Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

Our starting point is that leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. 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.

Leaders of all backgrounds and tenures only sometimes succeed in creating conditions that allow other people to thrive, and few have full control over the levers of their success. Our mission here is to help you fix that.

We believe that what we’ve learned in the process of changing things can be useful to anyone who seeks to lead, particularly now, when the scale and complexity of our shared challenges can seem overwhelming. We believe that our highest duty is to current and future generations of leaders who are willing to put themselves out there and try to build a better world.

Here’s the important, intuition-bending leadership principle that this experience has taught us: the real work of leadership isn’t particularly concerned with the leader.

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.1 Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for the people around you to become increasingly effective, to help them fully realize their own capacity and power. And not only when you’re in the trenches with them, but also when you’re not around, and even (this is the cleanest test) after you’ve permanently moved on from the team.

Brown-Philpot describes it, 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.

leader’s charge is less about the decisions that happen to cross their desk and more about the decisions that don’t even make it into the building.

Leaders must be intentional about distributing power and decision rights, and then take total, unqualified responsibility for the outcome.

Other people are making judgment calls all day, every day—and your job is to make sure that they’re getting it right, that their choices reflect the vision, values, and strategy of the organization.

Truth!

other words, a leader’s mission is to ensure that everyone on the team—wherever they may be—has a fighting chance at wild success.

Hoffman put it this way: “As a leader, you have to constantly shut off your own reel and watch all the movies playing around you.”5

Our advice is to follow Hoffman’s lead and risk making other people the heroes of your leadership story.

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 your success, your way to go faster and farther than you ever could on your own. That’s the transformative impact of empowerment leadership.

Trust creates the conditions for other people to be guided by you,

It’s the work you need to do on yourself before other people will take a leadership leap of faith with you. Once you do that work, you then earn the right to have impact on others at progressively greater scale.

The idea is that as you move outward from the foundational trust bull’s-eye (chapter 2), you gain the skills to empower more and more people, from individuals (via love, chapter 3) to teams (via belonging, chapter 4) to organizations (via strategy, chapter 5) and even beyond (via culture, chapter 6

Yes!

Leading a team with any type of difference embedded in it (and we will argue that this describes most teams) requires you to champion that difference and ensure that everyone can contribute their unique capacities and perspectives.

Strategy and culture are invisible forces that shape organizations and empower other people whether or not you happen to be present. If you seek to lead at the scale of an organization, then you need to spend a whole lot of time getting strategy and culture right.

Johnson is so good at what she does that her casual presentations on how to run staff meetings have gone viral. Whenever she onboards a new employee, Johnson leads with the word “empowered” and gets right to the mechanics of absence leadership: “You’re going to have a manager. Your manager’s important. But they’re not with you all day long. What you’re doing with your time is your choice, and the impact you have is driven by your decisions.”

Less Control, More Command: Empowerment Leadership in Action

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.

In this new framework, leaders would teach their trainees not what to think, but how to think and make decisions in the murky world of modern warfare, where context and conditions are constantly shifting.

Moltke believed that the only way to prevail in chaotic and uncertain operating environments was to encourage aggressive initiative, autonomy, and ingenuity at every level.

Mission Command offers us not only a new way to lead, but also a new way to think about leading. It’s a model that challenges leaders to embed trust and strategy into the organization so that they can confidently remove themselves from on-the-ground decisions. It’s a mindset focused on how to unleash other people in your presence, so that they can go out and excel in your absence.

Hannenberg talked to us about the payoff of Mission Command, she emphasized heightened access to human potential: “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.

In order to look like leaders, we end up behaving like smaller, two-dimensional versions of ourselves. We obscure the parts of ourselves that real leadership demands, cutting off access to our full humanity. 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.

In our experience, it’s generally one or the other. 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. Yes, take that vacation (please!) and after-hours management course. Hit the Appalachian Trail and read a great leadership book.** Then get back to the business of leading whenever you come back to work again.

“Yes, and … ” is a core improv principle that challenges you to accept reality as it is offered to you and then build on that reality to develop a compelling scene.

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.

If you don’t have confidence in someone’s growth potential, then you can do many things with that person, but leading isn’t one of them. You can oversee, supervise, govern, persuade, and endure them. You can get through the day and instruct them to do things. We don’t recommend this approach, but you can certainly do it, and it...

A particularly powerful sign of your conviction is to give someone the ball again after they’ve just missed the proverbial shot. Believing in someone sometimes means giving them space to stumble and learn along the way.

We also advise you to be direct. Sit someone down and tell them about the strengths you’ve observed, being as sincere and specific as you can in your descriptions. Use dates, times, and details, illustrating the positive impacts of their behavior on you and others. We will talk more about how to give effective feedback later in the book, but this is more radical counsel than it sounds. Most organizational cultures rely on negative prompts for improvement, which are far less effective than positive reinforcement.

genuine way to let them know that you’ve noticed. 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.

Leadership that’s not about you gives people license to engage more fully with the organizations around them. It unleashes people to achieve things they never dreamed were possible. On the other side of that kind of leadership is a remade world.

What will be the focus of your own leadership story? Will it be about the power you stockpiled and protected? Or about how much more you achieved by using that power to unleash the people around you?

mastering the inner rings of our empowerment leadership model: trust, love, and belonging.

Kalanick arrived humbled and introspective. He had thought a lot about how some of the cultural values he’d instilled in the company—the very values that had fueled Uber’s success—had also been misused and distorted on his watch. He revealed deep respect for what his team had achieved, but he also recognized that some of the people he had placed in leadership roles lacked the training, mentorship, or breathing room to be effective.

If leadership is about empowering others, in your presence and your absence, then trust is the emotional framework that allows that service to be freely exchanged. 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.

people tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy).

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When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers.

Aristotle’s writing on the elements of effective persuasion, where he argued that you need to ground your case in logos, pathos, and ethos. You will also find this pa...

Now think of a recent moment when you were not trusted as much as you wanted to be. Maybe you lost an important sale or didn’t get that stretch assignment. Maybe someone doubted your ability to execute or simply kept their distance from you on a project. Here’s the hard part: give this other person in the story—let’s call them your skeptic—the benefit of the doubt. Assume that their reservations were valid, and you were the one responsible for the breakdown in trust. This exercise only works if you own it.

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If you had to choose from the short list of trust attributes, which of the three got in your way? From the skeptic’s perspective, which got wobbly on you? Did they think you might be putting your own interests first? Did the interaction feel all about you? That’s an empathy block. Did they question the rigor of your analysis or your ability to execute on an ambitious plan? That’s a logic problem. Or did they think you might be misrepresenting some part of your story, exaggerating the upside or downplaying the risks? That’s an authenticity issue.

Taking responsibility for a wobble reveals your humanity (authenticity) and analytic chops (logic), while communicating your commitment to the relationship (empathy).