What To Do When Leadership Is Needed

Many organisations insist that their managers run regular team meetings - to develop strategy, change processes, make more sales - and so on. But to team members, and unfortunately often to the managers themselves, they are boring and do little to motivate or engage. In many cases, this lethargy has become even more so with the increasing number of online meetings in today's new world of work.

But there is a way to run team meetings that are invigorating, engaging, and yes, even inspirational! And best-selling author Bob Selden ("What To Do When You Become The Boss" - 75,000 copies sold in four languages), can show you how.

What To Do When Leadership Is Needed, is a ground-breaking workbook for managers of teams who want to see their teams perform at their best and have a good time doing so. Along the way, and by running team meetings based on the outlines and stories provided, managers will further develop their own leadership style that ensures their long term success.

By focusing on current real-world events, and those notable events that have occurred over the last two decades or so, your meetings will become ones in which your team want to participate and look forward to.

How do we develop as leaders?

We all like to hear stories, even when they are sometimes confronting - it's the best and most interesting way of communicating. Once someone starts to tell a story, the listeners all start imagining and visualising what is happening, what's about to happen, and what's the point of the story. And the better the storyteller, the more involved the listeners become in the story.

Whilst the 'nature-nurture' debate about how people develop as leaders has raged for decades, there is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that to at least some extent, leaders are made not born. My belief is the nurture component of leadership development comes about through the stories we hear and read; how we interpret these stories, and the elements from them that we choose to internalise.

Gradually over time as we hear more stories, we subconsciously build our own model of leadership.

This book is about some of the events I've seen, heard or experienced and that have particular leadership relevance for me. I've written about them as stories in the hope that they will resonate with you and also perhaps remind you of some stories that have influenced your development as a leader. Ultimately, I'd like to think that through reading and reflecting on these stories (and your own), you'll be able to develop and recognise fully your own model of leadership.

What To Do When Leadership Is Needed has been designed as a workbook for people who lead teams - each story can be used as the basis for making your team meetings interesting, memorable and most importantly, relevant, or as a trigger as to how your own stories could be used as a key team leadership tool.

Bob Selden.