AUDACITY

Goar offers advice for excelling at leadership.

“Wannabe leaders stay stuck. But those who are audacious enough to take one action—to help one person in one moment—become the leader others wannabe,” writes the author in her nonfiction debut. Goar, the president of a consulting company, argues in these pages that asking for help needs to be changed from an indicator of weakness to one of strength: “You need audacious courage,” she asserts, “to ask for help.” At the beginning of her executive career, the author experienced the same doubts many of her readers likely face—questioning whether she was up to the task and wondering if she might be the wrong person for the role. Goar acknowledges that the tricky aspect of such doubts is that they’re seldom completely unfounded. Here, she lays out several ideas for improving confidence at work and reaching one’s full potential. One of the author’s key concepts involves teaching oneself to pull back from relentlessly giving 100% to give oneself the space to breathe and learn (“Scaling back to 80 percent created that space to do meaningful work beyond the normal routine,” she writes). Goar also details “negative triggers” with which her readers will be familiar alongside their often-overlooked counterparts, positive triggers (“frameworks that help you restore yourself and preserve your energy”). The author writes with energetic directness throughout, including the offset “Tough Love Moment” sections that end each chapter (“Can you identify a core Why that explains the purpose for where you are and what you are doing?”). Some readers may find that the text reads as a series of self-justifications by a workaholic; quite a few of Goar’s anecdotes involve her continuing to work right through grieving the deaths of family members, for instance, and her insistence that the “Hype Squad[s]” she recommends are different somehow from the teams of sycophantic yes-people assembled by insecure managers might not strike those readers as entirely convincing. Still, the can-do zest of the prose offers bracing encouragement.

A lively and well-mounted presentation of concepts to help leaders up their games.