If Hope is Your Strategy, Start Over: What Every New Leader Should Know Before They Get the Keys

You got the promotion. Now comes the part no one really prepares you for: leading people.Leadership looks different when the decisions are yours, people are waiting for direction, and your actions affect someone else's success.In If Hope Is Your Strategy, Start Over, Justin Lopez shares the lessons he learned over more than thirty years of leading people-from an eighteen-year-old overnight stocker trying to figure out his future to a leader responsible for developing teams and the leaders within them.This isn't a book about complicated leadership theories, corporate buzzwords, or pretending to have all the answers.It's about what leadership actually looks like when you're responsible for people.Through honest stories, mistakes, difficult conversations, promotions, setbacks, and lessons learned along the way, you'll discover how to: - Build trust before expecting people to follow you- Create clarity when everyone is being pulled in different directions- Hold people accountable without taking away their dignity- Have difficult conversations before they become bigger problems- Recognize potential that others-and sometimes the person themselves-may not yet see- Develop people instead of becoming the person everyone depends on- Build and protect a healthy team culture- Prepare for tomorrow instead of simply reacting to today- Own your mistakes and keep growing- Leave people better than you found themYou'll also learn why promotions are earned long before interviews begin, why some of the most important conversations happen when the person you're talking about isn't in the room, and why the leader people remember may have very little to do with the title they held.The book concludes with Before You Get the Keys, a practical leadership playbook containing twenty-five lessons you can return to when you need perspective, followed by thirty questions designed to keep you thinking about the kind of leader you're becoming.Whether you're a new manager, first-time supervisor, team leader, experienced manager, business owner, or someone preparing for your first leadership position, this book was written to give you something many leaders never receive: The lessons someone should have shared before you became responsible for someone else's success.Because hope has an important place in life.But when hope becomes the plan...start over.