Thanks to everyone who replied last week. I asked what’s got harder about leading in your role over the last few years, and the answers have been very helpful.
This week’s email lets you know what the book is actually about. And you can apply for early access to the current draft as a beta reader – more on that below.
So, what is the book actually about?
Most of the leaders I work with are pedalling hard. And harder than they were five years ago, in most cases. They’re doing the things that used to work but it’s not working as well as it used to.
When I first started hearing this I assumed it was a capacity problem. Everyone seems to have too much on, so I assumed they just weren’t getting around to as much of the leadership parts of their roles. But that didn’t help much, because that’s not what’s actually happening.
The ground has moved
There are five generations in the workforce now, and they don’t all want the same things from the person leading them.
AI is changing what people’s jobs consist of, and what’s expected of them in return.
More teams have a spread of cultures and locations, with different norms and expectations about work, and the ones you’re managing at a distance are normally the ones whose norms you know least well.
Most senior roles now carry more technical and operational detail than any one person can reasonably hold in their head.
And a fair few organisations still haven’t properly settled the question of where people work, years after they said they would.
None of that is news to you. But the leadership approaches most of us were trained on, or just picked up along the way, were built for a simpler environment than this.
So the effort goes up
Effort is the one thing we all know how to do more of.
It just doesn’t work as well as it did. At senior levels you can add more hours but get much less back for them than you used to. The people having the biggest impact are frequently not the ones working the longest.
That gap is what the book is about. It’s about working out what makes you distinctive, then building how you lead and how you decide around that.
There are five rules, and they work in sequence:
1. Know Who You Are
2. Define Your Ambition
3. Shape Your Work
4. Lead Through Your Decisions
5. Build Your Character
Follow the five rules and you end up leading in a way that fits you, which takes less out of you and lands better with everyone else.
Which brings me to the beta readers
Here’s how I’d like it to work. The beta draft will be ready in the next week, and I’m looking for comments back by the third week of October.
It’s a short window, so what I’m after is your honest first reaction. Where it’s great (hopefully some of that!), where it drags, where you stopped believing me.
Read as much or as little as is useful to you. If you get a few chapters in and it isn’t for you, just tell me and that’s completely fine. Knowing where someone stopped is helpful in itself.
I’d like a proper cross-section, so a mix of roles, sectors, levels and experience, and I may not be able to include everyone who puts their name forward. If that ends up being you, I’ll still find a way to use your input.
If you’re up for it, the form is here. It asks for your current role and company so that I can get the cross-section of people.
It takes a couple of minutes, and I’ll send everything you need once you’re in.
It’s slightly nerve-wracking to hand over my writing. But a book draft gets better by being read by people who’ll tell you the truth about it, and that’s what I’m asking for.
Next week: the thing I learned about publishing that I wasn’t expecting, and which has changed how I’m spending my time.
Thanks for being on this journey with me, I appreciate your support.
Mostyn
P.S. If you know someone who’d be a great beta reader, please do forward this email on to them. And here the link to the form to sign-up.