By Robert Price
Absolute Author Publishing House (2021)
Paperback, 137 pages
Reviewed by DAMSON OPPONG
COVID-19 shifted the role of leadership as work and work environments changed rapidly. This book reimagines leadership in the post-pandemic world. The author, Robert Price, a bronze medal veteran in the U.S. Army, uses 25 years of global leadership experience across 17 countries to discuss leadership in diverse businesses from energy to pharmaceuticals to consumer market industries. Price addresses the changes the pandemic brought, including working from home, new ways of interacting with colleagues, and companies repositioning themselves in this changing landscape. Price suggests that as a result, leadership also needs to change.
In remote and hybrid working environments, leaders must strive to ascertain how to keep productivity high as they work from their own spaces. The author outlines several benefits to the organizations and individual employees when leaders can facilitate this new work environment.
The book provides a panoramic history of leadership and its theoretical growth, critical periods, events, and components. The book has five parts. First, Price discusses the historical context of leadership, its relation to the current time, and the need for change. Second, he discusses how the pandemic changed everything, including the work environment and employees’ expectations. Next, he reviews statistics on workers’ new routines, including some of their challenges, and elaborates on critical areas that will have to be tested in the new work environments. This calls leaders and followers to evaluate these new arrangements.
Next, the author discusses how to lead in a hybrid setting. Price argues that leadership does not evaporate because of these changes but must instead be reimagined. Instead, using the U.S. Army’s “Be, Know, Do” leadership model, he assists leaders in reorienting to the current era, adapting to the fluidity of change, including a discussion on the need for soft skills to survive. Finally, Price discusses adapting to a hybrid ecosystem and how leaders should retool to face these new realities.
This book was beautifully put together; the language, the way it is set up, and the case studies are all intriguing and instructional. The author offers practical steps and lessons that are applicable. His language is simple, and he is blunt in his explanations. Some readers may find his bluntness and tone to have a more masculine feel.
One drawback of this book is that the author raises pertinent topics but does not critically detail them. For example, it offers six foundations of the reimagined workplace: collaborative culture; adaptive workplace; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI driven); virtual proficiency; interpersonal savvy; and performance alignments. However, much is left unexplored without more detail, application, or examples.
In summary, leaders trying to facilitate workers moving through these work environment changes will find this book helpful.
Damson Oppong is the ministerial secretary of the Ontario Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in Ontario, Canada.