Your Leadership Edge

Your Leadership Edge is designed as a resource for applying the ideas fostered by the Kansas Leadership Center.

Not everyone is born a great leader, but anyone can foster core leadership competencies for themselves and become actionable, effective leaders. If you're ready to take the next step in your career and learn the secrets to effectively motivating and developing your team, Your Leadership Edge is the program to take you there. Your Leadership Edge is not just another leadership development self-help book; it is a complete management training program. The leadership training guide is geared toward managers, supervisors and executives of all backgrounds and experience levels and provides concrete steps that you can take to become a better leader right away. As you work through the management training guide, Your Leadership Edge will help you assess your own leadership competencies and allow you to identify your strengths and weaknesses. From there, the leadership development program helps you find ways to overcome the obstacles that stand in your way of being the type of effective leader that motivates, inspires and retains employees. In the pages of Your Leadership Edge, you won't find broad discussions of leadership development that are difficult to relate to or use to affect change in your own leadership style. Instead, you'll engage in a series of exercises and activities that make the concepts discussed relevant to your own position. It's this difference that makes this leadership training program so powerful. By the end, you will have a deeper appreciation of your own level of leadership skills and be poised to lead those who report to you in a way that maximizes their job satisfaction and improves their overall performance. Discover the leadership skills that transform subordinates into productive, positive and driven teams that are poised to accomplish their goals. Become the type of leader that you have always wanted to be. Order the paperback version of Your Leadership Edge or download this life-changing leadership training program for your Kindle today.

Leadership isn’t what you think it is. First, leadership and authority are two different things. That means that anyone can lead, and leadership starts with you and must engage others. Leadership is mobilizing people to make progress on complex challenges. Helping, motivating and inspiring people to change is what leadership is about. Because when everyone leads, we untap the full potential to solve the toughest challenges. In Your Leadership Edge, Ed O’Malley and Amanda Cebula provide a practical, comprehensive guide designed to help you hone the behaviors, attitudes and mindset necessary to create lasting impact for yourself, your organization and your community. The book describes four competences—Diagnose Situation, Manage Self, Energize Others, and Intervene Skillfully—and dives deeply into each one with a list of skills and tactics that can help you lead anytime, anywhere.

What does it mean to ‘be a leader’? What does true leadership look like in the 2020s, when we’re facing complexity and challenges in every direction – from climate disaster to political division, and inequality to consumer mistrust? And how can we be part of the solution, while crafting a meaningful and satisfying career? The answers aren’t simple, but Holly Ransom is closer to finding them than most. Barely into her thirties, since chairing the G20 Youth Summit in 2014, Holly has been working with and learning from the heads of countries, companies and charities to help them disrupt what they do and change the world for the better. In her fearless and widely-researched manifesto, this innovative young thinker shows how it is within everyone’s reach, everyone’s ability and everyone’s power to be an effective leader – in business and beyond. Through three principles – mindset, method and mastery – you’ll discover how to first lead yourself, then others. And you’ll benefit from the wisdom of the luminaries Holly has interviewed, from Susan Cain and Condoleezza Rice to Barack Obama and Malcolm Gladwell. This is the path to the leading edge – and becoming the leader the world needs you to be.

Drawing on the amazing story of Shackleton and his polar exploration team’s survival against all odds, author Dennis N. T. Perkins demonstrates the importance of a strong leader in times of adversity, uncertainty, and change. Part adventure tale and part leadership guide, Leading at the Edge uncovers what the legendary Antarctic adventure of Sir Ernest Shackleton, his ship Endurance, and his team of twenty-seven polar explorers can teach us about bringing order to chaos through true leadership. Among other skills, you’ll learn how to: instill optimism while staying grounded in reality, step up to risks worth taking, consistently reinforce your team message, set a personal example, find things to celebrate, laugh small things off, and--even in the face of extreme temperatures, hazardous ice, scarce food, and complete isolation--never give up. This second edition of Leading at the Edge features additional lessons, new case studies of the strategies in action, tools to uncover and resolve conflicts, and expanded resources. An updated epilogue compares the leadership styles of the famous polar explorers Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, which transcend the one-hundred-plus years since their historic race to the South Pole to help today’s leaders learn valuable lessons about the meaning of true success.

You should worry about your legacy later in your career, at the edge of retirement—right? Not according to Robert Galford and Regina Maruca. In Your Leadership Legacy, these authors argue that thinking about your legacy now makes you a better leader today. Based on stories of top leaders who have shaped successful careers, the book explores the art of "legacy thinking," helping you to formulate a legacy that will exert a positive effect on your work immediately. The authors provide a disciplined approach to framing your legacy, as well as shaping it over time. They start with the idea that your legacy is defined by how others approach work and life as a result of having worked with you. They then demonstrate how to assess your current impact on those around you, strengthen that impact, and pass along the best of yourself in the process. While many leaders "find themselves" and hone their work accordingly only after a major life crisis, Your Leadership Legacy enables all leaders to craft their work and build their legacy unburdened by such crises, and to experience personal satisfaction and achievement throughout their working lives.

This book is not about leadership, at least in the way we normally think about it. Leadership is not about position, or authority. It’s not about big speeches or grand visions. Leadership is engaging others to solve daunting challenges. Those challenges appear in our professional lives, in our communities, our families—and they seem unsolvable, beyond our ability to see what needs to be done or outside our capacity to make the changes needed. They are not. Because, leadership is an activity—small actions taken in moments of opportunity. And as you start to look around, you can begin to see more of those moments, seize the opportunity in those moments. Most importantly, you can help others see those opportunities too. That’s why everyone can lead and the real power to solve our most important challenges is when everyone leads.