Real Leadership

***A Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller*** Leadership lessons for enduring business and personal success from renowned motivational speaker, current leadership editor of Success magazine and former co-CEO of Primerica, John Addison In Real Leadership, author John Addison shares his straightforward practices for successful leadership through his personal and professional journey, helping leaders at any level understand and emulate the nine principles that fostered enduring results on his path to success. As co-CEO of Primerica--the largest independent financial services marketing organization in North America--from 1999 to 2015, Addison spearheaded the company through a period of rapid growth in the early 2000's, then helped navigate the company through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the separation from their parent company, Citibank, which created one of the most successful IPOs of the decade. Guiding the organization through these monumental changes while also working to keep morale high, Addison developed a passion and talent for motivating others that allowed him to inspire and empower over a million people during his career. The perspectives and personal laws of success that he’s developed over decades of hard work and diligence boil down to the principles of living your best life. Because that, says Addison, is the essence of leadership: having the courage, honor, and integrity to live your true life, the one you were put here to live, and to do it in a way that makes the world a better place than it was before you got here. Addison's story shares his experiences--from small-town southern boy to influential CEO--providing a riveting read that is down-to-earth and profound in its simplicity and honesty. His practical takeaway lessons will help you lead better in every aspect of your life. It’s the kind of leadership that others will follow over the long haul, through the good times and the bad, through the ups and the downs; it’s real leadership. John Addison is the former Co-CEO of Primerica, the largest independent financial services marketing organization in North America. He currently serves as CEO of Addison Leadership Group as well as the leadership editor of Success magazine. As a renowned, world-class speaker, he has motivated millions with his insight and wisdom on leadership, personal development, and achieving success in both their careers and their personal lives.

Too many organizations today play follow the leader: the commander articulates a “vision” and people uncritically go along with it. But this type of leadership—what Dean Williams calls "counterfeit leadership"—generates an unhealthy dependence on an authority figure and relies on dominance, control, and group seduction to get things done. By hampering people's ability to anticipate and react to changing circumstances, it creates a self-limiting cycle. And if the leader's vision is flawed, the entire organization suffers. The true task of a leader, Williams argues, is to get people to face the reality of any situation themselves and develop strategies to deal with problems or take advantage of opportunities. Real leaders don't dictate; they help people face their challenges and make adjustments in their values, habits, practices, and priorities to ensure the enterprise is given its best chance to succeed. Williams details how to apply this new approach to the challenges every organization or community faces. Throughout, he demonstrates the practical application of real leadership in the real world through examples from his own experiences working with organizations as diverse as the government of Singapore, Aetna Life and Casualty, and the nomadic Penan tribe in Borneo, as well as historical examples and the insights gleaned from his many interviews with presidents, prime ministers, and business leaders. At a time when so many “visionary” leaders have led their organizations to disaster, Real Leadership offers a needed, proven alternative.

This text explains why values-based spiritual leadership that coalesces employees into a harmonious group is the only way to successfully manage increasingly diverse workers in the 21st century. A person's values are the most powerful factor defining his or her actions; everyone has a value system or a spiritual component that triggers their behavior. Our personal values are a more powerful force upon individual action than corporate policy, procedures, tradition or peer pressure. Since the work environment is where the typical worker will spend the most time—more than at home with family, with friends, or at church—it is reasonable that workers will have spiritual demands as well as economic needs from their work lives. Unfortunately, this is a task managers are not prepared to meet. Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning argues that values-based—i.e., spiritual—leadership is the only way to do leadership in today's globalized, multi-differentiated world. The author traces the development of real leadership through five generations of theory, then builds a strong case for the values leadership strategy because of its ability to unify workers... and because it allows them to find personal meaning in the workplace task at hand.

A powerful call-to-action for gender equity that offers 10 key lessons for women aspiring to a leadership role—be it in politics, business, law, or their local community. Featuring words of wisdom from female leaders like Hillary Clinton and Theresa May, this empowering study reads like a You Are a Badass volume on world leadership. Women make up fewer than 10% of national leaders worldwide. Behind this eye-opening statistic lies a pattern of unequal access to power. Through conversations with some of the world’s most powerful and interesting women—including Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Michelle Bachelet, and Theresa May—Women and Leadership explores gender bias and asks why there aren’t more women in leadership roles. Speaking honestly and freely, these women talk about having their ideas stolen by male colleagues, what it’s like to be called fat or a slut in the media, and what things they wish they had done differently. The stories they tell reveal vividly how gender and sexism affect perceptions of women as leaders. Using current research as a starting point, Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala—both political leaders in their own countries—analyze the lived experiences of these women leaders. The result is a rare insight into life as a leader and a powerful call to arms for women everywhere.

