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.

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.

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

Leadership is built on the assumption that tomorrow can be better than today.

leadership asks you to be in touch with your own agency and ability to influence your surroundings.

In 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.

risk making other people the heroes of your leadership story.

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.

Only when you can imagine a better version of someone can you play a role in helping to unleash them.

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).

The smaller we choose to make ourselves, the less likely we are to take up the space required to lead.

Give yourself the freedom to update your point of view based on new information or experiences. Do it out in the open and model what it looks like to have the courage to evolve.

Anticipation of change introduces anxiety into an ecosystem, and the antidote is to replace it with actual change. The longer you wait, the more space the human imagination has to hallucinate—a favorite term of our friend and fellow educator Tom DeLong—about all the catastrophic turns the future could take. Getting started also allows you to create enough momentum to help you up the inevitable learning curve and around whatever resistance you may meet along the way.

Here’s the main problem with not doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to promote inclusion: failing to act in the presence of bias is demoralizing and inhumane.

The following ten signs reveal that your organization is digging in its heels: A task force has been assigned to the problem. A small, intrepid team of reformers is one thing; indeed, it’s among the most important tools for accelerating action. Most task forces, it turns out, do not fit this profile. If your organization is pushing you to rely on a structure like this that’s outside the typical chain of command, make sure it’s a mechanism with the legitimacy and decision rights to make a difference.

one of your central duties as an absent leader is to empower your employees to deploy resources they control without you staring over their shoulders.

the idea here is to be bad, to be downright dreadful, at the things that don’t matter in order to be excellent at the things that do. This takes courage and a willingness to give up the fantasy of unlimited capacity.

create more value than you capture.

Looking at leadership through a value lens, the responsibility of a leader is to create value for others.

As a floor, you must pay your employees a living wage, full stop.

nothing we’ve discussed in this chapter matters if the rest of the people in the organization don’t understand your strategy well enough to make their own decisions based on it.

understand deeply so that you can describe simply.