Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Dan Haesler, Wiley, $21.99.
“Leadership isn’t something you know. It’s something you show. All the time.”
Haesler is a leadership and performance coach whose work focuses on creating happier, healthier and higher achievement. He works with people in order to help them, and the people around them, to thrive, professionally and personally.
Haesler says: everything changes when you stop trying to prove yourself and start trying to improve yourself.
The Act of Leadership shares insights, techniques and habits you need to thrive. 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.
You may know you need to have that difficult conversation, but you’re less sure about how to have it. As a leader, you might know exactly what you need to do, but might be less clear on how to do it. You may well 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.
Haesler also reflects on some of the reasons people don’t quite have a handle on what it means to lead their people. This is not another leadership book, in the traditional sense. Most books delve into one or two concepts, while this book seeks to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.
“It’s a playbook of sorts for busy leaders with an emphasis on helping them create new habits and ways of being in their day-to-day leadership that they can enact almost immediately.”
