Introduction The Biggest First in Your Professional Career
1. Flip Your Script So You Won’t Flop as a Boss
2. Flip Your Mindset
3. Flip Your Skill Set
4. Flip Your Relationships
5. Flip Your “Do-It-All” Attitude
6. Flip Your Perspective
7. Flip Your Focus
8. Stick with Your Flipped Script
Taking the First Step
Notes
About the Research
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
About the Center for Creative Leadership
About the Maximizing Your Leadership Potential Program

William A. Gentry, PhD, is a senior research scientist and a director at the Center for Creative Leadership, a top-ranked global provider of executive education that serves more than 20,000 individuals and 2,000 organizations across the public, private, nonprofit, and education sectors, including more than 80 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Becoming a leader for the first time is one of the biggest and most stressful psychological and emotional shifts you will ever experience. You're suddenly given an important job that has almost nothing in common with what you've been trained to do. It's as though, at the age of sixteen, your parents said "You ride a bike so well you might as well take the car" and handed you the keys. Cool, but what now?

William Gentry feels your pain. He was happy as a senior research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership - and then he was promoted to his first leadership role. So this book doesn't just draw on his years of studying and training new leaders - it's personal. And his singular insight? New leaders must flip their scripts.

We all have scripts that tell us how things are supposed to be. As a worker, your script is all about "me": your individual contribution. But when you become a boss, you must focus on your group: flip that script from "me" to "we." This means flipping pretty much everything else - your mindset, your skillset, your work relationships, your "do it all" attitude, your view of the organization, and more.

Gentry walks you through each of six flips, offering practical, research-based advice and examples drawn from his work at CCL. But this book is more than a series of best practices - it's your guide to internalizing a leader's perspective. Gentry helps you flip your script so you'll know what to do to help yourself and the team you lead succeed. That's the kind of boss everyone wants to work for - and the kind of boss who accomplishes the most.