FEARLESS: Leadership Lessons at the Crossroads is a selection of company updates that Steve Johns, CEO of OneCause, sent to his staff every week during the COVID-19 lockdowns. OneCause is a company that raises funding for non-profit organizations. Since all their events before the pandemic were physical, the lockdowns not only disrupted their business model but threatened to wipe them out entirely.

As the company’s board started restructuring to continue operations under pandemic restrictions, Johns committed himself to providing weekly updates to keep staff informed and motivated. In his book (which is sub-titled “Leadership Lessons at the Crossroads”), Johns reproduces 16 of these short essays, adding notes that explain his thinking behind each one and the management principles derived from them.

This novel approach works quite well, although Johns also includes long sections of client feedback and emails, which only OneCause employees might find interesting. An added dimension of his notes is his perspective on political issues in America. For example, he worried about whether he should mention the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, since she was a liberal judge and some employees might have been offended: “Our country is more divided now than it has been at any other time in my life. But I wasn’t willing to be paralyzed by that division,” Johns writes. Yet, although he says several times that OneCause was apolitical and addresses several issues that divide the country, he treats the core situation of the book—the COVID-19 policy measures such as masks, lockdowns, and vaccines—as non-controversial.

As for the leadership lessons, the updates and notes provide an effective combination of management principles supported by the company’s real-world challenges. Johns realized early on that, if his updates were to be useful, he could not only provide dry facts but also inspire the staff. He draws on the ideas of leading thinkers—from Marcus Aurelius to Bertrand Russell to Confucius—to do so.

Among his many lessons, Johns points to the importance of redundancy in formulating strategy (“Your backup plans need to have backup plans”), the benefits of uncertainty (“Chaos, change and uncertainty are engines of innovation”), and the importance—both professionally and personally—of distinguishing between the urgent and the important (“Not everything important is urgent and not everything that seems urgent is important”).

FEARLESS provides interesting and useful advice for leaders in every sphere, not only in managing a crisis situation but in creating an effective organizational culture.

Steve Johns’s FEARLESS: Leadership Lessons at the Crossroads is an excellent exploration of leadership principles within the context of the unprecedented business challenges posed by government policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader