In Part 1 we looked at why starting a debate was a breakthrough way to save you time and make more money. Now let's look at how to get a debate started.

So what's the best way of getting your people involved in a debate? Well, it involves the most effective form of communication.

As you might guess, this is face-to-face contact. It has been shown over and over again that a 'rich' communication style - face-to-face, and usually one-to-one - is the best way to communicate complex messages.

Business leaders generally don't 'do' anything. It's true.

They don't work on the factory conveyor belt, they don't write the sales copy, they don't service the computers.

What leaders do do is talk for a living.

If you're a senior executive, reflect for a moment on your typical day at work. The chances are that you spend most of your time in conversation with others.

One of the skills that successful leaders need to master is a bit of a dirty word these days. It's not the sort of thing they offer leadership training courses on, but it lies at the heart of most business relationships. What I'm talking about is office politics.

When we call someone 'a political animal', we're often not being complimentary.

How do YOU communicate with your people? If you need to let your staff know something - the latest pay offer, when the office party is, that their department is being restructured - how do you do it?

If yours is a fair-sized business, chances are that you leave it to the HR department to fire off a memo or an email. And often, that's just fine.

What happens when you want to introduce change in your business? Let's look at a typical example.

In many companies, a big change is discussed in meetings and memos for weeks or months by the top team. They eventually reach a decision, prepare a presentation and call all the staff to a big meeting.

Well, the change is announced, with an impressive array of PowerPoint slides, and the employees are encouraged to go away and 'be more productive', or 'sell more products' or 'implement the new marketing strategy' or whatever.

So you're going to be chief executive one day. But once you've got there, how are you going to hang on to your job? Well, there have been many high-profile failures in recent months and it's possible to learn from those mistakes.

There are several reasons why leaders fail and I want you to learn from these failings. I don't want you to make the same mistakes.

A decline in a company's financial position may be the fastest way a chief executive can lose his or her job, as the global credit crunch has shown. But it's easy to forget that several other factors can be just as threatening to the person at the top.

Some of them may seem to be out of your control - a campaign by the media, for example, or the unpopularity of your own personal style of leadership.

Leadership is dead. Or, if not dead, it's in a coma. Executives all over the world are so overwhelmed with the day-to-day nitty-gritty of their jobs and hampered by the lack of support from the board that they don't have the time or energy to be good leaders.

Instead, executives at every level are constantly fire-fighting and are lurching from crisis to crisis.

There are two main reasons why chief executives fail to hang on to their jobs: a decline in the company's finances, and failure to communicate bad news in the best way. But there are many other reasons, too, that can contribute to a CEO's lack of success.

Here we'll take a look at three that concern key stakeholders in the business. And, if you plan to be a chief executive yourself one day, I'll offer some strategies that will help you to avoid the pitfalls many others have fallen into.

Do you want to change your leadership style? Perhaps you've discovered something in particular that you want to do, or do differently.

And this, of course, is the problem. You want to change something you do, but the folks in the office just aren't expecting you to change anything. They don't WANT you to change anything.

Also, some people around you may be suspicious or cynical.