Leadership isn't easy. It takes grit, courage, and vision, among other things, that can be hard to come by on your toughest days. When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror and own your natural-born strengths and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss offer a different worldview. They argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: build others up. Leadership isn't about you. It's about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure this impact endures even in your absence. As Frei and Morriss show through inspiring stories from ancient Rome to present-day Silicon Valley, the origins of great leadership are found, paradoxically, not in worrying about your own status and advancement, but in the unrelenting focus on other people's potential.
Unleashed provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create an environment in which other people can excel, Frei and Morriss offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on their work with companies such as Uber, Riot Games, WeWork, and others—along with interviews and stories from their own personal experience, to make these ideas come alive. This book is your indispensable guide for unleashing greatness in other people . . . and, ultimately, in yourself.
To learn more, please visit theleadersguide.com.
Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. She recently served as Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. Frei regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale change and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for improved performance. Her TED Talk on the topic of building trust has logged over four million views.
Anne Morriss is a highly sought-after leadership coach and the executive founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that works to help more and diverse leaders thrive. Her collaborators have ranged from early-stage tech founders to Fortune 50 executives to public-sector leaders building national competitiveness. She has spent the last twenty years building and leading mission-driven enterprises, serving most recently as founder and CEO of GenePeeks, which addressed the urgent need for better personal health information.
You can find the authors at:
Frances Frei: hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6587
Anne Morriss: linkedin.com/in/anne-morriss-b1238b8/ and twitter.com/annemorriss?lang=en