Leadership: A Practical Guide to Leading

This book is designed as a course in teaching leadership concepts and how to evaluate your tendencies as a leader using practical exercises and lessons learned. It can use I whole or in part for academic, the business world, nonbusiness entities to provide a baseline for developing effective leaders.

It provides perspective on how leaders need to adapt to keep up with the frenetic pace of change that is occurring today. It promotes critical thinking by examining and defining some of the biggest challenges leaders might face (technology, global markets, diversity, equity, and inclusion, etc).

Chapter 1: Defining Leadership: Leadership is the ability to influence people and organizations to shape behaviors, opinions, perceptions, motivation, and actions while balancing “Does This Make Me Money” (DTMMM) © and “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) ©. Leaders focus more on WIIFM than DTMMM! 

Chapter 2: Defining a Leader: A leader is a person who uses influence and information to shape outcomes and culture while managing expectations and egos. One must understand the difference between leaders and managers.

Chapter 3: Leadership Challenges (Defining and Coping): Leaders face many challenges as the navigate the organizations, cultures, of the global environment of today. This is not an exhaustive list, but a list of the most common that if addressed, will increase the effectiveness of leaders.

Chapter 4: Identifying and Understanding Stakeholders and Span of Control: The identification of stakeholders and subsequently, the span of control that you have as a leader will help you understand the extent of your interactions. More importantly, it will help you know which tools and types of power to use for addressing both moral, ethical, and legal issues.

Chapter 5: Understanding Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: An effective leader identifies and uses a combination of critical thinking and mental models when processing information to describe/define a problem aimed at developing an optimal solution (decision(s)).

Chapter 6: Concepts and Techniques: It is a must that all available information is used hone your leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities to become an effective leader. Concepts, techniques, and tools assist the leader in assessing the environment and people to resolve (make decisions) problems and directed actions whether they are unplanned or planned. Concepts (Theories, Approaches, Models) help you define and conceptualize the problem.

Chapter 7: Leader Analysis Tools: After gathering and processing information, understanding the concepts and techniques of leadership, and what makes a leader, the effective leader must create your personal leadership vision and frame a strategic direction for a noble purpose that followers can believe in and follow. This is exercising strategic leadership that serves as a baseline for workplace culture and values the organization can work towards to achieve maximum efficiency in tasks and relationships.

Chapter 8: Case Study Analysis and Templates / Chapter 9: Case Studies: Provides a generic guide to analyzing a case study with links to case studies. They are real-world tools to practice the critical thinking and leadership concepts against a problem to determine an optimal solution(s).

Chapter 10. Leadership Quotes: An integration of first-hand expert advice from Fortune 500 Leaders will serve as a wide range of viewpoints to put todays and future challenges in the appropriate context. Professor Barfield’s leadership philosophy is to “Lead by example and continually strive to manage expectations and egos, both in yourself and others.”

The book is a leadership guide designed to provide readily available information (thought leaders and experiential commentary) along with tools to address self-directed, crisis and non-crisis issues that occur in the workplace or business environment. Secondarily, it is a guide that can be used as self-paced or facilitated training modules as each chapter will conclude with a practical exercise. This leadership guide is for all business and nonbusiness professionals who want to enhance or develop or revive their leadership skills and perspectives. Too often, course curriculum most often facilitates how much the student can use rote memory rather than experiential learning. This book is designed to facilitate learning through repetition reinforced by real-world applications.