Hey everybody, welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster.

I'm Andy Stanley and I will be your host on this episode because today my friend Clay Scroggins is back in the studio to continue the discussion we began last month on his soon-to-be release book, How To Lead When You Are Not In Charge.

Well Clay, the first time I heard you talk about this topic, I thought to myself, this should be a book and fortunately you were thinking along those same lines.

You found an extraordinary publisher and so this August the book comes out, it's entitled How To Lead When You Are Not In Charge.

The sort of title is, leveraging influence when you lack authority.

Leveraging influence when you lack authority, which is what we talked a little bit about last month.

That's right. We're going to take a couple on that theme today.

Now as we said, this is a really, really important topic because very few people, very few people are ever actually completely in charge of anything.

Although there are a lot of people, perhaps a lot of people in our audience that think, no that's not the case and one day I'm actually going to be in charge.

So statistically speaking, there are far more people not in charge than who are in charge.

So the good news is you have an enormous audience.

That's exciting for this book.

And we've talked about this. I think many women with a strong leadership gift but who are not in charge are oftentimes tempted to just buy their time.

They're just going to wait.

To wait for the day when they hold all the cards to wait for the day when they are actually in charge.

And we've talked about the fact that that's a huge mistake because people in my position, now people in your position,

who are not looking for the men and women who are waiting for an opportunity, we're looking for the men and women who recognize their current opportunity and are actually doing something with it.

And that's what we talked about last month. Talk a little bit about those two things and then we'll move on with this new material.

Sure. Well, thank you for setting it up that way. I agree. I feel like when I have experienced waiting myself, it feels like I'm just sitting on my hands.

I'm just biting my time trying to wait until it's my moment to lead because we buy that lie that I've got to be in charge in order to lead.

But ultimately when we do that, we waste opportunities.

We waste opportunities that are in front of us to be able to lead and cultivate influence to make a difference in whatever organization we're in.

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