Leading Lightly
Lower Your Stress, Think with Clarity, and Lead with Ease
Leading Lightly recommends leadership improvement techniques that are designed to make its audience more engaged, mindful, and communicative.
With elements of self-help, Jody Michael’s engaging business book Leading Lightly asserts that leaders don’t need to be tough to be successful and effectual.
Arguing that contemporary business leaders are overworked, overwhelmed, and stressed, the book acknowledges prevailing struggles, such as managing one’s work-life balance, trusting one’s team enough to delegate, and evaluating performances. It notes that all such leadership challenges stand to impact one’s team, company, and industry. Still, it offers some hope: leaders who develop their mental and emotional health, it says, can deal with challenges well, and they can command conversations, relationships, and decisions with a light touch. Indeed, the book suggests that solid mental fitness is requisite in a time when leadership stressors have taken significant tolls on both businesses and employees.
With elements of both self-help works and of leadership guides, this work is astutely organized. Its ten chapters each cover a hot-button area of leadership, with topics including one’s performance and accountability. Each subject is illuminated with anecdotal conversations or discussions; these precede clearer coverage of the concepts proper. Further, each chapter includes either prompts in the form of questions, or exercises to solidify its notions. And the book’s chapters are sequential; this content was designed to be re-read and referenced on repeat.
The book’s thoughtful design extends throughout its work, in which the contents are broken down into subtopics, and in which call-out statements are used to emphasize particular points. Bulleted lists make this work accessible to those who only have time to skim it for a leadership jolt, too. Workflow diagrams, tables, and infographics further enhance and support the book’s claims and explanations. Sidebars appear on distinctive backgrounds, and in their own fonts, to highlight notions of importance; and the book’s prompts are followed by space for recording the audience’s answers. Takeaway notes at the end of each chapter prove to be a further benefit.
Firm and encouraging, this instructional work guides its audience through leadership development well, encouraging self-examination and self-assessment throughout. The repetition of key points helps to ensure that its ideas will stick, and its appeals to Michael’s financial industry experience ably recommend its methods for success.
Evolving mindsets are encouraged in Leading Lightly, a business book that guides its audience through improving their leadership techniques, hoping to make them more engaged, mindful, and communicative so that they can achieve success in business and life.
Reviewed by
Katerie Prior
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.
