Dare to Be a Revolutionary Leader
People Are the Solution-Change Your Leadership Style
Dare to Be a Revolutionary Leader includes provocative recommendations for achieving career success.
Charley Swords’s career guide Dare to Be a Revolutionary Leader advocates for transformational leadership methods on individual, group, and organizational levels.
The book grabs interest from the first, proposing a shift of popular attention from the topic of achieving perfection to that of supporting incremental growth. This paradigm shift is designed to recognize that leadership styles cannot be uniform––after all, leaders and workplace situations are not. From this entry point, the book segues into a discussion of internal motivations, suggesting that leaders think about their employees’ needs first––and implying that such attitudes will lead to greater general success.
Though the book moves from discussing leadership in terms of one’s self, to considering how leadership modes will shift in consideration of the needs of one’s employees, it remains piquing throughout. It asks people to interrogate whether they are leaders by default, or whether they have to make themselves so; it recommends methods for shifting one’s personal perspectives in this regard, too. Once this foundation is established, the book moves on to discussions of how to empower, engage, and support others.
Declarative in tone and supported by helpful lists, the book covers a bevy of subtopics, including self-care practices and self-leadership lessons. It includes tips on subjects as broad and ranging as dealing with difficult people, making ethical decisions, and improving meeting productivity. But it also makes use of familiar quotes from well-known figures, including Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela, that are less surprising than its more original work. Some of these notions are expanded upon to make fresh, incisive points about how to best use one’s energy and time. Still, although most of the incorporated observations about leadership are insightful and complementary, some are too rote to support the book’s central work. Additionally, some of the included recommendations, as with an encouragement to “kick your self-doubt to touch!”, are hazy.
More applicable are the book’s tables, which are used to highlight its most salient points, and to extend scrutiny of them in an illustrative way. Some stand to inspire prospective leaders to achieve their desired legacies. However, there are unnumbered figures included among the book’s illustrations, as well as figures without captions, that undermine the book’s clarity. Further, few sources are provided for the book’s interesting statistics, as with its recommended percentages for staff versus retail space.
Written from a service-oriented, collective perspective, Dare to Be a Revolutionary Leader is a provocative career guide that recommends nurturing respect for one’s employees in order to achieve workplace success.
Reviewed by
Andrea Hammer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
