Wall Street Journal Bestseller From the acclaimed author of Turn the Ship Around!, former US Navy Captain David Marquet, comes a radical new playbook for empowering your team to make better decisions and take greater ownership. You might imagine that an effective leader is someone who makes quick, intelligent decisions, gives inspiring speeches, and issues clear orders to their team so they can execute a plan to achieve your organization's goals. Unfortunately, David Marquet argues, that's an outdated model of leadership that just doesn't work anymore. As a leader in today's networked, information-dense business climate, you don't have full visibility into your organization or the ground reality of your operating environment. In order to harness the eyes, ears, and minds of your people, you need to foster a climate of collaborative experimentation that encourages people to speak up when they notice problems and work together to identify and test solutions. Too many leaders fall in love with the sound of their own voice, and wind up dictating plans and digging in their heels when problems begin to emerge. Even when you want to be a more collaborative leader, you can undermine your own efforts by defaulting to command-and-control language we've inherited from the industrial era. It's time to ditch the industrial age playbook of leadership. In Leadership is Language, you'll learn how choosing your words can dramatically improve decision-making and execution on your team. Marquet outlines six plays for all leaders, anchored in how you use language: • Control the clock, don't obey the clock: Pre-plan decision points and give your people the tools they need to hit pause on a plan of action if they notice something wrong. • Collaborate, don't coerce: As the leader, you should be the last one to offer your opinion. Rather than locking your team into binary responses ("Is this a good plan?"), allow them to answer on a scale ("How confident are you about this plan?") • Commit, don't comply: Rather than expect your team to comply with specific directions, explain your overall goals, and get their commitment to achieving it one piece at a time. • Complete, not continue: If every day feels like a repetition of the last, you're doing something wrong. Articulate concrete plans with a start and end date to align your team. • Improve, don't prove: Ask your people to improve on plans and processes, rather than prove that they can meet fixed goals or deadlines. You'll face fewer cut corners and better long-term results. • Connect, don't conform: Flatten hierarchies in your organization and connect with your people to encourage them to contribute to decision-making. In his last book, Turn the Ship Around!, Marquet told the incredible story of abandoning command-and-control leadership on his submarine and empowering his crew to turn the worst performing submarine to the best performer in the fleet. Now, with Leadership is Language he gives businesspeople the tools they need to achieve such transformational leadership in their organizations.

“One of the 12 best business books of all time…. Timeless principles of empowering leadership.” – USA Today "The best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution.” —FORTUNE Since Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013, hundreds of thousands of readers have been inspired by former Navy captain David Marquet’s true story. Many have applied his insights to their own organizations, creating workplaces where everyone takes responsibility for his or her actions, where followers grow to become leaders, and where happier teams drive dramatically better results. Marquet was a Naval Academy graduate and an experienced officer when selected for submarine command. Trained to give orders in the traditional model of “know all–tell all” leadership, he faced a new wrinkle when he was shifted to the Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine. Facing the high-stress environment of a sub where there’s little margin for error, he was determined to reverse the trends he found on the Santa Fe: poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention rate in the fleet. Almost immediately, Marquet ran into trouble when he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why, the answer was: “Because you told me to.” Marquet realized that while he had been trained for a different submarine, his crew had been trained to do what they were told—a deadly combination. That’s when Marquet flipped the leadership model on its head and pushed for leadership at every level. Turn the Ship Around! reveals how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control to his subordinates, and creating leaders. Before long, each member of Marquet’s crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became completely engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day. The Santa Fe set records for performance, morale, and retention. And over the next decade, a highly disproportionate number of the officers of the Santa Fe were selected to become submarine commanders. Whether you need a major change of course or just a tweak of the rudder, you can apply Marquet’s methods to turn your own ship around.

Inspiring communication can make the difference between poor performance and exceptional results. This is why CEOs and HR professionals now believe that the ability to understand, motivate and inspire others is the characteristic that is most important when recruiting senior leaders. Many leaders wrongly perceive they have to become inspired orators if they are to inspire others. Wrong. Language is a system of communication, so the issue is: what system should leaders use to inspire brilliant results? This is the question Kevin Murray answers in The Language of Leaders. Based on original interviews with an extraordinary list of more than 70 top leaders from a wide range of business and public sector organizations, this book provides a unique insight into how these leaders have responded to the demands of a transparent world. It reports on what they have learned and creates a lexicon for successful communication. The message from these leaders is resoundingly clear - communication is now one of the most crucial skills of leadership. Filled with actionable lessons and insights from leaders of high-profile organizations, The Language of Leaders is an invaluable book for anybody in a leadership position, or who aspires to lead.

The impression you make as a leader has the power to build, enhance, or sabotage your authority and ideas. Discover how to convey the essence of leadership with every interaction. Every communication leaders make—speaking, writing, posting, sharing, and even listening—has the power to either secure or sabotage their impact. But wanting to inspire and engage their team and knowing how to do it are two different things. In this book, Joel Schwartzberg suggests mindsets, tactics, tips, and examples to help readers reach that goal using the most powerful leadership tool available: a leader's voice. Whether managers are giving speeches, telling stories, sending emails, posting messages, recording videos, or running Zoom meetings, these are essential tools for establishing authority and galvanizing an audience. Readers will learn how to inspire instead of inform, communicate with purpose and power, and sell—not just share—their most important ideas.

The only language you need to know to change your results. Inside each of us is a vision of how things could be. Yet most people remain frustrated by a lack of impact, unable to connect and inspire the people they care about the most. Why? There’s a language we understand, but rarely use. A language that’s sincere. Powerful. Compelling. A language of words—and actions—that can’t be denied. Leadership Language will help you to peel back the ineffective “business speak”, so you can change the conversation. And change your results. Imagine what could happen when you replace frustration with an irresistible vision—for yourself, your team and your organization. Today’s leaders face so many challenges—employee retention, operational efficiency, culture, collaboration, leading across generations, and more—but communication is at the heart of every one of those issues. A clear message with a powerful delivery gets you halfway home. Honing in on your next conversation can drive more impact, better relationships, and greater overall effectiveness. For yourself. Your career. Your company. They say there’s nothing that can stop an idea whose time has come. So, take the lead. It’s time for you to create what’s missing. And Leadership Language will show you how. Get clear on your vision, get aligned with your story, and get others engaged with your message Connect with the people that matter most, in a way that invites innovation and new outcomes Find the courage to move forward, conquer change, and create powerful impact—while you help others do the same From student leaders to the C-suite, there is only one way for a leader to make an impact: communication. Leadership Language is your personal guide to mastering critical skills and unveiling your authentic potential.

Within contemporary culture, ‘leadership’ is seen in ways that appeal to celebrated societal values and norms. As a result, it is becoming difficult to use the language of leadership without at the same time assuming its essentially positive, intrinsically affirmative nature. Within organizations, routinely referring to bosses as ‘leaders’ has, therefore, become both a symptom and a cause of a deep, largely unexamined new conceptual architecture. This architecture underpins how we think about authority and power at work. Capitalism, and its turbo-charged offspring neo-liberalism, have effectively captured ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ to serve their own purposes. In other words, organizational leadership today is so often a particular kind of insidious conservativism dressed up in radical adjectives. This book makes visible the work that the language of leadership does in perpetuating fictions that are useful for bosses of work organizations. We do this so that we – and anyone who shares similar discomforts – can make a start in unravelling the fiction. We contend that even if our views are contrary to the vast and powerful leadership industry, our basic arguments rest on things that are plain and evident for all to see. Critical Perspectives on Leadership: The Language of Corporate Power will be key reading for students, academics and practitioners in the disciplines of Leadership, Organizational Studies, Critical Management Studies, Sociology and the related disciplines.

Become a more effective leader—cut the jargon and say what you mean Leveraging. Strategizing. Opening the kimono. Unlocking human capital. Trying to nail that BHAG. All on a go forward basis. These are only a few examples of the jargon-ridden language that is too often the mainstay of business communication. Jargon frustrates, confuses, and generally alienates listeners. Yet it's also everywhere, and using it can often seem like a mandatory requirement for anyone who wants to establish credibility in a professional workplace. To be an effective leader, you must be brave enough to be the first to drop jargon in favor of simple, coherent language. This can be difficult if you've spent years immersed in business culture, but Leading Through Language will show just how much you've come to rely on jargon, why it's holding you back, and how to trim it away to more effectively convey information and ideas. Understand why jargon is reviled, yet ubiquitous Learn why "business speak" gets in the way of business Discover what kind of language influences and inspires others Convey ideas with clarity, energy, and conviction Approach all communication as an act of leadership Communication often falls by the wayside in favor of more measurable data-backed performance metrics; but good communication has the power to improve metrics in every area of an organization. Leading Through Language is the business world's much-needed guide to true leadership communication, showing you how to eliminate idle talk and master compelling communication.