The Everyday Leader: Masterfully Lead the People Who Must Report to You

The Everyday Leader is titled to capture the wide range of leadership roles that position a great number of people to be “in charge” of the success of others. Whether you’re a committee chair, mid-level manager, community leader, entrepreneur or senior executive, if you are responsible for getting the best out of your direct reports or other workgroups, you wield considerable “power” over those in your charge, every single day. Why not be the best at it?

The Everyday Leader is not a novel, it’s a resource to be used by leaders in an ongoing way. It provides just-in-time insights, stories, and strategies to apply to your leadership situations as they emerge.

Based on both experience and research data, there’s no question that making the effort to build and sustain a work environment that motivates, challenges and excites people to do their best work has high payoffs for the business and the individuals impacted. The quality of the work environment the leader creates or inherits can have lasting effects on everything from the health, hopes and home life of direct reports.

Masterful leaders with supervisory responsibilities are adept in a number of areas. Among them are “People” capabilities, such as building trusting relationships, inspiring each employee to perform, lifting out and leveraging individual talents, and creating a motivating culture of accountability—all in service to achieving desired and required results. The “People” leader role has the most direct influence on those they supervise, the quality of work they do and their feelings about doing it.

The Everyday Leader supports leaders at all levels. It synthesizes some of the best, easily digestible, and practical research on leading people. It reveals actual leadership (at all levels) in the trenches experiences along with concise descriptions of concepts and ideas relevant to leading today. It’s deliberate about sharing relatable stories throughout—from middle managers to community leaders to chief executives and their direct reports. Throughout the book, there are practical approaches for each leader to chart a way forward. There’s a collection of tools, reflection questions, worksheets, and actions for you to use and adapt to become masterful at leading teams to outstanding performance.

Assuming Gallup is right, that only 10% of the work population are equipped to lead and manage work groups, The Everyday Leader wants to ensure you’re either part of that 10% or are contributing to increasing that number by providing resources and support to enable you to lead teams in any setting to thrive and contribute meaningfully. You can lead your direct reports humanely, genuinely, and masterfully.

About the Author: Lindiwe Stovall Lester, M.Ed., Ed.S., has spent nearly 40 years doing the “People work” described in the book, and she’s been a partner to many others to become masterful at leading others. She retired as a national nonprofit senior leadership consultant. She currently, as Tap In Consulting’s founding president, partners with clients for senior leadership coaching, human and organizational performance consulting, and results-oriented facilitation.