The Leaders Ecosystem: A Guide to Leading, Exceptionally shows how to lead through uncertainty, connect with millennials and re-engage dysfunctional teams. Photo: Supplied.
A world leader in positive psychology, Dr Paige Williams is obsessed with one question above all others: “What does good look like?”
She wants answers because, as she points out, leaders have many responsibilities, but this query supersedes the rest. What does good look like for you to thrive?
The Leaders Ecosystem shows how to lead through uncertainty, connect with millennials and re-engage dysfunctional teams. Look no further if you want to create an experience that empowers people to lead through disruption and uncertainty with confidence and clarity.
Researcher, author and a PhD in organisational behaviour, Dr Williams presents practical, evidence-based strategies and data that can be immediately applied. She combines playful humour with a meaningful message and street smarts and delivers it in a way that feels like a comprehensible conversation.
“Writing this book has been a work of paradox,” she writes. “For the first time I felt able to write about my thoughts and perspectives without the need to have evidence-based data to justify every point, and this made it both harder and easier; more joyful and more terrifying. I have had to expand beyond my small ego mind again and again to get out of the way of the words coming through me; an experience for which I have great appreciation — now that I’m on the other side of it!
“What does good look like for you? For the people you lead? The system you’re living and leading within? Indeed, these three orientations — ‘you, them and it’ — become the three primary decision-making vectors all leaders hold.”
However, what we’ve been told ”good” leadership looks like wasn’t designed to meet the needs, challenges and opportunities of the ecosystem we live and lead in now. Traditional leadership tools are failing. This book is for leaders who want to lead themselves, the systems they operate and the people they work with, exceptionally. Dr Williams leaves people with the confidence and motivation they need to succeed.
Leaders need a flexible, agile and interconnected system of ideas, frameworks and tools to support a bigger, better professional who guides and encourages so leaders can successfully lead for high performance through their current and future realities.
“We live in a world that demands answers and the pressure for leaders to provide them is intense and undeniable. And yet, my experience is that it’s the curiosities and questions I hold that better serve me, the people, and the systems I lead. This is because questions are fateful; we move and grow in the direction of the questions we ask.”
While management roles and circumstances change all the time, Dr Williams says the learning gathered along the way has stuck.
“Some of it has been hard won – through mistakes, missteps and mishaps; some of it has been gained through the risks, opportunities and big steps I chose to take without fully knowing that I could land them.”
Nevertheless, the past few decades it’s been through gathering insights and real-world, evidence-based strategies in her research and supervision as a student, researcher and now Honorary Fellow at The University of Melbourne.
“All of this is captured in the body of work expressed across these nine critical essays in what I call The Leaders Ecosystem.”
These articles provide a network of ideas and outlines for leaders to successfully lead themselves, others and systems to feel well and perform well through uncertainty. Each of the ideas individually will make a difference, but the real advantage of the ecosystem is in blending and fusing them to create a way forward that meets the unique needs of your situation and context.
Dr Williams uses an efficacious blend of neuroscience, psychology and her own extensive international business leadership experience to help leaders see the rules they need to break in order to make a breakthrough. Extraordinary times call for exceptional leaders.
The Leaders Ecosystem: A Guide to Leading, Exceptionally, by Dr Paige Williams, Grammar Factory Publishing, $34.95
