Lead Together

A Porchlight Business Book Award winner!

A new approach to leading teams and distributing power that creates a fairer, more fulfilling workplace and world, as told in the narrative tradition of Lencioni, Kotter, and Quinn.
 
Leaders today want to stop feeling overwhelmed and alone. They want to build engaged, diverse, resilient, and joyful teams that achieve greater things together. They want a better way to lead.
 
Lead Together is a fictional story, grounded in psychology and laden with practical tools, that offers leaders a power-with rather than power-over paradigm. It explores how leaders can develop power jointly rather than use it as a top-down means of control in the form of a page-turning, squirrelly narrative.
 
Psychology researcher and leadership educator Tania Luna offers the tale of Sam Squirrel, branch manager of Nuts for You, Inc., whose company faces an impending forest recession. Sam employs the leadership tactics his boss, Jack Walnuts, taught him ("know the way and make them go your way") but achieves only distrust, disengagement, poor performance, and high turnover. During Sam's last-ditch effort to meet his quotas, he finds a hidden, thriving community that shows him a radical new way to lead. But will it be enough to save Nuts for You and help Sam realize his dream of becoming Chief Nut Officer?

Lead Together springs from Luna's experience applying power-with principles to build a multimillion-dollar business with 96% employee engagement and less than 2% attrition. It shines a light on the little-known philosophy of organizational scholar Mary Parker Follett and takes inspiration from Daniel Quinn’s philosophical fiction as well as Patrick Lencioni’s and John Kotter’s parables. It is for any leader, manager, professional, or even family member interested in a more personal, sustainable, democratic, and equitable way of achieving their goals.

TANIA LUNA is a psychology researcher, writer, and educator. She has built multiple companies, including LifeLabs Learning, a leadership development resource that serves thousands of the world’s most influential companies, and Scarlet Spark, a nonprofit that accelerates the speed-to-mission of organizations that help animals. She is also a TED speaker, co-author of The Leader Lab: How to Become a Great Manager, Faster and Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable & Engineer the Unexpected, and co-host of the podcast "Talk Psych to Me." She lives with rescued pigs, goats, roosters, dogs, cats, and the love of her life.

"Whether you're a new leader, head of HR, or CEO, Lead Together is a perfect primer on how to manage the nuanced challenges of using and sharing power in today's workplace. Luna has a genius for making complicated ideas simple, but not simplistic. I haven't read a business book this funny and engaging, since, well, ever."
—Douglas Stone, coauthor of the New York Times bestsellers Difficult Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback

"As management thinkers go, Tania Luna is an unusual animal: A successful founder and CEO who has walked the talk, and knows how to bring others along. And her message is as powerful as it is urgent: Leadership can be something we do together. A crucial antidote to today's ego-driven and status-obsessed approach to leading, told in a way you will, err, nut forget.”
—Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, bestselling author of What's Your Problem?, published by Harvard Business Review Press

“This unique book transformed how I think about power and approach using (and sharing!) it at work and at home. In her signature irresistibly creative style, Luna breaks down your defenses and addresses every possible objection to fundamentally changing how we lead. Every organizational leader and team needs these powerful, actionable insights in their toolbox!”
—Siri Chilazi, Gender & Organizations Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School

“Lead Together is an entertaining, yet evidence-based tale teaching how to become a better leader and lead a better team.”
—David Burkus, author of Best Team Ever