Introduction

Throughout my 30-year career, I have often been asked to come in and turn around failing projects and underperforming departments. In practically every case these were not failing for technical or business reasons but because of a failure of leadership.

In my opinion, leadership is the number one influencer on the successful outcome of any initiative, whether it’s leading a project, running a business or department or even achieving a personal goal.

Why is leadership so critical?

Quite simply because leadership creates the vision, sets the direction, engages and empowers the teams, motivates the team, and helps build and maintain momentum until the goals are successfully achieved.

The challenge is that leadership is often misunderstood, undervalued, or over complicated.
In this book, my goal is to help people simplify leadership and to better understand it. Giving practical, powerful, and proven techniques that will help you become a better leader, build stronger teams and achieve amazing results.

These are the techniques and practices that I have used on hundreds of projects, and successfully taught thousands of people to help them better understand leadership and become better leaders.

Many of these techniques are easy to implement and they will have an immediate impact on both you and the teams that you lead, once you start to practice them.

One of the most asked leadership questions is “Are leaders Born or Made”.
Here’s my take on that old chestnut – quite simply Leadership is a choice.

In this book I am going to give you the tools, you need, to achieve your full leadership potential, the question is, will you choose to act on them?

Before we get started on improving your leadership, I wanted to take some time to clarify what leadership is, and what it isn’t.
When some people think about leadership they think about the position, the kudos and the rewards that come from the position, but that is a very limited view of what leadership is.
True, leaders do get all those things, but they don’t just arrive because we have been given a leadership position.
Whilst the goal of this book is to make leadership simpler, I want to make sure that we dispel any illusions about leadership, because leadership is hard work. Much of which goes on unseen and unpraised and a lot of it is done one-on-one when we coach, nurture and mentor the people under our charge.
Leadership is not one or two big things like setting the vision, giving motivational speeches, or defining detailed plans. Leadership is a lot of little things that we practice daily.
Leadership takes effort, determination and practice until these skills become natural and second nature to us. But when they do it will put you in demand, both with companies looking for leaders who can deliver success, but also with employees who will want to work with you because of the nurturing environments that you create.