It’s just amazing

Oh là là! Who would have thought? Certainly not me.

Dare to Un-Lead, my first book ever, was considered good enough to compete in the Porchlight 2022 Business Book Awards.

Out of +/- 700 books, it made it to the long list: 40 books picked by the Porchlight Editorial Team in 8 categories:

Leadership & Strategy
Management & Workplace Culture
Marketing & Communications/Sales & Influence
Innovation & Creativity
Personal Development & Human Behavior
Current events & Public Affairs
Narrative & Biography
Big Ideas & New Perspectives

In the Leadership & Strategy category, Dare to Un-Lead was in good company:

Anti-Racist Leadership: How to Transform Corporate Culture in a Race-Conscious World by James D. White with Krista White, Harvard Business Review Press

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than They Expect by Will Guidara, Optimism Press
The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale by John A. List, Currency
When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, How We Can Learn from Them by Julia Boorstin, Avid Reader Press
Dare to Un-Lead: The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World by Céline Schillinger, Figure 1

Out of these five, Dare to Un-Lead was then named by Porchlight the 2022 Leadership & Strategy Book of the Year

!!!

I couldn’t be happier! And most grateful to all the talented people who have contributed to turning my manuscript into an award-winning book: my first editor Richard Martin, the whole team at Figure 1 Publishing, my friends who endorsed the book, everyone who shared a book review on various sites, and of course the past, current and future readers.

You can read an excerpt here: the preface of the book, which starts with the story of Lucienne, my late maternal grandmother.

And so, why did the Editorial Team select this book? Here is what Sally Haldorson, Managing Director of Porchlight, writes about Dare to Un-Lead:

In Dare to Un-Lead: The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World, Céline Schillinger boldly calls for the radical deconstruction of our historical and hierarchical assumptions about leadership.
This isn’t a superficial cultural or moral critique of leaders’ clay feet. Instead, Schillinger, an engagement leadership consultant, reveals how the established and archaic mythology of leadership hurts us all. “Leadership … becomes a badge of honor, a status, rather than something fluid, contextual, enabling, and active.”
When leaders position themselves above or distinct from others, they become isolated, elitist, inclined to make uninformed decisions based on individualist bravado or bias rather than collective wisdom or co-intelligence. As a result, this “obsolete leadership … creates and maintains dysfunctional work environments.” And in those environs, employees are confined by “[o]rganizational belief systems, performance pressures, and time constraints [that] inhibit our critical thinking, limiting our ability to question and challenge.”
To instead build a collective culture “that truly encourages action, risk-taking, autonomy, and accountability,” leaders must “learn to let go and replace control with trust.”
Owing to her native country of France, Schillinger introduces readers to a refreshing new vocabulary with which to rethink how we think about leadership. And, sometimes, to break us out of old habits, new words are just the trick.
She writes, “Leadership is broken. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can transform leadership through three core values: those of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”
Liberty (companies benefit by emancipating employees from unnecessary organizational suppression, allowing for limitless creativity due to a greater sense of agency and ownership); Equality (companies thrive when employees experience a culture in which all ideas and all contributions are seen and accorded the same respect and value); and Fraternity (companies are more resilient when nurturing a sense of unity and collectivity, of humanity, of creating change through communal action.)
Equal parts radical and practical, the impassioned yet deeply researched Dare to Un-Lead will challenge everything you think about leadership, expanding both your vocabulary and your vision.

Pretty cool, right?

You can read other reader reviews here.

If you are curious about the winners in all 8 categories (I was too, and bought several - thank you Porchlight for the recommendations!) here they are:

LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY: Dare to Un-Lead: The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World by Celine Schillinger, Figure 1
MANAGEMENT & WORKPLACE CULTURE: Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work by Jess Rimington & Joanna Levitt Cea, Page Two
MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS/SALES & INFLUENCE: How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney, Portfolio
INNOVATION & CREATIVITY: Inspired: Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul by Matt Richtel, Mariner Books
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT & HUMAN BEHAVIOR: Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari, Crown
CURRENT EVENTS & PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane, One Signal Publishers
NARRATIVE & BIOGRAPHY: Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith, Roc Lit 101
BIG IDEAS & NEW PERSPECTIVES: The College Devaluation Crisis: Market Disruption, Diminishing ROI, and an Alternative Future of Learning by Jason Wingard, Stanford Business Books

Out of these eight, Porchlight picked Stolen Focus as their 2022 Book of the Year. That’s a great choice on an important topic, I can’t recommend this book enough.

A huge thank you to Porchlight, and congratulations to all authors and publishers!