William A. Adams

An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results

Transform Your Organization by Scaling Leadership How do senior leaders, in their own words, describe the most effective leaders—the ones that get results, grow the business, enhance the culture and leave in their wake a trail of other really effective leaders? Conversely, how do senior leaders describe the kind of leader that undercuts the organization’s capacity and capability to create its future? This book, based on groundbreaking research, shows how senior leaders describe and develop leadership that works, that does not, that scales, and that limits scale. Is your leadership built for scale as you advance in today’s volatile, uncertain, dynamic, and disruptive business environment? This context puts a premium on a very particular kind of leadership—High-Creative leadership capable of rapidly growing the organization while simultaneously transforming it into more agile, innovative, adaptive and engaging workplace. The research presented in this book suggests that senior leaders can describe the High-Creative leadership with surprising clarity. They also describe with equal precision the High-Reactive leadership that cancels itself out and seriously limits scale. Which type of leader are you? You scale your leadership by increasing the multiple on your leadership in three ways. First, by developing the strengths that differentiate the most effective leaders from the strengths deployed by the most Reactive and ineffective leaders. And second, by increasing your leadership ratio—the ratio of most the effective strengths to the most damaging liabilities. Third, by developing High-Creative leaders all around you. Scaling Leadership provides a proven framework for magnifying agile and scalable leadership in your organization. Scalable leadership drives forward-momentum by multiplying high-achieving leaders at scale so that growth, productivity and innovation increase exponentially. Creative leaders multiply their strengths beyond technical competence by leading in deep relationship, with radical humanity, passion and integrity. Drawing upon decades of solid research and experience enhancing individual capability and collective leadership effectiveness with Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, the authors provide an innovative and efficient framework to help you: Take stock of your own personal balance of leadership strengths and weaknessesScale your leadership in deep relationship and high integrityProliferate high-achievers throughout your organization’s leadership systemIdentify ineffective leadership and course-correct quicklyTransform your organization by transforming leadership Scaling Leadership is an invaluable tool for executives, managers, and leaders in business, academia, nonprofit organizations, and more. This innovative resource provides effective techniques, real-world examples, and expert guidance for organizations seeking to improve performance, align and execute strategies, and transform their business with scalable leadership capability.

Is your leadership a competitive advantage, or is it costing you? How do you know? Are you developing your leadership effectiveness at the pace of change? For most leaders today, complexity is outpacing their personal and collective development. Most leaders are in over their heads, whether they know it or not. The most successful organizations over time are the best led. While this has always been true, today escalating global complexity puts leadership effectiveness at a premium. Mastering Leadership involves developing the effectiveness of leaders—individually and collectively—and turning that leadership into a competitive advantage. This comprehensive roadmap for optimal leadership features: Breakthrough research that connects increased leadership effectiveness with enhanced business performanceThe first fully integrated Universal Model of Leadership—one that integrates the best theory and research in the fields of Leadership and Organizational Development over the last half centuryA free, online self-assessment of your leadership, using the Leadership Circle Profile, visibly outlining how you are currently leading and how to develop even greater effectivenessThe five stages in the evolution of leadership—Egocentric, Reactive, Creative, Integral, and Unitive—along with the organizational structures and cultures that develop at each of these stagesSix leadership practices for evolving your leadership capability at a faster paceA map of your optimal path to greater leadership effectivenessCase stories that facilitate pragmatic application of this Leadership Development System to your particular situation This timeless, authoritative text provides a systemic approach for developing your senior leaders and the leadership system of your organization. It does not recommend quick fixes, but argues that real development requires a strategic, long-term, and integrated approach in order to forge more effective leaders and enhanced business performance. Mastering Leadership offers a developmental pathway to bring forth the highest and best use of yourself, your life, and your leadership. By more meaningfully deploying all of who you are every day, individually and collectively, you will achieve a leadership legacy consistent with your highest aspirations.

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he'd not found them - not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was right: the purpose of life is to recognize ourselves - in each other and in all things. The mind is looking for itself: that is how it works, that is what it does for a living.

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he'd not found them - not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was right: the purpose of life is to recognize ourselves - in each other and in all things. The mind is looking for itself: that is how it works, that is what it does for a living.