About the Book

As a conscious leader, you are aware of your ego. You manage your ego well to stay calm, stable, and objective. Then you can see things more clearly, including yourself. You are able to transcend your agitated emotional states, ultimately turning your noisy ego into a quieter ego with more strength and calm. You work to accept and see yourself and others objectively.

As an authentic leader, you care about excellence in character, quality, and outcomes for yourself and your team and organization. You model integrity, genuinely walking your talk in communication, action, and decisions. You help an organization align around a shared purpose that fulfills shared values. Being open and sincere, you create high-quality work relationships and inspire the workforce to fulfill the team’s or organization’s purpose.

As an agile leader, you move flexibly and gracefully across many tasks, perspectives, polarities (opposing views), and conflicts. You zoom in and out, zip up and down from detail to big picture, from adversity to opportunity, from knowing to not knowing, from deep focus to mind-wandering, from rest to driving forward, from stability to disruptive change, from conflict to resolution, and on and on. Agile leaders adapt and bounce forward, going beyond resilience to turn adversity into growth.

As the name suggests, you cultivate high-quality relationships. You are able to shift from prefrontal task focus to heart-centered connection. Relational leaders build rapport, trust, and psychological safety by empathizing with others through high-quality listening. You seek to understand others’ perspectives and emotions, and what is meaningful and important to them. You accept and forgive others’ (and your own) limitations and mistakes. You work to help others, without trying to impress, dominate, or control them.

As a positive leader, you mobilize followers by helping them cultivate psychological capital and well-being. Five key sources of psychological capital and well-being are autonomy (feeling a sense of agency), confidence (feeling competent), positive emotions (feeling good), optimism (feeling optimistic), and meaning or fulfillment of values (feeling fulfilled). These resources energize everyone's work engagement, productivity, perseverance, resilience, and growth.

This capacity brings together all the previous five into compassion. As a compassionate leader, you understand the everyday stresses and strains of organizational life. You combine the warmth of concern—the desire and ability to make work life better, for example, less distressing and more rewarding—with a focus on accountability, being tough on performance. 

Also known as collective or distributed leadership, this capacity involves a shift from “I” to “We.” Leadership roles are shared and distributed throughout an organization or even a system of organizations, as in a global corporation. You empower everyone to learn how to lead in their own contexts. Your open, inclusive approach to figuring out the direction to take your organization includes team or organizational visioning, defining purpose, designing strategy, setting goals, and making decisions. 

As a servant leader you are a humble steward of your team and organization. You foster the autonomy, agency, development, and service orientation of followers, which in turn increases their motivation and engagement in meaningful work. While there is an evolutionary basis for other-focused service (e.g., the parenting role), the servant capacity develops with psychological maturity.

As a transformational leader, you are an inspirational visionary as well as an influential role model. You enable creativity and facilitate innovation by fostering the motivation and confidence of followers. You stimulate others intellectually to challenge, expand, and diversify their perspectives. And as a transformational leader, you model courage, a virtue in short supply.