Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity

• Offers proven strategies and tactics to help guide leaders through difficult or challenging situations
• Features powerful first-person stories from leaders who have mastered the art of struggle
• Written by an experienced leader and executive coach who worked directly with Bill Gates at Microsoft in its early years

Leadership and the Art of Struggle shatters leadership myths to reveal a new understanding of how exceptional leaders grow from adversity. The image that effective leaders guide their organizations on perpetually smooth journeys quite simply defies reality. Leadership is often a struggle, and yet strong taboos keep us from talking openly and honestly about our struggles for fear of looking weak and seeming to lack confidence.

Exceptional leaders intuitively understand the paradox. They know it’s precisely struggle that unlocks the potential for the greatest growth. Instead of denying struggle, these leaders embrace struggle as an opportunity for learning, as an art to be mastered.

Leadership and the Art of Struggle paints a realistic portrait of how great leaders navigate intense challenges for personal growth and organizational success. Through 150 stories of leadership struggle drawn from nearly 100 interviews, as well as from his experiences as an early executive at Microsoft, a CEO of a public company, and an executive coach, Steven Snyder derives mastery strategies for welcoming struggle as an integral part of your leadership journey. To help you implement each of these strategies, he offers a host of unique tools and specific, hands-on practices. You’ll learn how to cultivate the best mindset for confronting challenges, explore multiple tactics for dealing with struggle, and keep your energy high so you can continue to learn and grow.

Leadership and the Art of Struggle begins a new conversation about leadership. The very striving to make important human values real and effective is core to the practice of leadership. By mastering the art of struggle, leaders meet life’s challenges and adversities, focusing their energies on what matters most.

About the Author

Steven Snyder, Ph.D., is the founder of the Snyder Leadership Group, an organizational consulting firm. An innovator in thought leadership, Snyder has developed the breakthrough concepts introduced in Leadership and the Art of Struggle, based on years of leadership studies, intensive research, and data derived from extensive interviews with real-world executives from major corporations. He currently lives with his family in the Minneapolis area, where he remains actively engaged in philanthropy and community service.