Description
Book SynopsisLeadership is complicated.
How do you become a great leader?
Don’t leave it to chance.
The Leadership Map demystifies the subject and provides every leader with a comprehensive framework to create and grow a successful business. It covers all the key elements you need to understand and build a successful business; from creating your vision, to developing your people, to executing on your strategy.
The book is brought to life through stories based on the author’s knowledge and experience of working first-hand with CEOs of many businesses both large and small, private and public, national and international.
Ian Windle is a pragmatist, not a theorist. The Leadership Map will bring clarity to your thinking and provide you with models, tools and techniques that will allow you to immediately put your ideas into action.
Trade ReviewThis is an inspiring read - practical, with loads of examples, frameworks and strategies and personal reflections by the author. The chapters end with reflective questions, which would be the great basis of a journaling process, or discussion topics with a friend or colleague.... or simply to ponder. I read a lot of leadership books, and sometimes they can get a little repetitive, and end up just saying this one. The examples and questions make this one really engaging and I highly recommend picking this one. up! Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I'm so pleased I've read it and will definitely return to it over the years.
* NetGalley *
Table of ContentsPart 1 – Strategic Decision Filters
Chapter 1 – Find your Purpose
Businesses need to find their reason for being, or their purpose. It gives employees a reason to come to work in the morning and leaders a way of filtering their decisions into right and wrong. A Purpose can be as simple as ‘Disney’s’ Creating Happiness’. It informs how you act and will build in an emotional attachment to your business. Disney have a saying that for 100% of your time you have to be ‘on purpose’, but you can be ‘off task’, but you can never be ‘on task’ and ‘off purpose’.
Chapter 2 – Create an Unreasonable Dream
Everyone and every business needs a Vision, or Dream, that describes where they want to be. It builds in direction and excitement about the future and provides a clear direction to build your Strategic Priorities and Goals around. If it reasonable, it means that is can be done today and allows us to stay within our comfort zones, if it is unreasonable, then it means we have a stretch and grow to get there. That means learning and growth, energy and excitement follow. This is chapter is not about building a just a vision statement, this is about building a detailed Vision that brings the future to life for your top team and your people.
Chapter 3 – Live your Values
The behaviours we show in a business are reflections of our culture. Great values in a business help to decide who you want to recruit, who you promote, who you reward and who you fire. They bring people together and show how you are different. This chapter looks at what good looks like, how values are used in business and how to create them in an authentic and engaging way for your business.
Chapter 4 – Set your Strategy
Your strategy is what makes you different versus your competition. It is your competitive advantage. A clear strategy allows you to align where you spend money, how you structure your business, which products and service to bring to market and which markets to do business in. It is the final decision filter for a business.
Part 2 – People and Teams
Chapter 5 – Challenge the Status Quo
We need to create agile businesses, where we are all flexible enough to change and grow constantly; we need to adopt a growth mindset. Leaders need to challenge the small tactical as well as the big strategic things in a business all the time. Not only do leaders need to challenge and be challenged, but they need to be able to reset the business to absorb the changes constantly so that a new normal can be quickly established.
Chapter 6 – Develop your Dream Team
The most important team in any business is the senior management team and its challenge is to become high performing and to embrace excellence. Great teams start with a set of common goals, a vision, a purpose and some values, the leader must then create a feeling of safety so that members feel they can take a risk and make a mistake. From this will start to flow a feeling of trust, but this can only be truly enabled through being vulnerable and showing who you are. This means that people will try new things and be open when they don’t work out. From deep levels of trust comes Challenge, which is at the heart of my Team Excellence Model. Teams that challenge each other as a matter of course, don’t make it personal and are capable of moving on, growing the team and starting to embrace excellence. After Challenge follows Commitment and Accountability which ultimately leads to great Team Outcomes.
Chapter 7 – Engage the Emotions
Chapter 7 covers the areas of motivation, happiness, positivity and engagement; all the areas that leaders must understand if they are to get the most out of their people. The only way to grow a business is to grow the people within the business. Growth means stepping outside your comfort zone and having the support from leaders to see you reach your goals. This chapter also covers the importance of creating a happy and engaged workforce who are prepared to put in the discretionary effort, because they will willingly follow you.
Chapter 8 – Show Grit
Resilience, which is at the heart of Grit, is a massive part of success. All businesses will hit challenging times and people within those businesses will have challenging times too, at times, just in their own part of the business. This chapter unwraps Grit and shows how to develop it in your team so that you can cope with what life and business throws at us.
Part 3 – Strategy Execution
Chapter 9 – Create the Optimal Structure
Most businesses create a hierarchical structure. It is the default setting in PowerPoint, if you look for a diagram on structure. The reality is that there are numerous types of structure that organisations can adopt, that will support the execution of their strategy. In this chapter we cover the main types of organisational sstructure that are adopted in today’s businesses, and discuss the pros and cons of each one. The Structures include: The Hierachy, The Matrix, The Core Plus and the Dynamic.
Chapter 10 – Plan your Strategic Priorities
Every business needs a plan. This chapter explores what a good business plan looks like, what the contents should be and how to engage you team in creating one. It shows how to create an annual planning cycle and what it means to be strategic. It also discusses the importance of focus and not losing sight of what the most important priority is at any given time.
Chapter 11 – Measure your Success
You manage what you measure, so what are you measuring? Everyone measures the financial aspects of a business, and this chapter explores the creation of a scorecard, based on Key Performance Indicators, that come from your Strategic Priorities. Your scorecard must not only show the essential financial indicators of a business but must also include how your people are feeling (e.g. staff engagement, churn), what you customers are saying about you (e.g.Net Promoter Score, number of projects from existing clients)and how good your systems and processes are supporting the delivery of your strategy (speed of delivery, number of faults, breakages etc. turnaround time).
Chapter 12 – Execute through Great Meetings
Meetings should be the best part of your day, but they are often boring and inefficient. This last chapter shows what kind of meetings you should have, what the cadence should be, how they should be run and how to make them engaging and compelling.
