New Book, Leader as Healer, Says Leadership Needs An Urgent Upgrade

Leader as Healer, written by the transformational coach and leadership development expert, Nicholas Janni, argues an urgent upgrade is needed in how managers must think and practice leadership. Janni, an expert in his field teaching at Oxford University and the IMD Business School, and his book provide proven and comprehensive advice on leadership.

This well-timed book comes as an antidote to outdated management thinking and practices, which are not working in the current post-pandemic world. The leader of today needs an urgent overhaul in their leadership skill, where they are empathetic, intuitive and present. Along with being skilled in mindfulness, deep listening, and able to inspire colleagues to engage and collaborate in the everyday business.

Janni, explains why he decided to write Leader as Healer and says: “This is a book about the highest levels of presence and peak performance leadership, and the cultures that ensue from them, in which well-being, results and contribution to the world are naturally interwoven.”

Leader as Healer combines rigorous theory with practical examples and exercises to introduce a new form of leadership, one that embodies the ‘skill, heart, and wisdom’ that the current moment, with the ongoing war in Europe and the poor leadership of many world leaders, demands.

Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days and Professor of Leadership at IMD, says about the book: “In my decades developing executives at top business schools, Nicholas Janni’s work has consistently been the most transformational I have witnessed. He is the linchpin of every program I direct. Now, he has extended his profound work on leadership presence to encompass the role of the ‘leader as healer, by which he means a leader equipped to bridge the emotional and the rational, committed to restoring needed balance and achieving sustainability in organizations and societies. Given the existential change we face, there is no book that is more important and timely than Leader as Healer.”

The new approach to leadership that Janni presents is designed to reawaken the innate human capacities – physical and emotional, individual, and transpersonal. Leader as Healer focuses on such human qualities that have been recently forgotten because of the never- ending chase of economic growth and profit-maximization. It argues that it’s finally the time to embrace our emotions as leaders.