The Leader with Resolve: Maintaining Discipline Under Pressure

When pressure makes every choice harder, what will your leadership reveal?

Most leadership books are written for fair weather. They assume the plan is working, the board is calm and the numbers are behaving. This book is about what happens to leaders when they aren't.

I spent twenty years building a tax consultancy from a few thousand pounds of turnover to a seven-figure business, and a career since advising and coaching leadership teams. The same pattern kept appearing wherever I looked. Capable, well-intentioned people making small compromises under pressure that looked like pragmatism at the time and turned out to be the beginning of something far more costly.

The Leader with Resolve shows how leadership actually breaks down, from the first silence to the erosion of the strategy itself, and introduces the RESOLVE Framework: five Pillars that protect leadership behaviour when compromise starts to look reasonable, and the machinery to embed them in the way an organisation actually runs.

None of it is theory admired from a distance. The stories are mine, including the ones that don't flatter me.

Extraordinary leadership is not a personality trait. It is disciplined behaviour under pressure, and it can be learned.

Peter Gladdish built a tax consultancy from a few thousand pounds of turnover to a seven-figure business over twenty years, and has since advised and coached leadership teams through Beyond Amazing, the practice he founded. He lives in Devon. The Leader with Resolve is the first of three books on discipline under pressure.