Modern leadership is often contrasted with healthy relationships. Leaders, we are told, have to be a lonely and isolated genius, like Steve Jobs. However, in truth, no one can lead without relying on other people. Getting things done requires healthy relationships, and most key advances just cannot be made without others’ influence. In this book, leadership psychologist Henry Cloud examines how to best take advantage of others’ help by identifying mutually beneficial relationships.

Cloud’s main idea is that relationships of respect and growth yield the most productive results. Key insights have only happened because other people have become involved in another person’s life. Other people can inspire us to do things that we simply can’t achieve in isolation. This trait is grounded in the neuroscience of how mirror neurons act in our brains.

Although this book is written primarily for the workplace, this central idea has contains a very religious, spiritual core. Not only does this work reference Cloud’s Christianity multiple times, but also it contains common insights of religion, that no one is an island and that humans do better in loving, respectful relationships. This motif goes against the grain that selfish jerks end up first. Indeed, Cloud speaks directly against such a premise in his conclusion and contends that these jerks could have had greater impact with better relationships.

This book still faces a few limits. He consistently uses the term “corner four relationships” to describe the healthiest, most generative relationships. This concept clearly refers to a chart in the book, but I was not able to view this graphic because I listened to an audiobook. This repeated abstraction is, well, a little too abstract for me. I wish he would have just coined a more descriptive phrase for it that wouldn’t be so vague and distracting.

Further, Cloud never discusses the area of difficult choices. He presumes that relationships should always come first. How do we tell if someone is, say, taking advantage of us? How do we psychologically balance our need for subjective trust with an objective evaluation? These and other confusing areas are simply not addressed in this text. That’s unfortunate because the values of any principles are most clearly seen in the required trade offs.

This book’s audience focuses on organizational leaders and those aspiring to grow. The message can encompass a wide variety of organizations and leaders. The book broadly addresses businesses, non-profits, educators, and family leaders. In particular, mentors can benefit from Cloud’s focus on cultivating synergistic relationships, and their mentees can benefit from figuring out how to make their other relationships yield more fruit. Throughout, he consistently reminds us that individual success always rests on the shoulders of other people, and the greatest leaders bring out the best in other individuals, not just their own greatness. ( )