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(More customer reviews)Winning With People takes the reader on a 360-degree tour of our interactions with other people. The book is built around five questions designed to stimulate self-reflection. This helps us see ourselves as others see us and to see them as valuable even when we do not agree or understand them. I suspect almost anyone can find something, perhaps many things, in this book to help them grow in interpersonal skills. Maxwell insists that we be authentic and even sacrificial in our relationships to get along with others. He is absolutely right to instruct us that meeting someone half-way simply is not good enough. If we value the other person (and why shouldn't we?) half-way is just a half hearted approach and the other person will eventually perceive our lack of care towards them.
Maxwell helped me see most of our relational problems are in ourselves. I must take ownership of my shortcomings and strive to correct them. Along with my own housecleaning I must learn to build healthy relationships with others accepting that they too have housecleaning needs they may or may not ever address. Failure in either area on my part (housecleaning or skills building) can quickly destroy relationships I am currently blessed with. The first priority is learning how not to destroy relationships (get the beam out of my own eye), then learn to build good ones.
Maxwell's straightforward style reaches out to everyone using interpersonal examples from sports, pastoring, business, gangsters, marriage, Abraham Lincoln and other great leaders. Also, if you like to collect great quotes as I do, you will find dozens of good ones here (several from honest Abe).
I enjoyed reading the book but I have a few bones to pick that might bother some readers more or less so than they did me. At times I find Maxwell's approach superficial, too much cheerleading and not enough deep reflection. For example, some of the techniques for building up self esteem in others when you know practically nothing about them (p 92-95) strike me as insincere manipulation - calling it sincere doesn't make it so. I also detect some deep underpinnings of consumerism (more is always better) in how Maxwell gauges success. He often refers to who has the largest church attendance or how much the sales grew or other materialistic metrics to indicate success. For example a church with 15,000 members is referred to as being in the top 1% of churches in the country (p212) but no other success criteria are mentioned. In the top 1% by whose standards? Not mine, I don't think the Bible encourages that definition of success. I trust Maxwell is using this as just one convenient guidepost for success, but frankly his writing makes me wonder. I think it is a rather poor way to introduce the success of a church or pastor. These kind of quantitative - grow-baby-grow type examples are common throughout the book. Personally, I think hyper materialism/capitalism is fueling many of our relationship problems. I'm not comfortable having it sprinkled throughout a book on improving relationships.
Finally, there are a few areas where trying to actually adopt what is recommended would drain you in every area of life. P224 recommends: "care more than other think is wise, risk more than others think is safe, dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible, work more than others think is necessary". Maxwell's point is to live up to our highest ideals, but if I take this advice literally I am likely to damage relationships, not improve them because I'll be utterly exhausted in every area of my life - especially spiritually. If I am not to take it literally then it is just cheerleading to inspire me while I read the book. Perhaps I missed the point, but I don't find this helpful past the initial moment of inspiration.
As you can see I have mixed feelings about the book, but I do recommend it for those who want to be led into some useful self-reflection/emotional inventory for improving relationships.
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