BOOK REVIEW: Leadersights - Creating Great Leaders Who Create Great Workplaces by David Veech

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Leadersights: Creating Great Leaders Who Create Great Workplaces by David Veech

    Firstly, I admire the genuine honesty that this book admirably starts with the author’s own rejection of any idea that ‘this book is different’ and then reaffirming in the epilogue that ‘this isn’t earth-shattering’… bold and brilliant. If we’re going to lead well, we need to do so with humility and an unwavering willingness to drop any ego traits that stifle learning. Without David Veech’s own transparency regarding this his key concepts, which act as a golden thread throughout the book, might quickly lose credibility.

The book’s three ‘Leadersight’ categories act as a guiding handrail for leaders: Learning, Loving, and Letting go — all of which go hand in hand with leadership ‘greatness’. The author further sets the conditions to have his impact by being bolder still; by telling the reader that everything they’re doing now is ‘wrong’. Awesome. A wake up call so many leaders need; a punchy starting point for the author’s efforts to nurture a mindset that embraces organisational change.

The key strands of Veech’s message are enshrined in his ‘Leadersights’, which are:

Learning. If leaders want to impart knowledge, they first need to be on a continual path of progression. They must learn in order to understand what to deliver and how to deliver it. This, for me, is vital in leadership. Any leader who thinks they have nothing more to learn is, frankly, capping their capacity to lead — nobody is perfect. Every leader must learn continuously if they are to keep up with and handle change.

Loving. Veech conveys that we need to love our people as we would love our children. This, while probably the hardest Leadersight to truly embody (for most), is undeniable and unquestionable. We all want our children to grow up to be better than us and more successful than us in every way right? The author drives home this idea from a corporate perspective. Look after your people, they’ll look after you. A complex yet somehow simple approach that Veech brings into his own throughout the book.

Letting go. True to Veech’s non-groundbreaking yet fervently necessary thinking; this Leadersight feels ever-so-slightly lacking. His ‘Vicarious Learning’ mastery cycle speaks of setting the goal, standardising the work, repeating the standard, and then holding the team to account for their actions. It would have been near-perfect should it have explored in detail how the team might think and seek better ways while carrying out the repetition phase of the cycle. Having said that, following this cycle facilitates the ‘letting go’ that Veech seeks for his readers. What’s important here is he wants leaders to nurture the team in a way that allows them to set their own challenges; which cements the true value of his Let go leadership approach.

The book is peppered with insightful methods and ideas, theoretical and practical, that can change the organisational cultures we experience today — and prepare our people for tomorrow. It strongly facilitates the notion that change within competitive marketplaces, organisations, and individual behaviours is a fundamental leadership concept. This logic feels undeniable. I really buy into Veech’s perspective that ‘Instead of thinking of change as a discrete initiative or event, we need to view it as simply the way we work’. The author drives home the idea that people need to stop seeing change as threatening, and leaders need to embrace this now. Furthermore, he helps the reader understand that hoping for perfect conditions which allow businesses to unfreeze, change, and refreeze is a damaging and lacking mentality in the corporate world of today.

Any leadership book that encourages leaders to focus first and foremost on people, then leading in a different way, driving efficacy, bolstering workplace satisfaction, and facilitating high performance gets my vote— David Veech delivers this in spades.

Highly recommended.

Review first published on goodreads here.

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