Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast- Shorts.
There’s no co-host on shorts.

These are six-to-eight-minute observations, ideas, thoughts, or rants, about the literature, philosophy, psychology, and theology of leadership.

Because listening to me talk about leadership for, now six to eight minutes, is better than reading and trying to understand yet another business book.

There are rules that govern leadership.

These rules aren't hard and fast.

They can bend and be ambiguous.

They can lead a leader into the grey areas of leadership, but they can also provide boundaries and guardrails for amateur leaders.

Experienced leaders, academic leadership researchers, and well-meaning leadership consultants can disagree with the framing of these rules, but that disagreement doesn't make the rules any less valid.
The rules that govern leadership are bounded in 12 areas and if leaders know something about these rules, then they can adjudicate these areas of leadership with compassion, discipline, purpose, and--above all else--intentionality.

What does it mean to be an intentional leader?

An intentional leader is actively listening, fully engaged, disciplined, clear in their thinking and speaking, self-aware of their faults, driven neither by avoiding blame for decisions or taking credit for successes and is always ready emotionally to adapt to change.

If that sounds like pie in the sky or an impossible task if you're a manager or supervisor, that's because many well-meaning bosses, cultures, traditions, and even systems, processes, and relationships have been lying to you about leadership for many, many years.

It is time to stop the lying and start telling the truth of leadership.

It doesn't matter if you're leading a team of people to pick up trash by the side of the highway, or leading a team of executives through the airport, the truth of leadership is that it is hard, thankless, and very often the most fulfilling act you will ever take on.

It's not for the faint of heart, nor is leadership for the command-and-control authoritarian, the passive, smug bureaucrat, or the arrogant social climber. Intentional leadership requires a person to be aware, thinking and "on" all the time. There's no autopilot function.

So, to get all that across, I wrote a book, out now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and a number of other digital outlets, 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership that's out now everywhere you get books online and via print-on-demand. This book is not easy to read and it was not easy to write.

And, I firmly believe that this is the book for leaders like the ones listening, subscribing, and downloading this podcast, because, quite frankly, innocuous leaders coming from places they believe don't matter, need a manual, a guide, to show them where to go.

Or, to confirm that the direction they're heading in is correct.

Or that the direction they're heading is incorrect and they need to get back on the leadership path.

And that’s it for me.