Grace & Salt: Stateline author shares her faith-based journey to better leadership

Today Melissa McCormick of Roscoe, IL launches her new book, Grace & Salt: 12 biblical lessons to transform you and your team into better leaders.

After more than 30 years in the corporate world, retiring as the global senior vice-president of sales and marketing at Taylor Company in Rockton, McCormick has learned a thing or two about leadership, lessons she integrated into her own leadership style which she now shares in Grace & Salt.

As owner of MX3 Business Solutions, Melissa McCormick is a faith-based career coach, speaker, author, and trainer "helping women reach their full potential through enhancing communication, negotiation, and leadership skills rooted in authenticity." She invites readers to join this "self-discovery journey where faith meets business."

McCormick knows from personal experience the struggle that many people have with showing their faith at work, and she doesn't push her faith on anyone, not even her clients. But once she took the step of "bringing Jesus to work" instead of "leaving Jesus in the car," she found that she was "able to... well, just relax. I had somewhat of a freedom where I had a playbook that I could rely on. If I was going to have a tough conversation, I was able to wrap it in grace and salt."

The title of the book comes from a Bible verse, Colossians 4:6, which says, "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."

McCormick admits, "If you've known me for a long time, I tend to be a little salty. I'm very direct and sometimes that's not the best approach. So what I learned... was how to wrap those truth conversations that you have to have but wrap them in grace...but yet have that truth in there... So grace and salt is more of an approach... that really helped me, in my leadership style."

One of her motivations for writing about her personal journey, she says, is that "work stress is becoming stronger and stronger as companies require employees to do more [work] with fewer [people]. When I learned how to integrate my faith into business in an authentic way, I experienced a freedom and peace that relieved work stress. Ultimately, I was a happier and more productive employee and leader.”

Grace & Salt walks leaders through the process of creating a leadership development plan for both themselves and their team while helping them survive the chaos of leadership. Most leaders strive to get to a leadership position but when they arrive, realize it's full of more stress than anticipated. Grace & Salt uses 12 practical lessons to help the reader leave behind a life of stress, struggles, and being stuck.

The book has two parts, says McCormick. "The first segment is about leadership and developing your team... who's on my team, are they in the right seats, or do I need to move something around."  It is designed for leaders of any type, not just business leaders.

The second part of Grace & Salt, she says, is "more about self-care and helping the leader survive the chaos... When we need to work more with fewer people, that causes a lot of stress... And it also has some self-discovery... it's jam packed with lots of good stuff."

Starting today, McCormick's book is available to order on her website and from Amazon. She says, "This is definitely not going to be my first and last book."

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