Since 2013, when I published Intelligent Leadership, a lot has changed—in my own life and career, and in the world. Personally, I am honored to have witnessed an explosion of interest in my work, specifically the Intelligent Leadership model. I’ve worked with companies—big and small—and executives—famous and unknown—on nearly every continent. I’ve spoken at conferences and in boardrooms. I’ve even been named one of the world’s top executive coaches. I don’t bring this up to brag about my success or to impress you. I truly mean that. To me, the growing popularity of my work is a statement less about me personally, and more about the state of leadership in the world today.

One of the things that makes Intelligent Leadership (IL) unique—the true secret of IL—is the emphasis it puts on the inner work required to develop your leadership capacities. I’ve found that in order to achieve the results that most leaders are after—improved performance, career advancement, personal and company success, and leaving a lasting legacy—leaders must be willing to find the courage to “look under the hood” and start to understand just what it is that makes them tick. Then everyone must do the work to unleash their inner light so that it shines through to every dimension of their lives. We will be exploring this in great depth throughout the coming pages.

I’ve found that this depth approach is, for the most part, missing in leadership circles today. Many people either don’t take the appropriate time, or don’t have the knowledge or interest, to seriously explore their interiors. They tend to skip over all of that in order to get to the quick, easy, results-oriented stuff. But in doing so, they ignore the crucial value that this kind of self-knowledge has on your ability to lead. The great leaders that I’ve met all know this. It is, I believe, what makes them great.

To be honest, I think this demand for depth is at the heart of the “leadership gap” that so many people have written about over the past couple of decades. Members of an entire generation of leaders, people my age (I’m sixty-two) and older, haven’t put a sufficient emphasis on getting to know themselves, and for good reason. They’ve been primarily focused on building and growing companies, getting the job done, and delivering results to the many people who depend on them. Many of these great men and women have learned their leadership lessons through a lifetime of experience, but haven’t necessarily had the language or the tools to pass on to the next generation what they themselves understand implicitly. The aspiring leaders of today, Gen X and Gen Y, are much more open to the kind of inner work that’s at the core of IL, but they don’t have teachers to teach them. There aren’t enough roadmaps out there for potential leaders to prepare themselves, at the level of the heart, mind, and soul, for what great leadership really entails.

That is why I wanted to write this book. The Intelligent Leader is meant to be a roadmap for understanding the true essence of the leadership journey. My first IL book was an attempt to introduce the world to the work I’ve been doing to integrate the enneagram into a leadership tool that I call the Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory (MLEI). It was full of workbooks and activities to help you explore your unique strengths and weaknesses as a human being and a leader. It’s been very useful to many people. But since the publication of that book, new principles have emerged in my work. I’ve started to see patterns emerge in the many leaders I’ve worked with, and from those patterns, I believe I’m starting to see the picture of the true essence of great leadership, both how it feels on the inside and how it looks from the outside.

In The Intelligent Leader, I will share all of that with you, the reader. It is meant to guide you on a journey into the heart of leadership, exploring its many dimensions, and then stand with you as you peer back out, through your soul and personality, to see what the world looks like from that new vantage point. If I achieve my goal with this book, it will give you a direct experience of what truly great leadership feels like, from the inside out, so that you have a sense of what you’re shooting for, and what you need to do to get there.

The world today needs leaders to have this new kind of intelligence. They need to understand the subtle dynamics of the human heart, mind, and soul, starting with their own. They need to be rooted in powerful self-knowledge and to cultivate a rare but achievable ability to bring about the same rootedness in those around them. You could call it Enlightened Leadership, or Deep Leadership, but I prefer “Intelligent.” It speaks to just how savvy you can become if you put in the time to learn this approach.

I truly believe that this kind of Intelligent Leadership is not a luxury but a requirement for leaders today. And it’s my honor to share with you what I consider to be the secrets to becoming the great leader you have the potential to be.