Luna, T: Lead Together

Tania Luna is cofounder of LifeLabs Learning-a leadership skills accelerator for culture-conscious companies, including Google, TED, Slack, Reddit, and the New York Times. She is also a psychology researcher, TED speaker, writer for Psychology Today and Harvard Business Review, and cohost of the podcast Talk Psych to Me.

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 an engaging, 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?