Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion - Softcover

Chow, Anne

 
9781668024010: Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668024012 ISBN 13: 9781668024010
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Drawing from over three decades of experience, former CEO of AT&T Business Anne Chow shares groundbreaking strategies for inclusive leadership to transform your workforce, workplace, and business.

For generations, when we’ve needed to innovate and grow, we’ve been told to “think bigger”—it’s now time to embrace strategic leadership and Lead Bigger.

Inclusion has been overly politicized and narrowly defined to issues of gender and race today. As a result, we need a new approach to inclusive leadership that goes beyond DEI, leveraging its potential for business innovation and sustainable growth. In Lead Bigger, Anne Chow “has written a bona fide leadership masterpiece” (Stephen M.R. Covey, New York Times bestselling author) by reframing inclusion as an essential leadership skill of expanding our perspectives for greater performance in our work, workforce, and workplace.

As former CEO of AT&T Business, Chow was the first woman of color to hold the position of CEO in the company’s over 150-year history. Drawing from her expertise in transforming organizations, she shows how it’s every leader’s responsibility to be inclusive, teaching you how to create a dynamic environment that engages everyone you interact with while adapting to the ever-changing world. This book equips you to lead inclusively, with insights from leadership visionaries General Stanley McChrystal, Arianna Huffington, and Adam Grant.

If you’re committed to advancing work that matters, engaging a dynamic workforce, and fostering an agile workplace, you’re ready to Lead Bigger.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Chow was named CEO of AT&T Business in September 2019, making her the first woman to hold that position and the first woman of color CEO in AT&T’s history. She oversaw more than 35,000 employees who collectively serve 3 million business customers worldwide. She is currently Lead Director on the board of Franklin Covey and serves on the board of 3M. Chow is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and coauthor of The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias. She lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and actively supports numerous local and national organizations. 

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Chapter One: The Opportunity to Lead Bigger CHAPTER ONE THE OPPORTUNITY TO LEAD BIGGER
One of the mementos from my career I’m proudest of is an old yellow mug with an expletive on it, gifted to me by a team who taught me a new way to lead. I rediscovered it as I was cleaning out my office after a thirty-plus-year corporate career at AT&T. The mug reminded me of an early but important experience that convinced me not to head down the well-worn, often micromanaged or uninspired path of other leaders. I wanted instead to curate an approach with a wider, more human perspective, something I’ve since come to call leading bigger.

Back in the day, if you wanted to climb the ladder at AT&T, you needed to prove yourself by leading a large team. My post was to manage a customer service organization of several hundred people across the United States who were responsible for the clients purchasing our 1-800 toll-free-number services.

Until that point, I’d managed only a couple of staff members located in the same office. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. What did a twenty-something know about supporting customers seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, as the head of a demanding, diverse team whose members were twice my age and far more experienced?

I thankfully understood that, to start, I needed to listen to the people I was now responsible for. I met with many service representatives and technicians across locations, who didn’t hesitate to provide their unvarnished feedback: You’re just a young whippersnapper. (They really called me that, even though this was the 1990s, not the 1890s.) And You’re only here to get your large-team experience. Then you’ll leave. And District managers like you come and go. We do the work, and managers haven’t helped us improve anything at all.

I expected straight talk, but I got more than I anticipated. Not that I could blame them. They expected a self-centered style of leader who came in and focused solely on the task at hand—prioritizing short-term results, treating them as expendable, and enforcing a rigid approach to the workplace that dampened human ingenuity.

In that moment, I could have wielded my formal authority. I was, after all, their boss. I could’ve pushed my team to hit our targets just long enough to be able to achieve my next career goal and move on. Others before me had done exactly that, leaving a skeptical workforce in their wake. But in my gut, I knew this wasn’t how I wanted to lead. Even if relying on this authority structure was standard corporate behavior, it wasn’t what my team needed or deserved.

After all, I was a daughter of immigrants raised to get along, fit in, and work hard to be respected, so this managerial approach, though common, was anathema to me. And as a second-generation Asian American—and often the first or only in any given environment—I struggled to belong. So I was acutely aware of the real challenges in fostering connection and community in my professional roles. Rather than pulling rank, I was inclined to do the opposite, because using hierarchy to drive behavior always felt small to me.

Instead, in what became a career-defining moment, I decided my top priority was to lead bigger. I wanted to win the respect of the team; I wanted us to collaborate. And I hoped that we could make enduring improvements together in ways that would be helpful to the larger company. I didn’t want to selfishly check a box and move to my next assignment.

I did not have any sophisticated management model, but I did sense that to get to these bigger outcomes, I had to broaden my view to focus on the work, the people (the workforce), and the environment we were working in (the workplace). I knew gaining insights from others both inside and outside of my organization would be helpful, both to me as the leader and to my team. In my view, leading bigger was all about widening my perspectives by engaging with more people and taking in more information to elevate our performance and impact, helping my team deliver on a greater potential.

It also meant being a bigger person—caring about people and bringing a generous nature to work.

This is in contrast to small leadership, which I view as taking a narrow, one-dimensional, often short-term focus on a singular stakeholder or set of measures—usually financial. This approach is typically self-serving and less collaborative.

Little did I know that my predisposition to lead bigger was really about inclusive leadership, but at the time I was still formulating this principle. I knew I wanted to spark connection and inspiration in the work, and with the people in and around it. This included not just the employees but also our customers and the communities in which we operated—the groups that today I’d call stakeholders. I believed there was a way to compel all these people to meaningfully contribute, and for some, to band together in our human desire to belong. I wanted my team to know that I saw and respected them as human beings, so they in turn could bring their whole selves to work, perform their best, and realize their fullest potential. I wanted a workplace culture that cultivated innovation through strong trust and camaraderie, not one organized to bolster my own sense of ego or control.

I initially took the job thinking I was going to manage the customer service team, but I suddenly found myself in charge of addressing all the problems coming our way not only from the customers themselves but also from the rest of the organization. I first came to this realization in the confines of a stuffy windowless conference room, gathered around my new leadership team for the first time. They had clearly prepared for this gathering, and the most tenured manager of the bunch, a salty gentleman more than thirty years my senior, with his entire career spent in the same work center, had been nominated as spokesperson. He proceeded to lecture me, itemizing several points: “Our people are so dedicated, it’s amazing they can get the job done without any support from headquarters. We’re in this alone; no one else is working 24-7 on the phones taking customer calls. So many groups take advantage of us, and there aren’t any consequences for how crappy they treat us.” It didn’t take long for the ten other people in the room to energetically pile on with their own examples and emotions. I might’ve been the boss, but I was clearly also the student.

So I went to school. One of the biggest barriers to delivering a consistent satisfactory customer experience was the sales teams. Every day my team took calls from salespeople who made urgent requests ranging from “My customer needs this service to be turned on this week. I know I haven’t given you the order yet, but I need you to get it done. Otherwise we’ll lose the business” to “Why isn’t my customer’s service back up yet? What’s taking you so long?” to “What do you mean that can’t get done? I already told the customer we can do it.” In all cases, large fissures between the sales and service teams rose to the surface. It was as if they thought we didn’t care about the customer, and they didn’t behave like we were part of the same company. These haphazard behaviors caused major pain for my team and hurt their ability to do their work well.

I had to champion their needs on behalf of the business. I wasn’t just responsible for...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668024012
ISBN 13 
9781668024010
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
webstar
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Italien

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