Published 2016
Good Authority
How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For
Good Authority argued that professional growth and personal growth were never two separate projects — that the person who shows up at work and the person who shows up everywhere else are the same person, and pretending otherwise is why so much management advice quietly fails.
That was a minority position in 2016. Ten years later, with the machines absorbing the output and judgment left as the job, it reads less like a philosophy and more like a warning that arrived early.
The book introduces The Accountability Dial, a five-stage framework for holding people accountable with compassion. Not the watered-down kind. The kind that actually develops people.
It gets shelved as a business book, and it isn’t really. It’s a book about relationships — about using enough authority to be useful and not so much that everyone around you disappears. That question came out of years of sitting with teachers, working out how you learn from someone who knows more than you without handing over your own sovereignty, and how, if you never hand over anything, you never learn at all.
“Required reading for anyone who wants to do more than merely manage people. Good Authority is a modern classic, and it will redefine what it means to be the boss.”
“Good Authority is a complete framework for building the right culture. There are no holes in it. It’s the best business book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them.”
“My two favorite books are the Bible and Good Authority.”
More than 500,000 copies sold.
What You’ll Learn
The Accountability Dial
Five stages from Mention to Limit. A system for developing people, not punishing them.
Leadership as Personal Growth
Why the gap between who you are and who you lead is the most expensive gap in business.
The Art of Honest Conversations
How to say the hard thing in a way that builds trust instead of destroying it.
From Manager to Developer of People
The shift from controlling outcomes to growing capabilities.