Total Leadership

This book challenges the way we think about both leadership development and ourselves as leaders. Leadership development programs are meant to help people become better leaders at work. But, as author Stew Friedman knows through years of working with thousands of executives, people improve their performance as leaders only when they enhance their performance in other domains of their life at the same time. People are most successful in their leadership roles in organizations when they are also leaders of their own lives; that is, when they increase their capacity to influence everything they care about most in life, including work, family, the broader community, and their own sense of self. This is what Friedman calls Total Leadership and has been teaching to MBAs and Executive Education students at Wharton and to executives in several companies like Ford, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Lehman Brothers for several years.Building off ideas first introduced in his HBR article called 'Work and Life: The End of the Zero-Sum Game,' the Total Leadership approach in this book teaches leaders and aspiring leaders how to improve performance in every aspect of their lives through a proven three-step process of being real: clarifying what's important, being whole: recognizing and respecting the whole person including key stakeholders in all aspects of one's life, and being creative: continually experimenting with how things get done in one's life. Through a combination of exercises, diagnostics, dialogues, and experiments, the reader learns how to re-define and expand their roles as leaders, and enhance performance in all aspects of their lives.