"How to Win Friends and Influence People" | Part 3

These are my notes on the almost 100 year old book written by Mr Dale Carnegie.

Welcome back! You can read the first part here and second part here. Let’s continue from where we left off. And don’t worry, I’ll finish up in this one, three parts are more than enough.

The next part in the book deals with how you can be a better leader. And a leader’s job generally includes dealing with and changing people’s attitudes and behaviour.

Mr Carnegie asks us to begin conversations with praise and appreciation, even when you eventually do have to reprimand the person. And let the other person save face, they would already know they were wrong, so there is no need to insult them.

You can always bring attention to the mistakes indirectly, where you praise them for whatever part they did right and suggest improvements. Ask questions about improvements instead of directly giving orders. Nobody likes following orders.

And the author asks us to praise even slight improvements, to encourage the other person. And to further this, make the fault seem easy to correct, not something that can’t be backtracked and made better.

The author also brings back the idea of giving the other person a fine reputation to live up to. He asks us to give sincere and specific praises in lieu of general ones, basically to stay away from flattery (as we talked about here).

The last thing Mr Carnegie asks us to do as leaders is to make the other person willing and happy to do the work you want. You can do this by pointing out the benefits of the work to them personally. If they are your employees, you can also motivate them further by giving them additional responsibility or titles.

This is it from my side on this book. Will be back with more stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile, keep these points in mind when interacting with people.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. And do let me know if you want a specific topic covered!

P.S. You can read all my articles here.