Uplifting Leadership: How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance - Hardcover

Hargreaves, Andy; Boyle, Alan; Harris, Alma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1118921321 ISBN 13: 9781118921326

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2014

Synopsis

What does it take to do more with less? How can you do better than before, or better than others? How do you turn losses into wins, or near-bankruptcy into strong profitability, or abject failure into stellar success?

The power of uplift enables any organization to do more with less, beat the competition, and perform better than ever. Leaders who uplift their employees' passions, intellects, and commitments produce remarkable results.

Based on original research from a seven-year global study, Uplifting Leadership reveals how leaders from diverse organizations inspired and uplifted their teams' performance. Distilling the six common characteristics of leaders at high-performing organizations across business, sports, and education, authors Andy Hargreaves, Alan Boyle, and Alma Harris explore the nature of uplift, its impact on performance, and the ways to achieve it within and beyond an organization's walls, revealing how leaders:

• Identify and articulate an inspiring dream that is coherently connected to the best of what the organization has been before
• Pursue that dream at a sustainable pace without squandering resources, incurring excessive debt, or burning people out
• Forge paths of innovation and improvement that others have overlooked or rejected
• Monitor progress by using metrics and indicators in a mindful and meaningful way
• Build teams that naturally pull people into change rather than pushing them through it

Featuring case studies of organizations as diverse as Shoebuy.com, Fiat, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Marks & Spencer, Cricket Australia, Burnley Football Club, and the Vancouver Giants, as well as world-leading educational systems, Uplifting Leadership provides tools for leaders to incorporate these performance-driving strategies into their own.

For leaders who want their people to try harder, transform what they do, reach for a higher purpose, and stay resolute and resilient when opposing forces threaten to defeat them, Uplifting Leadership provides a path to better performance across any organization.

About this title

From the Back Cover

PRAISE FOR UPLIFTING LEADERSHIP

“How do highly effective leaders think and act in ways that others don’t? This groundbreaking book offers surprising answers from around the world that overturn many conventional assumptions about leadership. Now more than ever, leaders need to help transform our schools, our workplaces, and our institutions. Uplifting Leadership is brimming with inspiring ideas and practical evidence—from public education to private enterprise—on how to do exactly that. This important book will help leaders everywhere lift their organizations to higher levels of achievement, whatever the odds.”
—SIR KEN ROBINSON, author, The Element and Out of Our Mind

“Uplifting Leadership is the change book of the century. Forget every ad hoc idea about performance—these six brilliant insights about system success dance off the pages. Hargreaves, Boyle, and Harris reveal the secrets of soaring in turbulent times. Uplifting Leadership doesn’t invite you, it takes you!”
—MICHAEL FULLAN, OC, professor emeritus, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and author, Leading in a Culture of Change

“What makes Uplifting Leadership remarkable is more than its extensive research and direct style. In our either/or culture, its unique power is how it takes the energy inherent in paradox and shows how opposites really can attract so that, transformed by unity, practical wisdom becomes clear.”
—MARGARET J. WHEATLEY, author, Leadership and the New Science and So Far From Home

“Uplifting Leadership is about big change and how to make it—not in a few companies or teams, but on a big scale, including the transformation of entire countries. Turning crisis into long-term success requires enormous amounts of hard work and great leadership skills. Uplifting Leadership tells compelling, inspiring stories about how to drive major transformation, and it may well change the way you lead forever. I strongly recommend it.”
—ESKO AHO, former prime minister, Finland, and executive vice president, Nokia

“In politics and in business, there are many times when we could all do with a bit of a lift. Uplifting Leadership shows a powerful new idea that can transform the way we do business. Anchored in solid research, but written in attractive prose, this book will challenge leaders in business, education, and other sectors to rethink how they can bring together soft skills with hard data in ways that will elevate all of us.”
—FRANCES STRICKLAND, psychologist, educator, and former First Lady of Ohio

About the Author

ANDY HARGREAVES is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at Boston College. In 2014, he was ranked as one of the 12 most influential scholars on US public education policy. He has written or edited more than 25 books on leadership and change, including Sustainable Leadership (with Dean Fink) and Professional Capital (with Michael Fullan). For more information, please visit www.andyhargreaves.com.

ALAN BOYLE is director of Leannta Education Associates. He designs and creates professional learning for education leaders in the United Kingdom and abroad. For more information, please visit www.leannta.com.

ALMA HARRIS is professor and director of the Institute of Educational Leadership at the University of Malaya. She is also Pro-Director (Leadership) at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is internationally known for her work on school improvement. For more information, please visit www.almaharris.co.uk.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1118921321
• ISBN 13: 9781118921326
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240