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Lead with greater impact and less effort by building your leadership around what makes you distinctive
Senior leadership has become harder to sustain. The pace is relentless, the decisions are messier, and the intensity of the job has outpaced the approaches that used to work. Most leaders respond by working harder, with diminishing returns.
The best leaders have found a different approach. Leadership built around what's genuinely distinctive about you achieves more and is easier to sustain. That's leverage: small distinctive inputs with a disproportionate impact.
Outsized Leadership sets out five new rules for leading at the top:
- Know Who You Are – find out what makes you distinctive
- Define Your Ambition – make sure you’re heading in the right direction
- Shape Your Work – spend more of your time where you deliver the most value
- Lead Through Your Decisions – decide faster, and better, from a personal strategy
- Build Your Character – develop the qualities that will distinguish you over time.
Each rule can be applied not only at work but in the rest of life too. The result? Outsized Leadership and a fuller life to go with it.
Drawing on his experience as a leadership advisor, executive coach and former KPMG Partner, Mostyn Wilson shows senior leaders how to build their impact on what makes them distinctive rather than on how hard they work.
Mostyn Wilson is a leadership advisor and ICF-accredited executive coach to senior leaders in major financial services companies, working with teams at HSBC, M&G, MUFG, RenaissanceRe, Just Group, and Royal London. He is also an independent director at a global reinsurer, which keeps his boardroom view current, and associate faculty at Hult Ashridge Executive Education.
Before founding his advisory business, Mostyn spent 22 years at KPMG. He was a client-facing Partner serving global financial services companies, and sat on the executive team of a £250m division as COO and then Head of People.
He has studied leadership since he was a teenager. He is a certified Hogan assessor, a HEROIC Performance Coach, an accredited Love + Work Leader, and a Responsible Leadership Fellow of the Forward Institute. His LinkedIn audience has grown to over 60,000. He is based in London and works internationally.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction: What Outsized Leadership Actually Is
FOUNDATIONS – HOW LESS EFFORT PRODUCES MORE IMPACT
1 - Why the Old Playbook Stopped Working
2 - Why Outsized Leadership Works
3 - The Five Rules in Brief
RULE 1 – KNOW WHO YOU ARE
4 - Nobody Has Ever Asked You This
5 - The Two Types of Work You're Great At
6 - What Makes You Distinctive
7 - Who Are You When You're Not at Work?
RULE 2 – DEFINE YOUR AMBITION
8 - Whose Ambition Are You Actually Pursuing?
9 - The Questions That Identify What You Actually Want
10 - How to Build an Ambition That's Actually Yours
11 - The Ambition That Goes Beyond Your Career
RULE 3 – SHAPE YOUR WORK
12 - The Intersection That Changes Everything
13 - Why Senior Roles Almost Always Fit Someone Else
14 - How to Reshape Your Work From Where You Sit
15 - The Hours Outside of Work
RULE 4 – LEAD THROUGH YOUR DECISIONS
16 - The Daily Decisions That Build Your Leadership
17 - How to Tell a Right Decision From a Wrong One
18 - How Aligned Decisions Compound Over Time
19 - The Decisions That Build Your Life
RULE 5 – BUILD YOUR CHARACTER
20 - Why Skills and Effort Stop Separating You at the Top
21 - Character Is Specific, Measurable, and Buildable
22 - How to Develop Character on Purpose
23 - The Character You Bring to the Rest of Your Life
GOING FURTHER
24 - The Role of Luck and Circumstance
25 - The Long Arc of Outsized Leadership
26 - The Costs of Becoming Distinctive
Conclusion: The Leader You're Capable of Being