"Sticky Leadership" by Larry Briggs. A Review

Sticky Leadership: How Successful Entrepreneurs Get Their Leadership to Stick in the Heads, Hearts and Actions of Others by Larry Briggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whether directing an organization, company, not-for-profit agency, cotton-gin cooperative, or PTA, leadership skills are required. Most people learn how to lead “on the fly,” in all of the give-and-take of guiding people to accomplish a goal or project. After engaging in these learned-leadership practices for a while, those ways become customary and habitual. And when this happens, one can find oneself in a rut of routine that reproduces marginal results. Therefore, it’s helpful to occasionally pick up material on leadership that can, once more, reignite thinking with regard to the why and how of leading others. Larry Briggs, leadership coach, consultant and founder of V2A (vision-to-action), has compiled a resource to guide, encourage and help leaders, “Sticky Leadership: How Successful Entrepreneurs Get Their Leadership to Stick in the Heads, Hearts and Actions of Others.” This simple-to-read 160 page paperback works diligently to hand to its readers exactly what the subtitle describes.

The main emphasis of the book is that leadership needs to be “sticky” – it must grab the imaginations, motivations and aspirations of the leaders and the led. To do this Briggs walks his constituents through the three crucial traits of loving uphill, leading from the inside out, and creating a game worth playing. These three attributes govern the shape of this short book, where the author takes care to deliver what each means and doesn’t mean.

Much of the material in “Sticky Leadership” will seem common sense and fairly obvious. The value of the book is that Briggs is a coach, and as every coach knows, when the players are in the game the obvious and common sense can get clouded and lost in the sweat and strain. Therefore Coach Briggs hands to his readers a manageable piece to remind the players what they have already intuited and understood, and refreshes them with encouragement to put it into play. I gladly recommend the book.


View all my reviews