This book is an introduction to breakthrough leadership. It is a new frontier in leadership because it is concerned not only with what leaders do but also with the impact they have on the people they lead. It is based on a decade of applied research into three key issues:
What is it that leaders do to inspire the people they lead? What are the impediments to the development of potential that these leaders help their people to break through? How can organizations build competitive advantage by unlocking this potential in their workforce?
In essence, breakthrough leadership is the process by which leaders inspire their followers to grow, to perform, and to develop more of their potential. They do this by helping them to remove the impediments to that development. A great deal of the limitations that people experience in their work is self-imposed and related to self-limiting thinking. This book identifies the six distinctive behaviors that leaders adopt, which can help their people to break through this self-limiting thinking.
Organizations today have moved toward performance cultures in their search for growth. Managers globally have been trained in the skills of performance leadership, and as a consequence, there have been great gains in productivity. The next productivity leaps for organizations will come from realizing the untapped talent that exists in the workforce. This book is the culmination of a decade of work with companies such as CSL, Cisco Systems, Wesfarmers, and Fuji Xerox into change and transformational leadership.
