The Leadership Contract: The Fine Print to Becoming a Great Leader

INTRODUCTION

A former industry-leading innovator in the technology sector loses its market dominance in a matter of months and now struggles to survive. The chief executive officer (CEO) of a large retailer is forced to resign after having an inappropriate relationship with a coworker. The founder and chair of the board of the same company is pushed out after it's revealed that he knew about the relationship and did nothing to inform the board. It seems that stories of corruption and scandal are now so commonplace that we don't even react anymore. Our sense of trust and confidence in senior leaders has been eroded. Survey after survey finds employee engagement is chronically, cripplingly low. Managers say the new generation of workers is unmotivated and feel entitled, while members of Generation Y say they're simply not interested in rising through the ranks in the traditional way. Meanwhile, you and your colleagues feel overworked and pulled in about a dozen different directions at once.

These aren't separate problems. I believe they're all part of one crisis, a crisis that companies worldwide are spending an estimated $60 billion trying to solve—and getting nowhere.

It's a crisis in leadership.

At a moment when our world is more complicated than ever, is changing faster than ever, and is more radically transparent than ever, we desperately need our leaders to be stronger than ever. And they're not. They're failing us. And we're becoming disillusioned.

I've been studying leadership ...