Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

Now more than ever, your success as a leader isn't just about being a great business person. You've got to be a great person, performing well in all domains of your life -- your work, your home, your community, and your private self.

That's a tall order.

The good news is that, contrary to conventional wisdom about "balance," you don't have to assume that these domains compete in a zero-sum game. Total Leadership is a game-changing blueprint for how to perform well as a leader not by trading off one domain for another, but by finding mutual value among all four. Stew Friedman shows you how to achieve these "four-way wins" as a leader who can:

• Be real: Act with authenticity by clarifying what's important
• Be whole: Act with integrity by respecting the whole person
• Be innovative: Act with creativity by experimenting to find new solutions

With engaging examples and clear instruction, Friedman provides more than thirty hands-on tools for using these proven principles to produce stronger business results, find clearer purpose in what you do, feel more connected to the people who matter most, and generate sustainable change.

Most leadership development books focus only on your professional skills, while books about personal growth concentrate on your needs beyond work. Total Leadership is different. It's a unique and long-awaited resource that shows how to win in all domains of life.

About the Author

Stewart D. Friedman joined the Wharton School faculty in 1984. He became the Management Department’s first Practice Professor in recognition of his work on the application of theory and research to the real challenges facing organizations. He is founding director of both the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project. His writings on leadership development and succession, work/life integration, and the dynamics of change include the widely cited Harvard Business Review article “Work and Life: The End of the Zero-Sum Game” (coauthored with Perry Christensen and Jessica DeGroot) and, more recently, in the Academy of Management Executive, “The Happy Workaholic: A Role Model for Employees” (with Sharon Lobel). Work and Family—Allies or Enemies? (coauthored with Jeff Greenhaus, Oxford University Press, 2000) was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the field’s best books. With Integrating Work and Life: the Wharton Resource Guide (Jossey-Bass, 1998), Stew co-edited (with Jessica DeGroot and Perry Christensen) the first collection of learning tools for building leadership skills for integrating work and the rest of life.

In 2001, Stew concluded a two-year assignment as a senior executive at Ford Motor Company, where he was director of the Leadership Development Center (LDC). In partnership with the CEO and senior management team, he launched a corporate-wide portfolio of initiatives to transform Ford’s culture and improve its performance, in which over twenty-five hundred managers per year participated. Stew and the LDC were profiled in a Fast Company cover story, in Training and Development, in CIO, and in other media. Near the end of his tenure at Ford, an independent research organization (ICEDR) identified the LDC as having achieved “global benchmark” status for leadership development programs.

Stew has consulted with a wide range of organizations and executives, including Jack Welch and Vice President Al Gore; he serves on numerous advisory boards; and he conducts workshops and speaks globally on leadership and the whole person, creating change, and strategic human resources issues. The recipient of numerous teaching awards, he appears regularly in business media, and was chosen by Working Mother as one of America’s twenty-five most influential men in having made things better for working parents.

Stew played music and drove a taxi in New York during college and for a year thereafter, then worked for five years as a mental health professional in Vermont and New York before earning his PhD (1984) in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan.