Leading with Compassion: How to Make Leadership Authentic by Managing with Integrity

Business schools teach the transactional tools one needs to work in business. They teach various strategic planning and decision-making models such as SPACE or SWOT or decision trees or weighted grids. They teach about the various functions of an organization, financial ratios, and breakeven analyses. And they may even have a class on business ethics. But those tools are more about knowing where the business-case boundaries are as a risk prevention measure and do not help one to think about how they should comport themselves as a leader.

This book is about helping you to become your best self and helping those around you to achieve their best. Inherently it’s about authenticity, integrity, and empathy and how these simple traits can lead to high performance. The book explores ways to make our leadership more authentic and to lead with integrity. It discusses how to mentor employees and how this can lead to higher-performing teams and more successful organizations.

The book is organized around four major constructs. The first is about personal leadership. It starts with honesty and integrity. That provides the basis for an empathetic leadership style. This is one that helps to engage followers and brings them along because they want to come along for the journey, rather than feeling forced. That is the nature of the second construct: building and maintaining high-performing teams. This is then the basis for building a trusting culture. Change is all around us and that can be exhausting. Building a culture of trust is the first step toward building an agile organizational culture. That is the third construct. Finally, the last is a message of simple optimism. There are many challenges facing society today, but with thoughtful, engaging leaders there is hope that we can collectively rise to the challenge.

Dr. Gregory E. Worden is an accomplished executive and educator with extensive leadership experience working with a wide range of organizations, including U.S. government Federal agencies, private companies, nonprofits and higher educational institutions. Skilled in strategic planning, organizational change management, facilitation, program and project management.

Dr. Worden currently serves as the Moderator (President) of the Congregational Church of Camden, ME. He is currently teaching at the College of William and Mary and the University of Maryland University College. Previously, he worked to reduce duplication of Federal programs as part of G.W. Bush’s OMB FEAPMO. He also facilitated strategic planning at Veteran’s Health Administration, consulted for NSA and IRS to develop enterprise architecture and worked as a contractor at NASA GSFC where he worked to promote public-private partnerships between national space program and nascent space tourism industry.

He received his Doctor of Management (DM), International Operations Management from the University of Maryland University College in 2008. He also holds a Master of Science, Information Technology Systems Management, Capitol College, MD. He has received letters of commendation rom former White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, for work on the Federal Enterprise Architecture in 2004 and from President George W. Bush for work on e-Gov initiatives. He is currently authoring books on leadership, sustainability and technology forecasting.