The People Smart Leader: Five Keys to Inspire Others to Do Their Best Work

The leader’s most important role is to deploy finely tuned “people” skills to work with and through people to achieve exceptional work results.
Today’s leaders possess high job-related technical skills. Yet, their staffers report high dissatisfaction, disinterest, and disconnection with their jobs and often their supervising leaders.

Do any of these questions resonate with you as you lead your team?
Why don’t my people seem motivated? Why am I spending so much time doing others’ work? How do I get my team aligned and working towards the same goals? Why do my best people leave? Why am I working hard but not accomplishing much? Why do I have to manage all these different personalities? How can I get better at giving feedback? How do I create an environment that inspires people to deliver their best work?

The “People Smart” Leader, a follow-up to The Everyday Leader, offers you practical support to answer these and other “people” competency questions. The book encourages you to do the work to enhance your proficiencies and recalibrate your mindset —enabling you to lead and inspire your people to achieve stellar results. This publication extends the conversations from The Everyday Leader, targeting more value-adding skills and approaches. It includes an extensive set of development tools, reflections, and processes to put enhanced skills into practice.

The Five Keys are deliberately simple labels for the complex work of “people smart leadership”—Lead, Connect, Coach, Develop and Perform. Work through them individually or with a leadership development group.

About the Author
Lindiwe Stovall Lester, M.Ed., Ed.S. is committed to sharing what she has learned over 40 years as a nonprofit leader and an executive coach. She aspires to impact the quality of leadership for those at the middle and top organizational levels. These leaders have the power, position, and potential to create better futures for those entrusted to them who, together, can make a consequential impact in the world.