

I recommend Your Inner CEO to leaders, people who are about to be leaders as well as people who work on teams. Read the book through once then go back and complete the exercises, which is what I am doing now. There are accompanying online resources to it, including a Web site, wiki and Facebook group, the latter is how I connected with the author and learned of the book.

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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