Living your Leadership: Grow Intentionally, Thrive with Integrity, and Serve Humbly

by Chris Ewing

Living Your Leadership starts with self-leadership to discover, understand, and improve yourself. Only then can you shift your focus to being a transformational leader focused on servant leadership. Chris Ewing, a leadership consultant and educator who formerly served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, shares a proven approach to developing leadership in a deliberate and structured fashion. He demonstrates how to develop your leadership style to match authentic servant leadership through individual discipline and critical reflection of character. Moreover, he explores how to regulate behavior and explains why its important to move from an extrinsic motivational orientation toward a more intrinsic one. Other topics include the difference between management and leadership and how to lead with empathy, authenticity, control, and autonomy. Just as important, youll learn how to avoid stumbling blocks that prevent many from becoming leaders. If you want to be an effective leader, you must be the kind of person that people want to follow. Become that person with the insights and lessons in this book.

202 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2018

About the author

Chris Ewing is a leadership consultant and educator working in health care administration, management consulting, and higher education. He formerly served as an Air Force officer, specializing in space and missile operations, and is the chief operating officer of Paradigm Leaders, LLC, which specializes in leadership development and management curriculum.

Reviews

[Marne - Reader By the Water · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased - I know Chris and wrote the forward. This book is a well-researched guide on servant leadership. Don't trust me, trust Kirkus:

Ewing’s management manual focuses on the service element of leadership.

“Leadership is the bedrock of organizational effectiveness,” writes Ewing in his nonfiction debut, but too often people in leadership positions settle for merely managing their followers, moving them around like cogs in a mechanical design. “Your followers are people,” Ewing’s book reminds its readers, “complete with messy emotions, backstories, families, friends, hobbies, and lives outside of the workplace.” Ewing advocates the kind of involved, detailed, hands-on practice of management that’s exemplified in the phrase “going to gemba” (gemba is a Japanese term for “the real place”); i.e., successful managers walk around, make contact with their employees where the work is actually getting done, and witness potential problems firsthand. The end goal, according to Ewing, is managers who display “deep personal humility with intense professional will.” In concise, well-illustrated chapters, Ewing breaks down the tactics and strategies of truly inspired group guidance. The key characteristic that crops up repeatedly is humility. A good leader will manage people, but a great one will serve them, inspiring great loyalty and output. Citing Disney’s often-repeated slogan “gratitude improves attitude,” Ewing stresses that insightful leadership will be always be based on others, not oneself, reflecting the “necessary reciprocal relationship” between leaders and followers. Although some readers, particularly those who’ve had experience in corporate power structures, will raise an eyebrow at Ewing’s contention that humility is essential to really effective leadership (nearly all of the famous business leaders he name-checks are well-known to be ferocious despots to their subordinates), anyone encountering this book will be impressed not only by its thorough research—every page is buttressed with footnotes—but by its earnest presentation. There’s much food for thought here, particularly for middle managers aspiring to improve their work ethic.

A comprehensive, thought-provoking call for emphasizing the humanity in management.