Lead with Purpose
Reignite Passion and Engagement for Professionals in Crisis
To counter trends like quiet quitting, the business guide Lead with Purpose names ways of making one’s employees feel valued, empowered, and engaged.
Roger A. Gerard’s incisive business guide Lead with Purpose suggests means of creating workplace cultures that can retain their trained professionals.
To counter trends of toxic workplace cultures in which professionals are marginalized, burned out, and feel powerless, this book seeks to expose the factors that lead to mass quitting. It names ways to make employees feel valued, empowered, and engaged—steps said to have the potential for an immediate impact. Its approach is holistic and humanizing, as where it redefines professionalism to include traits like passion, discipline, and commitment to learning and growth.
According to this text, employees should never be treated as interchangeable commodities; instead, the book advocates for infusing business enterprises with a sense of the human and the sacred. Personal stories, as of a dedicated professional who missed a last visit with her dying mother when threatened with job loss, are used drive such points home. Further, the book’s smattering of humor enlivens it (habitual naysayers are people who “are likely to aim at nothing and achieve it with incredible accuracy”).
There’s an illustrative element to the book, which points to stress and disengagement among workers using examples, as of teachers contending with disrespect, a lack of autonomy, large classes, low pay, and the possibility of guns in the classroom. Also included are examples of first responders being treated like mere drivers and overburdened physicians being forced to abide by corporate rules at the expense of patient-centered care. Also highlighted as disempowering are COVID-19 mandates, which are said to have compromised feelings of job security and bodily autonomy. Indeed, the book sometimes limits its persuasive reach by taking clear political stances, as where it shares a negative view of unions, positing that employees who are heard and feel empowered don’t need them without sufficient regard to issues related to power structures and pay disparities. Elsewhere, referenced data is paradoxically referred to as a “quick, anecdotal, rough, and likely inaccurate … picture of what the competition is doing.”
Still, the book’s progression is steady and confidence building. Each chapter begins with a quote and ends with a clear summary, and sidebars appear throughout to highlight salient points. A large quantity of statistical data is also included, while the book’s reflection questions, prompts, and self-checks for leaders make its suggestions applicable in real time.
Lead with Purpose is a provocative business book with experience-based wisdom, practical solutions, and examples of lives and enterprises changed.
Reviewed by
Kristine Morris
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.
