Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You by Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss available from Harvard Business Review here.

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 that this impact endures even in your absence. As Frances and Anne show through inspiring stories from ancient Rome to 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 spaces where other people can excel, Frances and Anne offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on their work in companies such as Uber, Riot Games, 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.

Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, reviewed

The authors have good experience of having advised some interesting and innovative companies. This even included Uber, oh to be a fly on the wall for that one, an example of a company that did many things well, and yet also, with a toxic CEO / founder, also managed to make a complete balls of it too. Uber are currently laying off large numbers of their staff too, so it is probably fair to say that the jury is out in terms of whether Uber will ultimately make it or not. Either way it has certainly helped to inspire and inform the authors range of case studies.

This book, out June 2020, has a good finger on the pulse, and unlike some, will not need to be significantly rewritten for the Corona context that is now coming to frame all books currently being published – this is not one that will be blindsided by pre and post bc / post corona contexts. The whole book is divided into presence and absence halves, which is a nice way of doing it, and of making the point that a large amount of your leadership is about how people perform when you are not in the room or even the building.

There are further good examples and case studies from Riot Games and Netflix, where both good and bad leadership decisions were made. These help to make the book an informative and engaging book to read. One to read for the summer, if not on the beach, at least in your back garden, oh the joys of the new normal.

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