Manage Yourself to Lead Others: Why Great Leadership Begins with Self-Understanding
Margaret C. Andrews
Venture (September 2025)

What you must do first in order to become an effective leader of others 

Whatever their size and nature may be, organizations need effective leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. It is also true that companies annually ranked most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those that are most profitable, and having the greatest cap value in their industry segment.

Here is a key passage in Margaret Andrews’s introduction to her book:

“The Manage Yourself to Lead Others (MYLO) approach helps you connect with yourself to become more composed and intentional, which helps you understand and connect with others to lead more effectively. It’s a layered approach to leadership development that starts with understanding and managing yourself, then moves on to leading others, understanding and managing organizational context, working through the inevitable challenge of leadership,  and then setting the conditions and practices to lead for the long term. And it all begins with understanding and managing ourselves (See Figure 1).”

Presumably by “great” Anderson means leadersip that is deeply principled as well as highly effective. That is, someone whose leadership is  based on self-management that is guided and informed by self-understanding.

These are among the strategic objectives that Anderson will help you to achieve, and help you to help others to achieve:

HOW TO

o Recognize what leadership looks like
o Understand how people grow as leaders– and what happens when they don’t
o Understand yourself
o Manage your behavior and attitude
o Lead others with high-impact

o Manage up
o Understand organizational culture
o “Unpack” the challenges of leadership
o Recover from setbacks, getting unstuck, and building resilience
o Take the long view on leadership developments

This is a must-read for all executives who are committed to self-directed learning and Manage Yourself to Lead Others should be one of the primary spurces for all leadership developmernt programs, whatever the size and nature of the sponsoring organization may be.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading Manage Yourself to Lead Others: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Also use it when completing various exercises such as those in the first chapter.  Pay special attention to the material in Part Four, “Leading for the Long Term.”

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.