When Professionals Have To Lead

For too long, professional services firms have relied on the "producer-manager" model, which works well in uncomplicated business environments. However, today's managing directors must balance often conflicting roles, more demanding clients, tougher competitors, and associates with higher expectations of partners at all levels. When Professionals Have to Lead presents an overarching framework better suited to such complexity. It identifies the four critical activities for effective PSF leadership: setting strategic direction, securing commitment to this direction, facilitating execution, and setting a personal example. Through examples from consulting practices, accounting firms, investment banks, and other professional service organizations, industry veterans DeLong, Gabarro, and Lees show how this model works to: * Align your firm's culture and key organizational components. * Satisfy your clients' needs without sacrificing essential managerial responsibilities. * Address matters of size, scale, and complexity while maintaining the qualities that make professional services firms unique. A valuable new resource, this book redefines the role of leadership in professional services firms.

In many jobs people work their way up through a hierarchy, an experience that prepares them for managing a team. In some professions, such as law, finance, accountancy, academia, engineering, education and healthcare, individuals may find themselves managing a team of equals. This book uses 50 simple lessons to show the reader in concise, pithy prose how to manage a team of equals with intelligence and diplomacy. Each lesson features a short introduction and example from the authors' experience, showing you how skills can be acquired. These are then followed by 6-10 action points to implement immediately. Core leadership skills are reevaluated for the leader of a smart team. The book teaches you core skills such as decision making and delegating, but also soft skills such as delivering good and bad news to team members and how to realise more general aims such as building trust and growing your team. The authors also offer advice on how to look after yourself as a team leader, how to build resilience in tough situations, but also how to develop creativity and extend your skill base so that you are constantly learning.

Managing people when you're not their boss is a challenge, particularly in professional service firms where, increasingly, top professionals are being tapped to lead their peers. Now Patrick McKenna and David Maister provide a 'play book' for professionals trying to be both a team member and coach. In industies ranging from banking and insurance to law and engineering, as well as in research labs and software companies, management responsibility is increasingly delegated - ususally without guidance - to those who head up smaller teams of professionals. FIRST AMONG EQUALS speaks directly to those who have gone from focusing on their own performance to being a group manager in charge of leading others. From understanding the group leader role to setting terms of reference and effectively dealing with talented prima donnas, McKenna and Maister present a thorough introduction to managing and orchestrating talent.

Small business leaders have more ability to influence the culture of their workplace than leaders of giant corporations...and they can do so more quickly and effectively, seeing positive results in a shorter amount of time. Yet the vast majority of small business leaders do not understand the transformational impact their leadership can have on the lives of the clients, staff, customers, patients and colleagues around them. Face to Face leadership is unique to small organizations. It is emotional and personal as well as being powerful and transformational. Learning to find your voice and how to bring who you are to what you do will forever change the way you lead. Ask yourself...what are you doing with the sphere of influence that you have been given to positively impact the organization you lead? How are you leading your colleagues to orient their work in a way that reflects the core values and integrity that make their services so distinct? Book jacket.

The inspiring, unlikely, laugh-out-loud story of how one woman learned to lead–and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them. This is the story of how Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even while they’re mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. It’s the story of how she went from being an almost comically inept leader to a sought-after CEO who teaches others how to lead. Hadeed unintentionally launched Student Maid while attending college ten years ago. Since then, Student Maid has employed hundreds of students and is widely recognized for its industry-leading retention rate and its culture of trust and accountability. But Kristen and her company were no overnight sensa­tion. In fact, they were almost nothing at all. Along the way, Kristen got it wrong almost as often as she got it right. Giving out hugs instead of feed­back, fixing errors instead of enforcing accountability, and hosting parties instead of cultivating meaning­ful relationships were just a few of her many mistakes. But Kristen’s willingness to admit and learn from those mistakes helped her give her people the chance to learn from their own screwups too. Permission to Screw Up dismisses the idea that leaders and orga­nizations should try to be perfect. It encourages people of all ages to go for it and learn to lead by acting, rather than waiting or thinking. Through a brutally honest and often hilarious account of her own strug­gles, Kristen encourages us to embrace our failures and proves that we’ll be better leaders when we do.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start. Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question: How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture? In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love. Brown writes, “One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.” Whether you’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.

The best teachers are leaders, and the best leaders are teachers. Teaching by Heart summarizes the author's key insights gained from more than forty years of teaching and managing. It illustrates how teachers can both lift people up and let them down. It proposes that the best teachers are also leaders, and the best leaders are also teachers. In examining how to lead and teach, renowned Harvard Business School professor Thomas J. DeLong takes the reader inside his own head and heart. He notes that, as teachers, we often focus more on our inadequacies and missteps than on our strengths and unique talents. He explains why this is so by dissecting and analyzing his own experiences--using himself as a case study. The book's goal is to help readers learn about the intricacies of teaching and managing, and to impart lessons about how teachers can create a unique teaching atmosphere. To do this, the author analyzes the process of creating a curriculum, preparing for an eighty-minute class, managing the fifteen minutes before class begins, and evaluating the nature of the teaching experience after the session concludes. Along the way, he connects specific classroom behaviors with leadership issues--in organizations, in teams, and in personal relationships. He also asks--and answers--some provocative questions, such as: What happens on multiple levels when I teach or lead--with me, students, or professionals? What am I thinking and feeling as I process what students are thinking and feeling? How are my internal conversations affecting how I teach and lead? How do I manage my biases, including having "favorite" students? To what extent can I use teaching methods in the arena of management? Throughout Teaching by Heart, DeLong discusses why empathy and authenticity matter. When teachers embrace this mindset, students have the opportunity to have a unique learning experience. Teachers and managers will learn how to create moments of transformation for students. Whether you're a university professor, a student, a business leader, or just someone fascinated by teaching, this book will instruct, entertain, and--hopefully--inspire.

Solving today’s environmental and sustainability challenges requires more than expertise and technology. Effective solutions will require that we engage with other people, wrestle with difficult questions, and learn how to adapt and make confident decisions despite uncertainty. We need new approaches to leadership that empower professionals at all levels to tackle wicked problems and work towards sustainability. Leadership for Sustainability gives readers perspective and skills for promoting creative and collaborative solutions. Blending systems thinking approaches with leadership techniques, it offers dozens of strategies and specific practices that build on the foundation of three main skills: connecting, collaborating, and adapting. Inspiring case studies show how the book’s strategies and principles can be applied to diverse situations: Coordinating the activities of widely dispersed individuals and groups who may not even know they are connected, illustrated by the work of urban planners, local businesses, citizens, and other stakeholders advancing ambitious climate action goals via a Community Energy Plan in Arlington County, Virginia Collaborating with diverse stakeholders to span boundaries despite their differences of opinion, expertise, and culture, as illustrated by the bold actions of a social entrepreneur who transformed the global food service industry with the “plant-forward” movement Adapting to continuous change and confounding uncertainty, as a small nonprofit organization mobilizes partners to tackle poverty, water scarcity, sanitation, and climate change in rural India Readers will come away with a holistic understanding of how to lead from where they are by applying leadership principles and practices to a wide range of wicked situations. While the challenges we face are daunting, the authors argue that these situations present opportunities for creating a more just, healthy, and prosperous world.