The Act of Leadership

A Playbook for Leading with Humility, Clarity and Purpose

Dan Haesler

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780730392125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Unlock your true leadership potential with this insightful guide

In The Act of Leadership, acclaimed leadership and performance coach Dan Haesler shares the insights, techniques and habits you need to thrive, professionally and personally. By combining real-life case studies, cutting-edge research and incisive coaching techniques this one-stop leadership playbook will help you better understand yourself and the people around you, so you can be not only the leader you want to be, but the person your people need you to be, both at work and at home. As a leader, you might know exactly what you need to do, but might be less clear on how to do it. You might know you need to have that difficult conversation, but you're less sure about how to have it. You might know you need to hold your team accountable, but don't know how to do it in a manner that builds authentic engagement rather than mere compliance. The Act of Leadership goes beyond the theory. It is a coaching playbook designed to empower you to be the leader you want to be, and the leader your people need you to be. Most books explain the what and the why of leadership, The Act of Leadership demonstrates the how. Author Dan Haesler takes a coaching approach, combining his years of experience as an educator and now coach to corporate leaders, elite athletes, teams and educators, to reveal the pivotal insights and enlightening case studies that will help you to define what kind of leader you want to be and understand how to get the best out of yourself and the people around you. You will also discover the importance of thinking and acting mindfully, instead of on autopilot, using the mindfulness techniques used by World Champions to lead in the moment, sharpen your intent, and increase your impact.

• Let go of your biases and assumptions and see the impact we have on others
• Take on a growth mindset to help you deal with setbacks and mistakes
• Create organizational change that actually succeeds, by engaging people so that change is done with them not to them
• Adopt a coach-like mentality and use engaging techniques to improve your day-to-day interactions with the people you lead

With each chapter serving as a one-on-one coaching session, The Act of Leadership will help you create new habits and new ways of being in your day-to-day leadership, as well as life away from work, that are actionable, immediately. Perfect for leaders, professionals, educators, and athletes seeking to improve their own performance, The Act of Leadership will also earn a place in the libraries of anyone hoping to improve the lives of the people who follow them, in business, sport, and life.

Part I
THE ‘YOU’ STUFF

Let's explore some of the challenges you face as a leader purely because you're human.

Chapter 1
IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?
What kind of leader do you want to be?

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This chapter in a nutshell

• you'll be introduced to the prominent thinking around leadership theories and styles
• you'll be encouraged to reflect on how these theories and styles inform your own leadership
• you'll see how each chapter of this book might help you enhance your leadership

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Why this book? Why not the one sitting beside it in the store?

Maybe it was given to you as a gift and you're still trying to figure out whether or not to invest your time in it.

I get it. You're busy and you don't want to waste time reading a book that isn't for you.

This chapter aims to help you ascertain whether or not this book can help you, and how it might be able to help you. You will chart a course that might mean you flick through some chapters quicker than others, or you might choose to focus on just one or two.

In essence, I'm trying to write in a similar manner to how I coach. Not everyone needs everything, and some people only need one thing.

Rather than tell you something, let me start by asking you something:

What kind of leader do you want to be?

Take some time to ponder and then note down what comes to mind for you.

Look back over what you wrote and consider:

• Was it easy to answer that question? Were you surprised by how much space I gave you to write in? Did you need more or less space?
• Did you focus on your ability to deliver results based on products, processes, policies or people?
• Did you compare yourself to others? Are they well-known leaders or people only you would know?
• Does anything you wrote surprise you?
• Have you ever taken time to consider this question before? Where have you gone looking for answers? Have you looked for a mentor or just taken your lead from what you think the organisation expects?
• How satisfied are you with your leadership right now? If you had to score yourself out of 10 as a leader, what would you say? How inclined are you to want to improve?

By the way, if you scored yourself a 10, this is either not the book for you or (more likely) absolutely the book for you, and I'm guessing perhaps it was given to you as a ‘gift’.

Now, unlike at school when teachers used to lie and tell you, ‘There are no right or wrong answers’, when it comes to these questions — and, in fact, any questions I ask as a coach — we're not as interested in the notion of right and wrong as we are in what it brings up for you. What new awareness can we create from asking questions of ourselves and each other? Coaching, and this book, is not a test. Your answers and thoughts are yours alone, and a piece of paper can't judge, criticise or hold anything against you, so whenever I ask you to reflect, the more open and honest you can be with yourself, the more awareness you'll create.

Are you up for that? If so, this might be the book for you.

But back to that question, ‘What kind of leader do you want to be?’

In my experience, some people struggle to answer the question because they haven't spent enough time thinking about leadership and what it really means to be a leader.

In many cases, people find themselves in a position of leadership by default or as a result of being the last one standing, or in some cases being tapped on the shoulder and given an opportunity. I've lost count of the number of people I've worked with who say, ‘I never set out for this’, or ‘I've never thought of myself as a leader’. Sometimes this is an indication of their humility, but more often than not it's also a sign that they've unexpectedly found themselves in a position of leadership and they're still trying to figure out whether they're really the right person for the job.

Impostor syndrome is quite common among leaders. But fear not, as the host of Coaching for Leaders, Dave Stachowiak says, ‘Leaders aren't born. They're made’. With a little reflection and deliberate action, you can become a great leader.

When working with a leader for the first time, rather than jumping straight into what needs to be fixed or improved, I’ve found it useful to spend time exploring the concept of leadership with them, and I’d like to do that now with you.

So, what makes a good leader?

Several well-established theories and styles form our understanding of leadership and what good leadership looks like. While I won't cover them all here, it might be helpful to dig into some of the more prominent ones at this point.

For a time, it was thought that leadership was something that either came naturally or didn't. You were either a natural leader or you weren't. It's likely that this thinking came from observing the natural world, in which we recognise leadership in a pack as being dependent on inherent traits; the biggest, strongest or loudest tend to lead while the smaller, weaker, quieter tend to follow. And while that might work in the Serengeti, the Daintree rainforest or the local woodland, we've come to learn that leadership is more nuanced in the human world of organisations and communities.

That said, it can be useful to analyse the apparent traits that successful leaders possess. While not being an exhaustive list, some of the more immediately recognisable domains are knowledge, emotional intelligence, confidence, honesty, energy, likeability, decision-making skil...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I: THE ‘YOU’ STUFF
• Part II: THE ‘YOU AND THEM’ STUFF
• Part III: THE TACTICAL STUFF
• CONCLUSION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT