Lynette Silva Heelan
3 min read
The Workhuman Book Club was created to inspire you with thought leadership from our speakers all year long, help you connect with other people who love to read, and provide exclusive opportunities to ask authors questions about their books and subject-matter expertise.
5-minute read
More than $46 billion a year is spent on leadership training, but a recent Gallup survey showed that 82% of employees find their leaders uninspiring. Why the gap? Most leadership development focuses on outward skills like strategy, people management, and finance. Instead, new research shows that leadership should start inward with the mind.
That’s the premise and the lesson of the latest book from repeat (and very popular) Workhuman Live speakers Rasmus Hougaard, founder and managing director of Potential Project, and Jacqueline Carter, international partner and North American director for Potential Project. In “The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results,” Rasmus and Jacqueline lay out the path for “MSC leadership” – the skills necessary for mindful, selfless, and compassionate leadership and the benefits to the individual leader, to the people they lead, and to the organization overall. As they write in the book, this matters because, “the mind creates our behavior. Our behavior shapes the people we lead. And the people we lead create the cultures of our organization and thereby determine its performance.”
Based on extensive direct research on more than 30,000 leaders from thousands of companies in more than a hundred countries, plus third-party industry research and direct anecdotes from leaders themselves, this book delivers what Arne Sorenson, president and CEO of Marriott International, promises in the forward – a path for “leaders to be humans first” as they model how to “act, interact with, and engage with the people they lead in a way that makes people feel seen, heard, and valued.”
The book steps the reader through why each element of MSC leadership matters:
At an organizational level, Rasmus and Jacqueline point out:
A selfless culture is rich in gratitude. Gratitude is the natural response to understanding how interconnected we all are, how much we rely on other’s skills and contributions for our own success … A selfless culture makes a point of identifying and showing gratitude to all those people who make the invisible contributions to the shared success.
But how do you accomplish this? The book also offers guided practices for training the brain, and access to the Mind of the Leader app in appendices. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions and guided mindfulness practices.
Discussion questions
Join us over in the Facebook group all month long to chat with your peers and answer these book club discussion questions, pulled from questions provided by Rasmus and Jacqueline in the book:
(Jacqueline Carter will host a Facebook Live event with the Workhuman Book Club on Thursday, May 30, at 1 p.m. RSVP here and post your questions for her: https://www.facebook.com/events/666573130431118/.)
About the author
Lynette Silva Heelan
Lynette Silva is a principal consultant on Workhuman’s Strategy & Consulting team, partnering with clients on change strategies to make work more human.
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