As a follower of my work, you likely know that we’ve built a very large web site over the past 15 years. The biggest contents areas are over 300 articles, hundreds of blog postings, and over 85 issues of The Leader Letter. It’s a good thing I love to write or this would really feel like work!

If you’ve spent time hunting for particular topics on our web site you’ve likely found that the volume of material now accumulated there can make it tough to quickly find what you’re looking for. My response to a recent e-mail from a reader may also help you navigate through my continuously growing work on personal, team, and organizational leadership:

“Our team of supervisors, coaches and manager have a book club meeting regarding Growing @ the Speed of Change with each of us taking a turn at ‘hosting’ the book discussion meeting. My turn will be coming in October 2010, and I am responsible for pages 179 to 216 which is chapters XIII to XVII. I was wondering if you could give me tips on how to bring the conclusion of your book to my team with impact.

I am new to facilitation and work at our company where we are dealing with a lot of change both in procedures and systems.  So any ideas that you could help me with would be greatly appreciated.”

I am always delighted to hear how people are using my books. But it’s really tough to provide generalized tips on applying these topics. The chapters she’s referring to include Grow Your Courage, Upward Leadership: Leading Your Boss, Get Help, Get Connected and Get Persuasive, Grow For It, and Be an Action Hero. These topics are quite broad and I approach them in a wide variety of ways in my workshops depending upon the time available, key issues of the group I am dealing with, organizational context/culture, objectives of the session, experience levels and positions of the participants, etc.

Looking for a way to help her broaden her book club discussions and applications of these topics I suggested she do a search of The Leader Letter archive for examples or past items/blogs around these topics. For example, type “book club” in the “Search the Archive” box (top of the right column on the main archive page) and up comes a recent example of what another book club group has done. Or she could search “upward leadership” “courageous leadership” or “personal growth” (with the quotation marks) and find a selection  of past discussions, examples, or “Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm” on those topics.

Beside the engine specific to The Leader Letter archive you can use our main search engine to sort through everything on the site. Look for the “Google Site Search” box on the right side near the top just under my photo. I hope you find lots of practical leadership material that’s worth far more than you’re paying for it!