A LEADERSHIP FABLE FROM AERIE VIEWS
A Team Worth Following
Leadership worth following isn't one person's job. It's something a whole team learns to build.
"It isn't about being a leader worth following. That's no longer enough. You have to build a collective team worth following."
A seventy-year-old company. A product recall that several people saw coming and no one said out loud. And a leadership team that has to learn, one hard conversation at a time, how to tell each other the truth.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Most teams don't fail loudly. They get stuck.
Hearthstone Heritage has been steady for seventy years. Its meetings are calm, its emails are polite, and its CEO speaks often about a transparent culture. But its leaders have quietly stopped telling each other the truth. When a rushed launch ends in two house fires and a $20 million recall, that silence finally has a price. Sarah, the Head of Sales, can see what the company is missing, but seeing it isn't the same as leading it. Her first attempt to say so gets her told to stay in her lane. What follows is the story of a divided leadership team working its way through Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Along the way they discover the answers were closer than anyone expected: in an engineer's sketchpad, a support rep's interview notes, and a dad's story about his daughter's birthday party.
Polite meetings. Buried bad news. Handoffs where launches go to die. If you've worked on a team that was stuck, you'll find it here, along with a way out.
Every turning point rests on the four dimensions and twelve competencies of the Aerie Views Leadership Framework. Most show up first as an absence, then as a practice the team chooses on purpose.
A closing chapter maps each competency back to the moments where it mattered. A Quick Reference gives you one question per dimension to bring into your next team conversation.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Read the fable. See the framework. Recognize your team.
- Trust & Connection (the environment leaders create)
- Strategic & Cognitive Strengths (how leaders think)
- Execution & Operational Excellence (how leaders deliver)
- Innovation & Adaptability (how leaders evolve)
THE FRAMEWORK
The Aerie Views Leadership Framework
Four dimensions. Twelve competencies. Carried not by one leader, but by everyone in the room.
"High performance isn't about going fast. It's about going right."
Ruth Delgado, Sarah's first manager, A Team Worth Following
GET YOUR COPY
Bring the framework home
Read it on your own, or read it together. A Team Worth Following is written to start the conversations teams usually avoid, and to give everyone a shared language for having them. Now available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.
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