MICK Spiers, an experienced executive and leader, has launched his groundbreaking new book titled “You’re A Leader, Now What?” that “equips readers with practical leadership skills never taught in school and rarely developed in early careers.”
The book is a new take on some of the leadership rhetoric that is out there, said Spiers, who wants to bring back joy to the workplace. It will also help readers progress and become the leader that they want to be and achieve the success they deserve.
Although he got a lot of respect for a number of leadership authors out there, some of them are still teaching techniques that are more 10 to 20 years old, said Spiers, who had a fair share of missteps and failures. “So, this is really a modern thought about millennials and about what the modern workplace needs,” he underscored.
To make the book useful for readers, Spiers, who started The Leadership Project movement, encourages them to keep an open mind, be ready to unlearn what they think they already know, commit to a learning mindset, and answer the self-reflection questions at the end of each chapter.
According to Spiers, it is not just reading the book chapter by chapter or when they are falling asleep at night. To read one chapter at a time, and then stop and do the exercises, and to reflect on their own leadership are some of the reasons why the book is different.
Spiers has been blessed to work with truly inspirational leaders. He studied closely his own leadership style to see what works and does not work, and practices self-reflection every day, as taught in the book, to help him improve his leadership craft continually.
Spiers describes a good leader as very self-aware and understands their own emotions. “Emotional intelligence is a huge part of leadership,” he said, adding that a good leader is also someone who knows themselves, knows their team, inspires their team, and engages them in the conversation.
“It is also about how they relate to other human beings,” he also said, adding one must go to the platinum rule, which is “to treat others the way they want to be treated.”
From there, everything else kicks in giving people purpose and meaning, giving people a voice, making sure that their opinions are valued and that they feel like they matter, he added.
Spiers, who wants leaders to challenge the status quo, urges people to stop, think, and reflect on what good leadership looks like. “Build your own picture of what a good leader looks like,” he advised.
He chose the first-time leaders on purpose because of the emotional roller coaster that they go through. “They have these euphoric highs where they finally get recognized for they are good at what they do. Then they have this thud of anxiety when I realized that no one has ever shown them what it means to be a leader,” he explained.
Spiers took eight to 10 months in total to write the book “because I did multiple edits at the end of the process.” What he also had to do was to think about his avatar, who the book was written for, and he had to put himself in readers’ minds.
The book was written for a 25 year-old person. “What a 25 year-old-may need to know that would have made me a better leader quicker than the way that I developed it over time,” he said.
Of all the topics that may be explored, “I picked leadership because I have skills in that space and people are spending up to one-third of their lives in these workplace spaces,” he noted.
The “You’re A Leader, Now What?’’ is now available thru Amazon.com, Shopee, Lazada, and National Book Store outlets nationwide.
Visit www.mickspiers.com to know more about the book, the author’s coaching tours, and his The Leadership Project.
