Synopses & Reviews
Great leaders all over the world unleash astonishing potential within themselves, their people, and their organizations by building the trust, delivering the change, and inspiring the focus that underpin engagement and create conditions for innovation.
You, too, can become a Secure Base Leader in your work and your life. No matter where you work and with whom you work, how little support you feel, how small your budget, or how busy you are, you can learn specific skills and develop a way of being and doing that delivers sustainable results through inspired relationships.
Secure Base Leadership, based on trust, confidence, and challenge, is the best way to liberate yourself, your team, and your organization.
“Care to Dare sends a vital and urgent message to every leader: empathy and attunement are not a waste of time in today's business climate, but essentials for success. George Kohlrieser makes the business case for kindness as the platform that allows leaders to challenge their followers. And he does so with authority, depth, and verve. Every leader who wants results needs to read this book."
—Daniel Goleman, bestselling author, Emotional Intelligence
This book will not only help you learn – it will help you act! A book for leaders across all cultures, its message is clear – Care enough to Dare and you will transform teams, organizations and business culture.
Marshall Goldsmith, author, MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and America’s preeminent executive coach (Fast Company magazine)
“I wondered if George Kohlreiser could create a worthy sequel to his masterful Hostage at the Table. Well, he, Susan and Duncan have, and then some! Genius in its simplicity, this book shows us that the Secure Base Leader provides a combination of safety and risk that creates the only possible means to success at innovation. Innovate or die is the seminal characteristic of today's environment; Care to Dare is the key.”
—Tom Peters, co-author, In Search of Excellence
“If you read only one book on leadership, it should be Care to Dare by George Kohlreiser, Susan Goldsworthy and Duncan Coombe. Filled with actionable advice, the book shows leaders how to discover their secure bases in order to sustain their effectiveness and energize their teammates to do so as well.”
—Bill George, Harvard Business School, author, True North and former chief executive officer, Medtronic
‘Care to Dare ties together the essential and very human elements of leadership into a program you can make work. Read this powerful and very readable book. It will help you see your strengths and weaknesses as a leader and will help you grow as a person.”
—John A. Davis, Faculty Chair, Families in Business Program, Harvard Business School
“This is an exceptional book with a message that is critical to the challenge of developing better leaders. In short, being personal and connecting on a human level is the key to what really matters in life and business. George has done a great job of explaining how and why this matters so much if you want to lead others effectively.”—David Rock, cofounder of The NeuroLeadership Institute, and author, Your Brain at Work
Synopsis
Have you ever been led by someone who cared for you like family, and dared you to achieve more than you ever thought possible for yourself, your organization, and even society?
Award-winning author of Hostage at the Table, George Kohlrieser, along with his co-authors Susan Goldsworthy and Duncan Coombe, explain how becoming a secure base leader releases extraordinary potential in others.
Part of the Warren Bennis leadership series Care to Dare shows you how to become a Secure Base Leader so that you release your followers from the fears that get in the way of their performance. It shows you how you can unleash astonishing potential by building the trust, delivering the change, and inspiring the focus that underpins sustainable high performance.
From extensive interviews with executives from all over the world, as well as from surveys with more than a thousand executives, the book reveals the nine characteristics that Secure Base Leaders display on a daily basis. The research shows that a primary difference between a successful leader and a failed leader is the presence or absence of secure bases in his or her life.
Care to Dare will take you on a journey where you will discover your own secure bases, past and present, and determine how you can be a secure base for other people in your life at work and at home.
Synopsis
Care to Dare shows you how you to unleash the astonishing potential of the people around you by building the trust, delivering the change, and inspiring the focus that underpin sustainable high performance. You do so by becoming a “Secure Base Leader” who reduces anxiety and increases healthy risk-taking. Secure Base Leadership works at the personal, team and organizational levels. It is not just a set of skills (the “doing”). It is first and foremost a way of being. You care enough to dare people to reach for their dreams, and in the process, you can return to your very humanity.
