Presence-Based Leadership

Presence-Based Leadership is founded on this liberating premise: leaders’ most crucial and complex challenges, rather than being obstacles, are actually doorways for becoming precisely the leader that current conditions require.

Here is a rich field guide to the territory of complexity, and how leaders can navigate it with leading-edge approaches that generate clarity, resilience, and results that actually matter.

Silsbee’s new book is his most expansive. A master of integration, he seamlessly weaves fields as disparate as complexity, leadership and adult development theory, mindfulness, and interpersonal neurobiology into a deeply human exploration of how leaders can bring the fullness of their

humanity to the most intractable challenges they face. His immensely pragmatic

approach grounds new perspectives with intimate real-world examples. He offers specific, field-tested experiments and practices that invite the reader into discovery and application.

This is a radically new and integrated approach to leadership, through which leaders can tap the creativity and resourcefulness of their internal complexity in order to meet a complex world. Through cultivating an embodied leadership presence, readers will become more dynamic shapers of the context in which they lead, and a creative force for what matters in a fractured and dynamic world.

Presence-Based Leadership is the third and final volume in Doug Silsbee’s groundbreaking and influential trilogy on coaching and leadership.

Looking unflinchingly at our outdated worldview, Silsbee makes his case with scholarship, grit, and elegant prose. This is a beautifully comprehensive inquiry into leadership. Written with passion, lucidity, and daring, this will be disquieting to some and useful to all; a wise and pragmatic light on the path of fully being human.

—Richard Strozzi-Heckler

Founder, Strozzi Institute of Embodied Leadership; author of The Leadership Dojo

 

Silsbee’s seminal third book offers radical new perspectives on our internal habits of thought, processing of information, and action. He offers a pragmatic and leading edge resource, offering powerful practices and detailed examples for the crucial work of our times: leaders setting an example for others by improving themselves.

—Marshall Goldsmith

Author or editor of 35 books including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Triggers.

 

Silsbee’s release of his third book completes a trilogy of comprehensive and ground-breaking work. He elegantly navigates the balance of expansion and pragmatism. Practices, perspectives, and real-world examples reveal keys to leadership presence, courage, and resilience in tumultuous times. Here is an essential, even radical, yet surprisingly accessible book.

—Karen Kimsey-House

Co-President and Co-Founder, CTI

 

I worked with Doug as a leadership coach during a period of major challenge to the global nuclear industry after Fukushima. Doug’s human approach expanded my leadership thinking and deepened my self-awareness, presence, situational awareness and effectiveness during extremely demanding and complex challenges. This book offers you the keys.

—David Garchow

Retired Vice President/Director

Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, World Association of Nuclear Operators

 

Silsbee offers a powerful and pragmatic field guide for anyone doing difficult community “work.” This unique book will help you recognize and shift your thinking and being, and therefore the foundation of your relationships. Here are the keys to disrupting patterns that keep us and our communities stuck, producing poverty, inequity, and violence.

—Lisa Eby, MSW

Director of HR and Community Engagement

Buncombe County, NC