LEARN FROM 30 WORLD-CLASS LEADERS Real Leadership is the ultimate leadership conference in a single fascinating volume, with brand-new insights from an elite group of leaders as they dialogue, debate, and even disagree about the most important things every successful leader needs to know. George Barna and coauthor Bill Dallas invite you to imagine yourself backstage at a conference featuring 30 world-class leaders. As you join them in the greenroom, you’ll be privy to their provocative conversations on subjects including: — defining what makes someone a leader — knowing how to identify, communicate, and get commitment to vision — touchstones for leading effectively: what to look for and how to measure performance — earning and maintaining people’s trust — developing character traits that honor God, serve people, and empower self — establishing and retaining the moral authority to lead — knowing how power is derived and how to use it appropriately Listen in. Learn from the best. The way you view leadership will never be the same.

Real Leadership Real Change is a call to action on behalf of young people everywhere. In spite of the pace of change in our lives, little has changed in the way we educate our children. It is time to redefine the purpose of public education and take the bold actions necessary to make a difference. Real Change will happen when Real Leaders address organizational culture and design while building trust and respect among all stakeholders. This book gives practical examples and challenges that will put you on the path to being the Real Leader you need to be. You will read the story of a Canadian school community that received the Order of Excellence from The National Quality Institute, as a result of their focused quest for making a difference. While serving a rainbow of faiths, cultures, and socio-economic groups, the school achieved extraordinary results through the efforts of everyone in the school community. Students, staff, and parents worked together in an atmosphere of mutual respect and shared responsibility to maximize student learning. Learning encompassed academic, social and emotional growth, with real successes in student gain scores and character development alike. Real Leaders made Real Change....

As Leadership goes, so goes the group, the organization, the nation, et al. Yet in spite of this multi-millennial axiom and the simple fact that we are the best leadershipeducated society in the history of business, our encounters with genuine leaders remain extremely rare. Real Leadership! Are You Ready? examines this perplexing phenomenon and qualifies the problem as an unwillingness and/or inability to use new leadership information to improve our performance. It also provides the solution: a Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c) to help individuals and organizations build and sustain durable Leadership Platforms. If you are ready to enrich your personal leadership and raise the level of leadership in your organization, this book is for you. But I caution you ahead of time—this book and its measures of merit are a little different than the typical leadership development offering. It won’t offer instant solutions or allow for a casual engagement by the passive reader. No! It offers much more than that. The principal measure of merit for Real Leadership! Are You Ready? is the extent to which it will steal you and your organization away from the impersonal and futile trappings of fake leadership and enable you to move toward the personal and productive outcomes of Real Leadership. With your commitment and this book as a guide, the personal and organizational platforms that emerge will not only provide better support for the weight of those who choose to follow your lead, they will actually be able to withstand the world’s difficult tests of time and torrent.

This monograph begins with a case study that provides a means for analyzing the complexity of organizational leadership in the contemporary security environment. As such, it presents a high stakes problem-set that required an operational adaptation by a cavalry squadron conducting combat operations in Baghdad. This problematic reality triggered the struggle to find a creative response to a very deadly problem, while cultural norms served as barriers that prevented the rejection of previously accepted solutions that had proven successful in the past, even though those successful solutions no longer fit in the context of the reality of the present. The case study highlights leaders who were constrained by deeply-held assumptions that inhibited their ability to adapt quickly to a changed environment. The case study then moves on to provide an example of a successful application of adaptive leadership and adaptive work that was performed by the organization after a period of reflection and the willingness to experiment and assume risk. The case study serves as a microcosm of the challenges facing the U.S. Army, and the corresponding leadership framework presented in this monograph can be used as a model for the Army as it attempts to move forward in its effort to make adaptation an institutional imperative. The paper presents a more holistic approach to leadership where the leader transcends that of simply being an authority figure and becomes a real leader who provides a safe and creative learning environment where the organization can tackle and solve adaptive challenges. The paper concludes by recommending that U.S. Army leaders apply Harvard Professor Dean Williams's theory to the challenges confronting the Army's leader development process thereby fostering a culture of adaptive leaders.