Mindset Towards Mastery: Responsibility, Performance, and the Work of Becoming - Softcover

Finlayson, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1066603014 ISBN 13: 9781066603015

Publisher: taijenga studios, 2026

Synopsis

Don’t fail at leadership because no one told you the rules had changed.

You built a career on being the best individual contributor in the room. Then one day you are handed a team, and the very skills that got you promoted stop working. Mindset Towards Mastery exists for that exact moment: the career transition to leadership that almost no one prepares you for.

Author Andrew Finlayson has spent more than 35 years working across technology, media, retail, financial services, and public service, taking on leadership roles in health and life sciences along the way. His keynote talks have taken him from Hong Kong and Singapore to Turkey and the United States.

Inside, you will learn how to:

• Turn ordinary workplace moments into deliberate growth. Proven ways to treat the coffee queue, the corridor conversation and the Tuesday stand-up as raw material for development.
• Earn trust from people who used to be your peers. Acknowledge that the relationship has changed, rather than performing a sameness that no longer exists.
• Recognise disengagement before it becomes attrition. Learn the early signals, so you can act while there is still something to retain.
• Lead with authority you have not yet grown into. Hold the line without overcompensating, and let credibility mature at its own pace.
• Keep a companion built to be revisited. Leadership changes faster than any single read can anticipate, so this book is designed to be opened again as your challenges evolve.

Pick up your copy today and start mastering leadership.

It guides new managers and ambitious professionals, drawing on real stories and psychological insight into the people you now lead. The junior hire still finding her footing. The colleague who used to be your peer. The team member quietly disengaged and waiting to be noticed. Leadership means meeting all of them differently, and it starts with a shift in your own mindset before it changes theirs.

229 questions that expose how you really think, so you can change how you lead.

Across fourteen chapters, this leadership mindset guide explores focus, loyalty, self-worth, and the moments that decide whether someone grows into a leader or stalls as a contributor. Each chapter pairs real workplace stories with reflections that turn insight into habit, sharpening the emotional intelligence that separates a manager from a leader.

Leadership that looks like every workplace, not just the office.

The people in these pages are not confined to boardrooms. Claire rebuilds trust on a struggling factory line. Anjali leads a patient roundtable in an overwhelmed ward. Gabriella finds her feet in her first days in uniform. Zach steps up on an ambulance shift. Ashley holds a team together under a circus tent. Elsewhere, Lucy leads a rural construction crew, Rob runs a remote farm shed alone, and Tamsin keeps a design studio moving when it never stops. Over fifty named figures move through fourteen chapters, and the office is a minority among them. Whatever floor you lead on, someone in this book has stood there before you.

Real people, not case studies.

Drawing on decades of experience, hard-earned lessons, dozens of deep interviews and hundreds of coaching sessions, the people in this book are authentic. There is the recruit discovering her confidence, the charity leader coping under strain, and the shift worker imagining a future when the floor shifts beneath her. These are not composites built to prove a point. They are the lessons of real working lives.

Begin the journey of becoming, and lead the team your people are waiting for.

Edition details

• Publisher: taijenga studios
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1066603014
• ISBN 13: 9781066603015
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352