Hacking Leadership

“Nothing impacts our world like leadership,” says internationally acclaimed author Mike Myatt in his latest book, HACKING LEADERSHIP: The 11 Gaps Every Business Needs to Close and The Secrets to Closing Them Quickly. Poor leadership cripples businesses, ruins economies, destroys families, loses wars and can bring the demise of nations. Unfortunately, today’s leadership practices are too often inadequate to meet the challenges of the 21^st century.  What must leaders do today to be successful tomorrow?

HACKING LEADERSHIP shows leaders how to bring their leadership skills up to speed to meet those challenges by helping them identify weaknesses or gaps in their leadership skills and thereby empowering them to achieve their true leadership potential.

Core leadership principles need not be abandoned. They are still as valid as ever. But they must be transformed to close the gap between perception and reality, between intentions and outcomes. Myatt gives readers the tools—the hacks—to do just that.

“Hacking Leadership is a thought-provoking, shattering jolt of leadership wisdom that can propel anyone in the direction of their full leadership potential,” General John E. Michel, Commanding General, NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan.

Myatt sets forth eleven leadership gaps, which if not properly identified, understood and addressed can be fatal not only to leaders but to those whom they lead. Among them are:

• The Leadership Gap: Leadership isn’t just a role or a title. It’s a choice [TweetMe]. With principled effective leadership, all things are possible. The best leaders understand leadership is the key to unlocking and realizing limitless potential. The only limits are the ones you submit to. Discover the three critical leadership gaps you must be aware of and how to remedy them.
• The Purpose Gap: Great leaders have a clearly defined purpose, while average leaders just show up for work [TweetMe]. Purpose fuels passion, which creates focus and in turn fuels high performance. The secret sauce to purpose is found in a leader’s ability to scale personal and professional purpose into a cause embraced and evangelized by others.
• The Mediocrity Gap: The best leaders don’t play it safe they don’t look the other way when something is wrong, and they don’t compromise on values. They do the right thing. Doing the right thing means never settling for mediocrity [TweetMe].
• The Culture Gap: A company’s corporate culture is its heart and soul [TweetMe]. It must be part of the ethos that describes why the enterprise exists, what and who it values, and how it will behave.
• The Knowledge Gap: When it comes to leadership, knowledge isn’t about being right. It’s about achieving the right outcomes. Great leaders keep their egos in check  and do whatever they must to ensure that their organization has ability to access information and convert that information into successful outcomes [TweetMe].
• The Talent Gap: Recruiting talent is one thing, strategically deploying talent is quite another. If leaders spent less time trying to retain people, and more time trying to understand them, care for them, invest in them, and lead them well, the retention problem would take care of itself [TweetMe].
• The Innovation Gap: If your organization doesn’t innovate in response to market-driven needs and demands, it will fail. It’s just that simple. Leaders who don’t know how to hack the innovation gap put their organizations on the fast track to obsolescence [TweetMe].

HACKING LEADERSHIP will help leaders understand how to hack not only these gaps but also other blind spots such as dealing with organizational complexity, fear of failure, and making sure expectations are understood and met. Myatt also devotes a chapter on the importance of hacking your family life. Career successes you have, while nice, are fleeting and don’t even begin to compare to the significance of those who build into your life on a regular and consistent basis. If you cheat your family to invest in your career, your loved ones will pay a very heavy price.

***About the Author: Mike Myatt is the CEO at N2growth, a global leader in providing leadership development services to Fortune 500 companies. He is widely regarded as America’s Top CEO Coach. The author of Leadership Matters, he is also a Forbes Leadership Columnist, and a senior fellow at the Gordian Institute. His website is www.n2growth.com.***