Become liberated manager by nurturing personal share price: Book

The best way to become liberated from the things that impede performance of a manager is to nurture one's personal share price, says a new book on leadership.

Stuart Drew, who has worked in global IT and financial services, has come out with the book "The Liberated Manager: A new leadership paradigm using the Personal Share Price method" in which he tells how he became a liberated manager.

The book covers various areas that contribute overall to liberating managers from traditional burdens like the perceived need to have all the answers for day-to-day issues and challenges.

Drew contends that in a world of ever-increasing change, one element that can lead to differentiated and sustained performance as a manager is becoming liberated from those things that impede performance by being aware of establishing and nurturing what he calls one's personal share price (PSP).

"The premise is that personal presence and behaviour directly impact performance. These three elements combine into a PSP that can be developed, whether it is perceived or not," he writes.

"Once appreciated, managing one's PSP is the route to sustained liberation and fulfilment. It is also a way of controlling your own destiny through increased self-awareness.

"The formal process to measure a manager's performance in a company through annual appraisals is a lagging indicator of value. By contrast, awareness of one's PSP as a means of self-government is intended more as a leading indicator of value and prospects," Drew argues.

PSP, according to the author, is an abstract and volatile concept that is valued daily and is not linear with regard to performance.

"It is a result of interactions with colleagues, peers, superiors, customers, partners, team members, and even friends and family. It remains unpublished, but it can be measured through an honest appraisal of oneself," he says.

He chose the concept of a PSP as it "seemed appropriately analogous to the workings of financial markets".

"A quoted company's share price provides a measure of valuation on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, a share price is generally a leading indicator of future performance. By contrast, an employee's six-monthly or annual appraisal is mainly a lagging indicator of past performance only and provides little or no guide to the future," the book, brought out by PublishNation.

Drew cites some examples to explain PSP.

A simple way to imagine the concept of a PSP is to consider how some of the business models like Airbnb, eBay, Amazon and Uber sustain success, he says.

"They use collaboration feedback systems. In 1997, eBay introduced a feature called Seller Feedback. In any transaction the seller rates the buyer and the buyer rates the seller. The idea of both parties rating each other after a transaction has become ubiquitous in on-line trading platforms."
He goes on to add: "Imagine a similar but more complex system operating within a company among colleagues who work with each other as supplier and internal customer. More importantly subliminally external customers are rating suppliers all the time, sometimes revealed through an annual satisfaction survey but more often on experiences from day to day interactions."