Leader: Know, love and inspire your people

Emmie Bidston and Katy Granville-Chapman are both incredibly passionate about helping leaders to lift-up and empower their people to have more joyful and fulfilled lives. They are Associate Fellows of the Oxford Character Project (an inter-disciplinary initiative at Oxford University) and co-authors of the online course “Leading and Flourishing in Difficult Times” developed by the Oxford Character Project and Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University.

Katy is the co-founder of Global Social Leaders, a movement of young people who are carrying out social action projects to improve their communities in 105 countries. Katy is also a deputy head teacher, an affiliated researcher at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre and has a PhD from Oxford focused on leadership and flourishing. Before going into teaching, Emmie worked for the Government and is currently an economics teacher and director of the Wellington Leadership and Coaching Institute.

Why did you write the book?

We were hoping to energise leaders in any setting, and at any career or life stage, to lead through service and empower them with the tools to help their team flourish. We were also hoping to answer these key questions:

• What exactly is it that good leaders do to enable their teams to succeed?
• How do they think?
• What do findings from neuroscience teach us about effective leadership?

To answer these, we aimed to combine up-to-date research in psychology and neuroscience with inspiring examples of success to show that leadership can be learned and that it is all about looking after your people. We hoped that our analysis of how and why effective leaders outperform others – not just in terms of results, but, even more importantly, through the contributions they make to people’s lives – through knowing, loving and inspiring their teams – would be compelling and applicable for leaders. We are both teachers, so also wanted to provide lots of practical exercises and examples to help people to apply these ideas immediately in their lives.

What value does the book offer?

The book provides a model of leadership, based on thorough research, that is memorable and practical: effective leaders know, love and inspire their people!

The book also provides practical examples and challenges to help you improve your leadership. We have been testing this leadership model with businesses, universities, students and teenagers across multiple countries and it seems to resonate in all these sectors and across age groups. So, we are hopeful it can help change the narrative around leadership from the ‘hero leader model’ to one where leadership is all about enabling other people to flourish.

What’s happened since you published the book?

Publishing the book was great fun and brilliant for our friendship! It has also helped increase our confidence, credibility, and clarity of vision about leadership. It was through the book, and Katy’s research at Oxford University, that we were able to write the online course and reach more people with this exciting vision of leadership for flourishing! We have also been lucky enough to speak about the book on various podcasts and write in magazines such as the ‘TES’, ‘The Psychologist’ and ‘Real Leaders’.

Leader: Know, love and inspire your people (Published by Crown House Publishing) is available to buy on Amazon. 

Connect with Katy: LinkedIn

Connect with Emmie: LinkedIn – Twitter

Winners of The Business Book Awards 2021 will be revealed online on Tuesday 25th May 2021.