The book

The secrets of leadership: on a journey with Roberto Re towards personal and professional growth

Roberto Re's book offers valuable lessons on how to become an effective leader, manage change and build a winning team. On newsstands with Il Sole 24 Ore

5 June 2025

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Reading a book on leadership by Roberto Re - who has made this theme into a sort of personal brand since his highly successful book "Leader di te stesso" (over 450,000 copies sold in less than ten years) and has dedicated a very successful personal career as a coach and trainer to it - simply means being in the right place at the right time.

It means reading and getting to know stories and teachings distilled by those who have in turn met, known and learned from many people who have succeeded in becoming first and foremost leaders in what they do and have succeeded in turn in transmitting around them the values, motivations and convictions that have animated them on their journey, which is obviously never obvious or banal.

This is the journey proposed by Re in his book "The Secrets of Leadership", published by Gribaudo and on newsstands with Il Sole 24 Ore (also available on the Shopping24 website), which aims in some way to help us discover what are the characteristics that distinguish a true leader, what are the fears that hold us back on our path to leadership, but also how to form a winning team and how to create an empowering environment.

In each of the ten chapters that make up the book, the author sets out to reveal one of the qualities that a modern leader must possess, acquire or improve. Starting with emotional intelligence, which consists not only in the ability to know and manage one's own emotions, but also in the ability to recognise the emotions of others and to create positive relationships with them: a rather rare quality that is truly necessary for leadership in the times in which we live and work.

King emphasises how emotional intelligence is particularly at home in the female world, to which the second chapter of the book is dedicated, explaining how leadership today needs to integrate two models: the traditionally masculine model of strength and determination and the more feminine model of welcoming and caring for others.

Another stage of the book is dedicated to the ability - and need - to manage the inevitable change and to learn not to procrastinate decisions, which are the spice of a person's mature life and growth path (all the more so of a leader). "A leader," the author argues, "is a person who has learnt to face and manage change. Change is a natural and inevitable process, it represents a choice, it requires an act of responsibility'.

In this vision, the leader understands change as growth, knowing that it is the decisions we make that determine our destiny. According to Re, who we are today is nothing more than the sum total of the decisions we have consciously or unconsciously made in the past and, by the same token, ten years from now we will be the mirror of the decisions we have made from now on. The decisions we make every day, including the smallest ones, can in fact greatly influence the course of our lives.

According to the author, indeed, the difference between individuals, between those who are leaders and those who are not, lies precisely in what they decide to do in their difficult moments: they can decide to use them as a stimulus for change, as an adventure into the unknown, as an opportunity for growth, or they can decide to immobilise and feel sorry for themselves. "It is precisely the moments of difficulty, where we are forced to make a decision, that can turn our existence around, but only if we are able to take advantage of them rather than suffer them. And this is independent of what happens to us'. The book, therefore, tells the stories of many leaders who made the right decision at the most difficult time of their lives.

A focus on negotiation skills and team management skills, which are particularly important in companies, is not to be missed: it is no coincidence that the ability to work as a team is one of the most sought-after skills in job advertisements at all levels, and the ability to lead, as well as build, a team is decisive when it comes to choosing people for managerial positions in a company. "A bad team produces only poor results, regardless of the talent and experience level of its individual elements. This is because a team is more than just the sum of its parts, it is a complex reality in which each part must proceed harmoniously in the same direction'.

Finally, the last part of the book is dedicated to the digital world, how to become an online leader and use one's aptitudes strategically to promote oneself on the Net. The digital world is today a fundamental and certainly not ignorable platform in which to exercise one's function and leaderahip. The younger generations are, for obvious reasons, led to experience the digital environment with extreme naturalness, while not a few leaders - managers, entrepreneurs, professionals at the top of their fields of work - are still wary of these dynamics. The last part of this book also - and perhaps above all - speaks to them. (M. Do.).

Roberto Re

The secrets of leadership

Publisher Gribaudo

Pages: 216

Newsstand release: 3 June 2025

Price: € 12.90