Sal Silvester - Ignite!: The 4 Essential Rules for Emerging Leaders

Here is what I know about you: Ill bet you are smart and successful, maybe even a rising star in your organization. Youre considered the go-to person on your team. Youre so good at your jobas an engineer, financial analyst, customer-service representative, software developer, nurse, sales representativethat people are taking notice, and something is about to rock your world.

You are about to get promoted.

The problem is, if you are like many other new or recently promoted managers, you feel thoroughly unprepared and out of your element. Perhaps even a bit scared.

And with good reason. Like so many who have greatness thrust upon them, this is all new and unfamiliar to you. How you handle the often-rocky transition to managing people will affect not only your future, but also that of your company. As a front-line leader, your actions have a direct impact on your team members level of engagement, productivity, job satisfaction, morale, and commitment, more so than any other factor in your organization.

According to the Gartner Group, people dont leave their organizations. They leave their managers. Suddenlythats you.

Just thinking about whats at stake can be over-whelmingespecially since in most organizations, new managers dont receive a bit of leadership training before being dispatched to the front lines.

We often hear that leadership is about charismatic people who inspire others through the force of their personality. Or that leadership is an innate set of characteristics magically bestowed upon the lucky ones at birth. Or that you have to join the Army and complete Special Forces training as a rite of passage into the discipline and godliness of leadership.

None of that is true. The essence of leadership is about employing key skills and behaviors on a consistent basis. The good news? These skills and behaviors can be learned. Seriously.

Thats right, leadership can be learned. And guess what? Its not too late. You can learn these skills and become an effective and influential leader, starting today.

This book provides rising stars like you with a practical model that can be implemented immediately to help ignite your leadership potential. Youll learn the four essential rules to live by that will enable you to generate commitment from your team members.

This book is not just for emerging leaders. Its also for senior leaders to whom the emerging ones report, and who play a key role in developing the next generation of leaders. In the best organizations, theyre busy coaching, teaching, and imparting the experiences that help promising candidates to develop and eventually take on more senior roles. That not only helps the organization deepen its bench strength, it enables senior leaders to focus on more strategic roles as they relinquish some of the day-to-day challenges of running the business.

Good leadership isnt something you can memorize, like the multiplication tables. How then can you learn about and embody this allegedly mythical, magical set of qualities?

The best teaching tool I know of is the learning parable. Its a story about a fictional person with real-life business and leadership challenges that illustrates all the essential elements of what youre trying to learn. In the first part of this book, youll meet Ben Turner, the main character in our learning parable. Ben is a technology expert in the Professional Services Department at BCO-Tek, a $150 million software development company with more than one hundred employees based in Boulder, Colorado. Ben likes his job fine just the way it is, and greets the unexpected news of his promotion as he would a sudden case of the flu. But now, if Ben cant figure out how to get his team members moving in the same direction, not only will his career prospects diminish, his company will lose critical customers to the competition.