Why Gracious Leadership?

You might wonder why it was important to me that I write a book about Gracious Leadership.

There are two primary reasons. When I started my journey as a young leader, I could not find any book that readily defined the specific qualities and competencies required to achieve my personal mission as an aspiring leader – that being, to lead my teams with uncompromising respect to achieve peak performance results within a work environment that they revered.

As a new MBA in 1978, I simply did the best I could to be a respectful leader who guided my teams to achieve the right results. Thankfully, I was blessed to work for some incredible mentors who showed me the way by the great examples they set.

Fast forward almost 40 years… When I decided to leave my full time role in hospital administration in 2015, I reflected a lot about my journey as a leader and those mentors who had inspired me.

I was struck with the reality that four decades later, we still did not have ready access to a “how to” book about becoming a good and gracious, peak performance leader in a fully respectful environment.

As a result, I found myself becoming intrigued about writing such a book to memorialize the important lessons of respect in leadership and life that I had been blessed to learn throughout the years.

In the spirit of transparency, my passion to pursue this work grew exponentially in 2016 – 2017 as I, like you, found myself bombarded by the media with a seemingly endless proliferation of sad, but true stories of toxic and negative, high profile leaders. I thought to myself, “Enough is enough.”

I decided that remaining silent on the issue of negative leadership was not an option. Instead of falling prey to the adverse impact of highly visible, toxic leaders, it was time to turn the tables and to focus on all the good that can be achieved, all of the joy that can be derived, and all the value that can be delivered through positive, effective leadership.

In short, I wrote this book to inspire a movement of positive leadership… indeed to create a world full of good and gracious, effective and respectful leaders…the type of leaders that inspire teams to achieve greatness. And equally as important, my big dream is to fill our world with role model leaders that we want our children, our grandchildren and the leaders of the future to emulate.

The second reason I wrote Gracious Leadership is both personal and pragmatic. Simply put, books last longer than people, and because the key ingredients of Gracious Leadership are timeless, I wanted to leave these lessons of respectful leadership and life for the generations that will follow.

At a time in our history when civility and decency have been significantly diminished within many environments, aspiring leaders now have an opportunity to step up and serve as fully respectful, peak performance leaders.

 Now is the time for Gracious Leadership, a positive leadership movement – and now is your time to make a profound difference as a good and gracious leader! Come along with us. Join us today and lead like you’ve never led before!