Frances X. Frei - Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leaders Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

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Copyright 2020 Frances Frei and Anne Morriss

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to , or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

First eBook Edition: Jun 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63369-704-1

eISBN: 978-1-63369-705-8

FOR ALEC AND BEN,
May the best of you be unbound,
and may you taste the sacred joy
of setting other people free.

Just remember that your real job is that if you are free,
you need to free somebody else. If you have some
power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

TONI MORRISON,
as quoted in O, The Oprah Magazine

There are a lot of books about leadership, many of them terrific. Humans have been dwelling on the practice and mystery of great leadership for millennia (more on that later). Why read one more? Well, if you look around, its clear that many of the existing models of leadership are not wholly up to the task of handling the challenges we now face together. From rebuilding trust in institutions to unleashing potential at the scale of organizations and beyond, we believe that traditional ideas about leadership only get us so far. They carry us through the first few miles of todays leadership marathon, but often set us up to lose momentum before we get all the way to the finish line of impact.

The problem, respectfully, is that its been all about you . Your talents and shortcomings as a leader. Your confidence and lack of it. Your heroic moments of courage and instinctand, of course, your epic falls from grace. For all kinds of good reasons, including the demands of good storytelling, traditional leadership narratives assume that the vision-having, strategy-making, troops-rallying leader is the most important person in the scene.

In this book, we propose a different orientation. Our starting point is that leadership, at its core, isnt about you. Instead, its about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential. And we will begin by making the case that if you seek to lead, then the important work ahead starts with turning outward.

Consider these questions: Are your teammates and colleagues better off when youre around? Are they more productive and more engaged? More willing to innovate and take smart bets? Whatever your answers are, hold on to them as we begin this conversation. The response we hear most often is sometimes, and its the typical pattern we observe among even the most seasoned leaders. Leaders of all backgrounds and tenures only sometimes succeed in creating conditions that allow other people to thrive, and few have full control over the levers of their success. Our mission here is to help you fix that.

We are scholars and writers, coaches and company builders, optimists and (on our best days) accelerators of action. It has been the privilege of our lives to work as change agents at some of the worlds most influential organizationscompanies like Uber, WeWork and Riot Gamesand with some of the worlds most inspiring business leaders, people like Jen Morgan at SAP, Doug McMillon at Walmart, and Bozoma Saint John at, well, any room she decides to walk into. But at the core of our identities, we are educators, which is why we wanted to write a book about leadership. We believe that what weve learned in the process of changing things can be useful to anyone who seeks to lead, particularly now, when the scale and complexity of our shared challenges can seem overwhelming. We believe that our highest duty is to current and future generations of leaders who are willing to put themselves out there and try to build a better world.

We were both taken by the idea of leadership at a curiously young age. Frances first became interested in the context of sports: how coaches helped players reach their potential, how players made each other better on and off the court, how the joy and heartbreak of competition seemed to elevate everyone in the game. For Anne, oddly enough, it turned into an obsession with the American Revolution at the delicate age of nine. Side effects included regular appearances as a cross-dressed minuteman and middle-of-the-night reenactments of Paul Reveres ride. We were not like the other kids.