Arms you with powerful tools for overcoming resistance to change and creating a culture of collaboration, engagement, and employee empowerment Your people are your most valuable asset, and if you want them to excel (and your profits to soar), you'll need to abandon your traditional command-and-control management style and adopt a collaborative, open leadership approach—one that engages and empowers your people. While this isn't a particularly new idea, many leaders, while they may pay lip service to it, don't really understand what it means. And most of those who do get it lack the skills for putting it into practice. In Flat Army you'll find powerful leadership models and tools that help you challenge yourself and overcome your personal obstacles to change, while pushing the boundaries of organizational change to create a culture of collaboration. Develops an integrated framework incorporating collaboration, open leadership, technologies, and connected learning - Shows you how to flatten the organizational pyramid and engage with your peoples in more collaborative and productive ways—without undermining your authority - Explains how to deploy a Connected Leader mindset, a Participative Leader Framework, and a Collaborative Leader Action Model - Arms you with powerful tools for becoming a more visible leader who demonstrates the qualities and capabilities needed to become an agent of positive change "a canon of radically different management" - Forbes "several elaborate, interlinked models for connected leadership, you will certainly get lots of ideas" - The Globe and Mail "takes a deep look at the gestalt of leadership both in one's self and in how one collaborates with others. There is plenty to learn and practice, as well as the inspiration to guide." - Forbes Leaders of any description and department are struggling. Society is awash with social technologies; employees want to be included in the conversations and decisions; and management is stuck sorting out how teams should operate using dated leadership models in a new and technologically- sophisticated social world order. Human Resources needs to catch up with technology; Finance continues to operate in a silo; and IT is tripping over both legacy systems and newer, social technologies, while experiencing difficulty adjusting to a more collaborative behavioral model. Most importantly, employees are becoming significantly more disengaged. Does any of this sound familiar? There is no easy way to undo what years, and even decades, of outdated management practice have done to leaders. Command and control is rampant, evil and unnecessary. The process of change has to start with the leadership in any organization, and Flat Army is designed to prevent your organization's ship from sinking. Dan Pontefract knows and understands what happens to organizations when employees are unhappy and uncommitted. More importantly, he knows what it takes to create a leadership culture that drives engagement, empowerment and encouragement amongst continued execution. In all of the corporate leadership roles he has had, he held a steadfast belief that a collaborative, connected and participative leadership framework is the only way in which to operate. Pontefract is Chief Envisioner of TELUS Transformation Office; a future-of-work consulting group he founded in 2014 that helps organizations enhance their corporate culture, leadership, learning, work styles & collaboration practices. Dan is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria, Gustavson School of Business. Previously, as Head of Learning & Collaboration at TELUS, Dan was responsible for the overarching learning, collaboration & leadership development strategy for the company. Dan championed the introduction of the TELUS Leadership Philosophy (TLP), an open and collaborative-based leadership framework for all TELUS team members. In parallel to these actions he drove a philosophical and cultural shift in the way TELUS views and experiences learning called "Pervasive Learning" the shift to a social, informal and formal learning and collaboration model bringing TELUS to the forefront of connected learning and leading. He further championed the use and deployment of collaborative technologies to complement both the learning and leadership frameworks. Between 2008 and 2015, employee engagement at TELUS soared from 53% to 87%. Prepare to be entertained, shocked and engaged. Challenge yourself. Challenge the status quo. Flat Army pushes the boundaries of organization change. It can change yours. FLAT: to be on a level surface, not in a hierarchy ARMY: a large group of people who share similar aims or beliefs FLAT ARMY: an unobstructed flow of corporate commonality Dan Pontefract is the author of three books: OPEN TO THINK: Slow Down, Think Creatively, and Make Better Decisions (2018), THE PURPOSE EFFECT: Building Meaning in Yourself, Your Role and Your Organization (2016) and FLAT ARMY: