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INTRODUCTION

Let me give you a detailed  overview of what Who’s In Charge? is about and its main parts. If you have picked up this book, you are probably like many of the senior leaders I work with – an outstanding professional who has reached success in your career. You are smart, passionate, ambitious, and visionary. You know how to move ahead, achieve demanding goals in your life and your life’s work, be that your role, organisation, or business. At the same time, there may be moments when you feel limited or even trapped by the very ways of working and leading that dominate your environment and that you have mastered so well. You feel constrained by organisational or social dynamics that limit your ability to lead with a clear and coherent strategy, rally people to focus on what matters most, create alignment, collaboration and accountability, and bring out the best of your teams. At times, you may feel that these patterns of working are driving you to the brink of exhaustion without allowing you to make the full and meaningful impact that you seek to make. And you have experienced how difficult it can be to reconcile them with being there for your family and having a full life.

You may also have realised that the old ways of leading, which you grew up with and which got you to where you are, hold you back from making the difference you want to make with your leadership – ways of leading that are based more on force and control than on purpose and empowerment. And maybe like me, you have also observed how these ways of leading are inadequate for creating the necessary focus, engagement, and collaboration that we need to deal with issues of complexity and volatility, such as climate change, financial markets, or public health and other pressing social issues, and how they are inadequate to lead your organisation or team in a world that is defined by them.

In short, humanity is facing an acceleration of complex challenges and the uncomfortable fact is that we need to radically rethink how we operate if we want to continue our success story as a species. Or in the most direct and simple terms: if you look at the multiple crises going on in the world and want your children and grandchildren to thrive rather than barely survive, you know that a radical shift is needed.

Effective leadership is key to this shift,

and it requires a shift in leadership itself.

This shift is not easy. Yet its pursuit invites us to consider a new perspective on leadership that is both transformative and transformational, and capable of responding to the challenges that our world is facing. You will find it transformative in helping you expand your way of leading, to make it more dynamic and impactful, and better adapted for leading in today’s world and its complex challenges. You will also receive a powerful approach and tools to become a transformational leader – one who inspires others to shift their behaviours and reach greater levels of collaboration, innovation, and performance. And thus a leader who enables transformation and creates successful outcomes in a constantly changing world. In addition, you as a leader will gain insight on how to create a life and leadership that are both successful and fulfilling, impactful and sustainable, high energy and in balance. 

Your leadership matters. It matters because the challenges that your business, organisation, community, country, and our human collective are facing, are so entangled and “wicked” that they push people into resignation or into the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.

We need leadership now more than ever, and we need to courageously step into leadership. But we need better than “any kind of” leadership. The old methods are ill-suited for tackling most challenges in a world that is increasingly complex, interdependent, and volatile.

Most senior leaders are under enormous pressure. They are playing on multiple fields at a time, and have to deal with economic, sociopolitical and technological environments that are constantly changing. They are exposed, being the ones who not only have the power to call the shots but who also bear the ultimate responsibility for where these shots land. They know how to play “the game” and they survive on adrenaline. Yet, they are not always certain they are in the right game, and they know that their batteries are running at a constant low. If you are one of these leaders, I invite you to explore ways of playing a different game. I want to give you a better understanding of how our human energy works, and tools for sustaining and renewing it. Being able to manage your energy is part of your leadership mastery.

Your leadership can become transformational. The approach you will learn by engaging with the material in front of you will allow you to lead in situations where the old approaches fail to create the clarity and purpose that are needed to move into action and create impact. I offer you tools to build the trust and engagement that are called for to work through difficult situations and create outstanding results because they demonstrate the value of bringing people of different backgrounds together to create the alignment and collaboration that predict high performance, and to keep your teams engaged even when the going gets tough. Your leadership can create the outcomes you aspire to as well much greater ones, which you were once not able to envision. By modelling a different and powerful way of leading, you will shape the expectations and behaviours of your followers and those around you – you step into transformational leadership.

Who’s in Charge shows you how to be in charge and combine success with fulfilment. We all aim for success, but few of us are clear about what it means for us personally. When we adopt other people’s definitions of success, we disconnect from what is meaningful to us – we disconnect success from fulfilment. And, if you think about it, success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure. None of us want to arrive at the end of our lives only to realise that although we have been “successful” by external standards, our lives did not feel complete. In the last part of the book, we therefore dive into the “what” and “how” of building a legacy, what a legacy is and can be for you, and how to build yours.

The three pillars – energy, power, and legacy

The book is structured around what I consider the main ingredients of successful leadership, of being and remaining in charge: energy, power, and legacy. Why these three? Energy is the foundation for anything that you do, anything you want to achieve in your life, and through your leadership. Power is a tool of leadership, and it is the essential currency for making things happen. Yet, we often operate from a narrow understanding of power, mistaking it for force or control, rather than understanding its more important function – which is to create an intended and sustainable impact. Legacy, finally, is what you leave behind when your life comes to an end. To be more precise, it is about what you want to know you are leaving behind on the last day of your life.

            In Energy, you will learn about the different dimensions of human energy, how they work together, and how you can benefit from this understanding for your life and leadership. You will develop an advanced knowledge of these dimensions of human energy, and the skills to expand, renew and manage yours. This will boost your capacity as a leader … and it will make a huge difference for your quality of life!

            In Power, you will consider your assumptions about power – what it is and how we can best use it. You will broaden your understanding of power by learning and discussing different approaches to succeed in the complex environment in which you are operating, and to lead people and teams in this environment. You will also build a strategy of power – the one that is adapted to your personality, context, and challenges.

In the last part you will explore building a legacy, and what a legacy is and can be for you. This is ultimately about how to combine success with fulfilment. We all aim for success, but few of us are clear about what success means for us personally. Think about it for a moment: what does a successful life mean for you? Not successful moments or battles, but a successful life? By developing a clear sense of what you want your life to be about and what you want to create with it, you not only create a sense of direction, but also acquire a strong inner authority. And this will reflect outward in your leadership.

Leadership mastery through deliberate practice

In my activities as an artist, musician, dancer, and in sports and martial arts, I have learned the value of mastery, and the importance of deliberate practice for achieving it. The same applies to leadership: It is useful to draw on science to understand the mechanics of leadership, but our intellectual knowledge alone will not make us successful as a leader. This is because most concepts of leadership are easy enough to comprehend on an intellectual level but challenging to put into practice, on an emotional and sociodynamic level. The question of “who’s in charge?” thus also plays out within each of us: are our unconscious biases, beliefs and fears driving our show, or is our conscious self at charge, allowing us to take perspective, assess situations and choose our behavious and communication intentionally and effectively? This is the reason why developing our leadership “from the inside out” is inevitable if we want to go beyond learning leadership tools, develop our capacity as a whole person, and master our leadership role with high impact and ease. To do so, we need to set ourselves up for success much like an artist or elite athlete does – by accessing the right instruments and engaging in deliberate practice.

Besides proposingperspectives, concepts, and models of leadership to you, Who’s in Charge invites you to engage in practices to build your leadership muscles – to grow your leadership mastery from the inside out. You will find these practices, tools and exercises embedded in each section of the book. And because you may want to keep reading and return to the exercises after having finished the book, you will find them once more, all together, in the final part of the book. You can use this part as guide to your leadership practice, and you may find yourself doing some of the exercises again, after a few months’ time.