Book Summary Preview : Top Performance

The Big Idea

How do you become a Top Performer? If you are a manager or leader, and you want to become more effective, “Top Performance” by Zig Ziglar is for you. It shows how to maximize your leadership abilities and management skills.

It offers dynamic principles that are applicable for business as well as family life, on managing people effectively, overcoming and correcting poor management practices, developing a healthy self-image, and improving people’s energies, relationships and communication.

I. How To Be A Top Performer

The foundation for developing yourself and others is wrapped up in this principle: you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

Management is getting things done through people. And great managers from all fields know that when they put people first, their effectiveness and efficiency improve.

II. Building A Foundation

Your foundation determines how successful you will be. Character, integrity, values, and trust are the four cornerstones of a good foundation for management style, leadership style, and lifestyle.

Values, motives, confidence, and philosophy of life have a direct bearing on your self-image, and self-image is associated with life happiness and satisfaction, personal well-being, and marital satisfaction.

III. Choosing To Be A Top Performer

Our success in life is determined by the choices we make. You can’t change your past, but your future is a clean slate and can be shaped by your choices.

The choices you make today will determine what you will be, do, and have tomorrow. To be a Top Performer, you must make the proper choices. To be effective in making proper choices, you must understand the difference between reacting and responding.

Responding is positive and reacting is negative. For example, if you’re doctor tells you that your body is reacting to a drug she has prescribed, that’s bad news and means you’ll need to change what you’re taking. But if she says your body is responding to the medicine, then it’s good for you.

As individuals, managers, and leaders, we can choose to react or respond to negative events or situations. You’re response, or reaction, to the negative reveals what’s inside you.

This is important to remember when dealing with conflicts or people who are rude, obnoxious, vicious or simply wrong. Most often, people deal with you in a mean or hostile way not because they want to hurt you, but because they are hurting. Every obnoxious act is a cry for help.

IV. Causing Others To Want Your Leadership

Management goes beyond leadership. Management is that special kind of leadership in which the goals of the organization must be combined with the goals of the individual for the good of both. Excellent managers of people cause others to want them to channel energies for the maximum benefit of both.

You won’t be an effective leader or manager unless you gain the willing cooperation of others. Cooperation is not getting others to do what you want, but getting others to want to do what you want.

You get true cooperation by being a dynamic, organized, sensitive, effective, and strong-willed leader.

• Dynamic – flexibility in your style of leadership to steer your team through good and bad times
• Organized – careful planning and presentation of projects and ideas
• Sensitive – consideration for other people’s feelings and ideas
• Effective – capacity to learn and grow, and look at things from others’ perspectives
• Strong-willed – Being fair but firm, and true to the vision and mission of the organization

To cause others to want your leadership, you must be an expert in people skills. This includes being someone people can look up to, but at the same time, not look down on others. Second, you need to bring the team together and work for a common goal or cause.

Third, face up to your strengths and weaknesses. Fourth, find and develop the talented individuals in your team. And finally, always have a sense of humor; a positive attitude cheers others and can make them work better.

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