Leading with Compassion: How to Make Leadership Authentic by Managing with Integrity

Business  schools teach the transactional tools one needs to work in business.  They teach various strategic planning and decision-making models such as  SPACE or SWOT or decision trees or weighted grids. They teach about the  various functions of an organization, financial ratios, and breakeven  analyses. And they may even have a class on business ethics. But those  tools are more about knowing where the business-case boundaries are as a  risk prevention measure and do not help one to think about how they  should comport themselves as a leader. 

This book is  about helping you to become your best self and helping those around you  to achieve their best. Inherently it’s about authenticity, integrity,  and empathy and how these simple traits can lead to high performance.  The book explores ways to make our leadership more authentic and to lead  with integrity. It discusses how to mentor employees and how this can  lead to higher-performing teams and more successful organizations. 

The  book is organized around four major constructs. The first is about  personal leadership. It starts with honesty and integrity. That provides  the basis for an empathetic leadership style. This is one that helps to  engage followers and brings them along because they want to come along  for the journey, rather than feeling forced. That is the nature of the  second construct: building and maintaining high-performing teams. This  is then the basis for building a trusting culture. Change is all around  us and that can be exhausting. Building a culture of trust is the first  step toward building an agile organizational culture. That is the third  construct. Finally, the last is a message of simple optimism. There are  many challenges facing society today, but with thoughtful, engaging  leaders there is hope that we can collectively rise to the challenge.