Power with: A Squirrely Story about Building Effective, Inspired, Resilient Teams

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 the Chair of the Board, co-founder, and former co-CEO of LifeLabs Learning. She is also a researcher, educator, and writer for Psychology Today, Harvard Business Review, and multiple other publications. She’s the co-author of two books: The Leader Lab: How to Become a Great Manager, Faster and Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable & Engineer the Unexpected and the co-host of the podcast Talk Psych to Me. Her TED Talk on the power of perspective has over 1.8 million views.