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by
Frances Frei
Started reading
January 30, 2021
Instead, it’s about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential. And we will begin by making the case that if you seek to lead, then the important work ahead starts with turning outward.
how coaches helped players reach their potential, how players made each other better on and off the court, how the joy and heartbreak of competition seemed to elevate everyone in the game.
These were people who seemed to defy the limits of their humanity in pursuit of something bigger than themselves.
As we went on to study organizations and build them, we discovered that the daily work of leading is much quieter and less dramatic than the leadership stories that had captivated us as children.
And there’s rarely a crowd that goes wild when you get it right.
the real work of leadership isn’t particularly concerned with the leader.
Again, leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at unleashing other people. Full stop. That’s it. That’s the secret.
leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence.
she shifted her focus going forward from what she needed to be successful as a leader to what she needed to do to help others succeed.
If you can’t sustain genuine interest in the ideas of other people, including those ideas that have nothing to do with you, then you haven’t yet earned the right to lead.
Reality has become tedious. When you’re regularly practicing leadership, the world is a pretty magical place, filled with progress to be made and human potential to be unleashed. It’s a red flag if it’s been awhile since you’ve felt a sense of wonder at the unlimited possibilities around you.
It asks you to know your own power so—among other things—you can introduce other people to theirs. If you’re not feeling it, for whatever reason, then you won’t be to able pull this off.
Those of us hungry for leadership will eventually change the channel.
Whenever we share our all-about-you warning signs, we find that most leaders can relate to at least a few of them. To be clear, if you saw yourself anywhere on that list, it doesn’t disqualify you from leadership (we’ve all become stars of our own show at some point). But it does mean you may be able to improve as a leader if you start thinking more about how to empower other people.
“As a leader, you have to constantly shut off your own reel and watch all the movies playing around you.”
mission as a leader: to continuously improve the performance of the people around you.
The purpose of this thought exercise is to start taking radical responsibility for the experiences of other people, which is the decision at the heart of empowerment leadership.
What more could you have done to unleash the people around you? As we will suggest many times in the chapters ahead, activate your best thinking by writing down your answers.
We’ve all missed opportunities for leadership impact, all of us, for one reason or another. Here’s where it usually gets interesting: Why? Why did you miss the chance to fully empower another person or team or organization?
The answer we hear most often is that you made it somehow about you. You turned inward rather than outward, directing energy toward your own hopes and fears, rather than those of your team.
If you have a pattern of hesitating in the face of leadership opportunity, we suggest spending some time with the pattern. What held you back?
Sometimes protecting ourselves is the right choice, but we’re often unreliable calculators of personal risk and return.
In our experience, most people can handle far more exposure than they think they can—and almost everyone underestimates the meaning that leadership brings to their lives. In exchange for the anxiety of flying without a net, you get to travel to unimaginable places.
If your objective is to lead, then unleashing other people—helping them become as effective as they can possibly be—is your fundamental mandate. Rather than threatening your own primacy, other people’s excellence becomes the truest measure of yo...
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That’s the transformative impact of empowerm...
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It’s the work you need to do on yourself before other people will take a leadership leap of faith with you.
In 2012, General Dempsey produced a manifesto on how to lead in this new, less predictable environment.7 The memo made a passionate case for why a leader’s mandate was less about consolidating power and more about prudent decentralization of that power up and down the chain of command.
“When people are trained and trusted to lead in their own spheres of influence, they find out they can do things they never imagined were possible.” In this new model, Hannenberg clarified, her teams weren’t waiting for permission to bring the full breadth of their abilities to whatever problem needed solving. They weren’t waiting for permission to win.
She counts this moment as the beginning of her evolution into someone, in her words, who was “willing to take up real space in the world.”
A pattern in our own missed opportunities has played out whenever we’ve chosen to protect ourselves rather than do the exposing work of leadership.
Rather than approach these meetings as opportunities to teach and learn, to lead and be led by peers we respected deeply, too often we entered these spaces with our metaphorical porcupine quills flexed.
sometimes too timid, other times too brash—that materially reduced our chance of influence.
In the choice to insulate ourselves from the judgment of others, we disconnect from leadership’s core mandate to make those very same people better.
The relevant question wasn’t “What do these people think of me?”; it was “What can I do to help make these people better?” That’s the shift that empowerment leadership demands.
We’re not suggesting that you disappear behind others and give up your pursuit of status and recognition. But we are creating a distinction between that game and the practice of leadership, in a world that often conflates the two. If you seek to lead, then your focus—by definition—shifts from elevating yourself to protecting, developing, and enabling the people around you.
Think conductor or director rather than star of the show. Your job is to make Oscar-worthy...
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As we will explore in our next chapter, other people’s willingness to be led by you requires at least some conviction that you know what you’re doing. That might require you to develop new skills.
Performing improv was fun for Jason and also helped him communicate more effectively. The experience made him more present with his team and more empathetic as a listener.
You can improve yourself or the people around you, but it’s difficult to do both at the same time. We advise being intentional about this distinction and doing the work on you away from the office.
Once you’ve made the leadership pivot, your job is to see the full humanity of the people you seek to lead, including their ability to evolve. Only when you can imagine a better version of someone can you play a role in helping to unleash them.
This progression, in turn, requires a leader’s willingness to both believe in someone else’s unrealized potential and find ways to communicate that conviction. In other words, it requires that you not keep this beautiful insight to yourself.
You see what they’re capable of today and—this is for leadership bonus points—you see where that gift might take them tomorrow if they decide to share it more often. Start with a person close to you and work outward from there.
The goal here is to start getting in the habit of an external leadership orientation, away from the magnetic pull of our own thoughts and experiences and toward the potential of the people we seek to lead.
Indeed, in our experience, it can be even more impactful for seasoned professionals to be reminded of their capacity for unrestrained growth.
Or about how much more you achieved by using that power to unleash the people around you?
If you observe any patterns, write them down.
When do you reliably empower other people? When has that investment in others been easy for you? When has it been hard?
When you succeed in unleashing other people, what is different about your “state”? How does your energy and ability to focus change?
I’m willing to be led by you because I trust you. I’m willing to give up some of my cherished autonomy and put my well-being in your hands because I trust you. In turn, you’re willing to rely on me because you trust me.
The more trust that accumulates between us, the better this works.
