So You Want to Be a Leader?: What Nobody Tells You Before You Say Yes

Everyone tells you leadership is the next step. Nobody tells you what it costs.

It costs time, and not just hours. It costs the dinners, the vacations that were never really vacations, the moments you were present but somewhere else entirely. It costs friendships that do not survive the shift from peer to boss. It costs a version of yourself you were good at being.

So You Want to Be a Leader? is not a celebration of ambition. It is the conversation Rebecca Nunery wishes someone had handed her before she said yes. Across twenty-one chapters, she covers what leadership training leaves out: the math on your actual hourly rate, the loneliness nobody names, the slow drift that turns good managers into ones people dread, the weight of information you cannot share, and the question most books will not ask, which is when it is time to leave.

Drawn from twenty years of managing teams across medical device manufacturing and health information technology, this is a practitioner's account rather than a theorist's. For anyone considering people leadership, already in it and wondering why it feels heavier than expected, or quietly questioning whether to stay.