What if most leaders are making their job much harder than it needs to be? Nobody asked you to hold every answer, control every outcome or take the weight alone. It's exhausting, and it doesn't even work.

In this engaging leadership fable, CEO Richard Mansfield discovers that every relationship his leadership depends on - his CHRO, his CFO, his executive team, his Chair, his investor - runs on a contract he wrote in his head and never showed to anyone. With the help of his coach, Nigel, he learns to make the implicit explicit - one relationship at a time. It is uncomfortable. It is also, as Nigel promises, simple.

This is a book for anyone who sits on an executive team, as every senior leader must pay attention to this specific, practical mechanism of contracting. Honest conversation is not a soft skill sitting alongside performance; it is the mechanism that produces it.

Discover: - Reflective questions at the end of each chapter to help you apply the ideas to your own team. - Three practical frameworks you can apply immediately: the relationship map, contracting, and observation-based feedback. - VECTRA, a diagnostic model for reading an executive team as a system.