Lift
10 Mentorship Touchpoints to Empower Your Team and Accelerate Your Career
The encouraging leadership guide Lift builds on personal insights to suggest ways of elevating one’s employees toward greatness.
Public relations professional Amy Summers’s uplifting leadership guide Lift is about inspiring career growth in one’s employees.
About mentoring employees in order to advance their careers and build a lasting legacy, this book frames leadership as a way of making meaningful impact. It explains why people should invest in long-term mentorship relationships, how to go about them, and what the projected return on investment is. Advice for vetting and hiring candidates is also included.
The book is organized according to ten mentorship touchpoints, including structure, purpose, and connections, of increasing complexity. Indeed, they advance in a way that parallels the course of a relationship, starting with introductions and reaching the points of being able to elevate one’s employees and support healthy exits to the next opportunity. These steps are explained at length; they are also illustrated with a bevy of straightforward anecdotes about Summers building her public relations business, reflecting topics like setting goals and delegating. She recalls being mentored for her public relations career in college, watching a decade of training culminate in a solo dance performance, and rebuilding her firm after the Great Recession with remote workers to avoid the expense of an office.
Thought-provoking questions are included related to topics including one’s management style and core values, coupled with reflection prompts related to growth and transformation and concrete guidance tips. Relationship-building techniques like checking in, being transparent, and brainstorming decisions together are also named, with the book walking through the basics in a detailed and helpful way. It dispenses both general guidance, as about regular rewards being essential to motivation, and particular tips, like to host storytelling sessions to instill confidence in public speaking, and to prompt shy employees to drop comments in the chat during virtual meetings.
Motivational in tone, the text includes assurances like “I’ve got your back.” Its frequent use of direct addresses is also reassuring. Illustrative popular culture references appear, as do original cartoons featuring anthropomorphized animals that represent different stages of professional development (a cold “Polar Bear Boss” shows little concern for their employees and provides scant praise for hard work, for example). While the latter are somewhat superfluous on the whole, all adds up to a lighthearted introduction to a complicated subject.
A hope-filled leadership guide, Lift is about helping one’s employees evolve and thrive.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
