John Maxwell
The 360-Degree Leader:
Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization
(Thomas Nelson, 2005)
Summarised by George Wells
This summary was written as a weekly email to the staff in George’s Department. The “Some things to think about” sections are by George and were geared for the staff in their context.

In this book, Maxwell deals with an important topic: not everyone is called to be the top leader in an organisation, and so we need to learn to lead from "the middle". The idea of 360-Degree
Leadership is that we should be able to "lead up", influencing our leaders, "lead across", influencing our peers, and "lead down", influencing those lower down the organisational hierarchy. As usual,
Maxwell gets his points across with a series of fairly brief, pithy chapters dealing with various practical issues.
He introduces the first section, which deals with myths about leadership, by reflecting on the sorts of people we instinctively think of when we think of "a leader": William Wallace, Winston
Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. He points out that this is misleading as "99% of all leadership occurs not from the top but from the middle of an organization". Taking this further, all of us can lead effectively, even if we're not the Vice Chancellor or the CEO.
He notes that many people are good in one direction (e.g. they have influence with their boss, but alienate the people who report to them, or are great with their team, but do no get along with their peers), and some people are very productive, but lack influence with anyone in the organization.
In contrast, 360-Degree Leaders have influence in all directions, with their superiors, with their peers and with their subordinates. While this may seem like a tall order, Maxwell provides some helpful guidelines in the book on how to lead in all three directions: up, across and down.