About the Author
GEORGE KOHLRIESER is an organizational and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD (International Institute for Management Development), Switzerland, one of the world’s leading business schools, and is the creator and director of its flagship High Performance Leadership Program.
George incorporates the lessons he learned as a psychologist and hostage negotiator in his work with leaders. He has worked with the police, the military and humanitarian organizations in such hot spots as Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Croatia, as well as with police departments and police academies in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and India. In the course of his work, he has been taken hostage four times – once in a hospital emergency room and three times in homes during domestic violence disputes. Each time, using Secure Base Leadership skills, he successfully negotiated his way out.
His first book, Hostage at the Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, and Raise Performance, was an international best seller and received the "Best Business Book Award 2007" from DCF (French Association of Business Leaders) and "Best Management Book 2008" in Germany by Managementbuch.de.
An engaging teacher and a highly sought after motivational speaker for conferences and keynote addresses, George has been a guest on BBC, CNN, ABC, and CBS as well as numerous radio programs. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and other leading newspapers and magazines
SUSAN GOLDSWORTHY is founder & CEO of Goldswolf & Associates, a company specializing in leadership development, executive coaching, and change communications. She works with a number of international clients, is on the faculty at Webster University, Geneva, and is an executive coach and consultant lecturer at IMD.
Susan has more than twenty years management experience in large multinational companies, working for Japanese (Hitachi), American (Digital) and European (Tetra Pak) corporations across a range of industry areas. Her most recent corporate role was as Vice President, Communications, Tetra Pak International.
A former Olympic finalist, European and Commonwealth Bronze Medallist, Susan combines experience from the fields of sports, business and neuroscience. She is passionate about helping people turn knowledge into behaviour and creating the conditions for healthy high performance.
Susan holds a Masters degree (MSc) in Consulting and Coaching for Change with HEC and Oxford University, certification in Coaching for Leadership & Professional Development with The Tavistock Institute, the Graduate Certificate in the Neuroscience of Leadership and post-graduate diplomas in Marketing, Direct Marketing and Change Management. She is also qualified in the use of a number of psychometric assessment tools.
DUNCAN COOMBE is a teacher, researcher, author and advisor. He is on the faculty of Ashridge Business School and is a consultant to the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value. He works as an external consultant to a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations. Duncan’s teaching and advisory work to senior executives includes topics of leadership development, organization development, culture and change management. He has served clients in many sectors including financial services, hotels, poverty alleviation, FMCG and pharmaceuticals. His work has taken him to five continents and places as diverse as Bhutan, Burkina Faso, and the Arctic Circle. The central theme of all of his work is human well-being, whether at the individual, team, organization or societal level. He is deeply committed to being a voice for humanity in the workplace and is particularly focused on the topic of Love in organisations. Duncan completed his Doctorate in Organizational Behavior at The Weatherhead School of Management. He holds an MBA from IMD, an LLB (Dean’s Merit List) and a Bachelor of Social Science (majors in Psychology and Economics). Duncan is on the faculty of the Gestalt Center for Organization and Systems Development and is also a Lifeline crisis counsellor. Previously, Duncan worked at Procter & Gamble and Investec Asset Management in a variety of business development roles. He has lived and worked in the US, Switzerland, the UK and South Africa.
Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xxiii
Part I 1
1 Your Leadership Opportunity 3
2 Secure Base Leadership in Action 31
Part II 51
3 Build Trust through the Bonding Cycle 53
4 Deliver Change: Embracing Loss through Grief 81
5 Focus: Bringing Forward the Power of the Mind's Eye 111
6 Achievement: Playing to Win 141
Part III 169
7 Strengthen your own Secure Bases 171
8 Become a Secure Base for Others 197
9 Transform Your Organization into a Secure Base 229
10 Humanize Your Leadership and your Organization 257
About the Research 279
Notes 287
Index 299