What if your calendar, pauses, check-ins, and smallest decisions were quietly teaching your team how to experience your leadership? Read the full review to discover the answer for yourself there.
Book
The Direction You Set by Simon Kingsley
Genre: Business & Economics / Nonfiction
Sub-genres: Leadership; Management; Professional Development; Career Development; Workplace Skills; Management Training
Themes: Leadership transition; first-time management; trust; delegation; accountability; communication; feedback; difficult conversations; team development; coaching; conflict resolution; organisational change; prioritisation; workplace wellbeing; professional growth; leadership judgement; career progression.
Minimum age: Adult/professional readership, approximately 18+, although the content itself does not contain adult material.
Review
A promotion can change a person’s calendar before it changes their instincts. On Monday, someone may still be the person who solved the difficult problem, wrote the report or delivered the work. By Tuesday, colleagues may be asking that same person to decide what others should do. What happens in between is the territory explored by The Direction You Set.
Simon Kingsley’s management guide begins with a useful observation: the abilities that make someone successful as an individual contributor are not necessarily the abilities required when that person becomes responsible for other people. The manuscript calls this transition “The Gap,” and uses it as a starting point for examining the practical and psychological adjustments involved in becoming a manager.
The book’s greatest strength is its practicality. It does not attempt to turn management into a collection of abstract theories. Instead, it repeatedly asks what a manager should actually do when confronted with familiar workplace situations: a team member struggling with an assignment, a meeting without a clear purpose, an uncomfortable conversation that has been postponed, competing priorities, conflict between employees, organisational change or a request from above that threatens to overload the team.
Delegation receives particularly useful treatment. Kingsley distinguishes delegation from abdication, arguing that handing someone a task does not mean handing away responsibility for the outcome. The book’s “brief, monitor, debrief” framework gives that idea a memorable structure: provide context and authority, maintain appropriate awareness, and then close the loop by examining what happened.
Trust is treated similarly as something accumulated through repeated behaviour rather than granted automatically with a job title. The book’s trust model identifies competence, reliability, and character or intent as contributing elements. The accompanying diagram makes the point visually, while the surrounding discussion stresses that small commitments and consistent behaviour can matter more than impressive gestures.
Another worthwhile feature is the attention given to the manager’s own sustainability. Later chapters address support networks, boundaries and burnout, recognising that a manager who attempts to absorb every problem can eventually become a bottleneck rather than a source of stability. The discussion connects this directly to earlier arguments about delegation and developing people’s judgement.
The book is also strongest when it acknowledges judgement rather than pretending every management situation has a formula. The chapter on stepping in and stepping back explicitly presents this as an ongoing assessment of context, competence and stakes. That is more realistic than prescribing permanent micromanagement or permanent hands-off leadership.
The Direction You Set is best suited to first-time managers, aspiring supervisors, team leaders and professionals who have entered management without formal preparation. It is less suited to readers seeking an academic management text or an extensive research review. Its value lies elsewhere: it offers a practical set of questions, habits and frameworks for someone learning that leadership is less about personally completing the work and more about creating the conditions in which other people can do it well.
The book’s central question is therefore a useful one: if small decisions gradually establish a manager’s pattern, what direction are those decisions setting?
Content Warning: Brief references to workplace misconduct, wrongful termination, safety failures, fatal aviation crashes, burnout and occupational stress.
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