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IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

There are a lot of books about leadership, many of them terrific. Humans have been dwelling on the practice and mystery of great leadership for millennia (more on that later). Why read one more? Well, if you look around, it’s clear that many of the existing models of leadership are not wholly up to the task of handling the challenges we now face together. From rebuilding trust in institutions to unleashing potential at the scale of organizations and beyond, we believe that traditional ideas about leadership only get us so far. They carry us through the first few miles of today’s leadership marathon, but often set us up to lose momentum before we get all the way to the finish line of impact.a

The problem, respectfully, is that it’s been all about you. Your talents and shortcomings as a leader. Your confidence and lack of it. Your heroic moments of courage and instinct—and, of course, your epic falls from grace. For all kinds of good reasons, including the demands of good storytelling, traditional leadership narratives assume that the vision-having, strategy-making, troops-rallying leader is the most important person in the scene.

In this book, we propose a different orientation. 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.

Consider these questions: Are your teammates and colleagues better off when you’re around? Are they more productive and more engaged? More willing to innovate and take smart bets? Whatever your answers are, hold on to them as we begin this conversation. The response we hear most often is “sometimes,” and it’s the typical pattern we observe among even the most seasoned leaders. 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.

Who do we think we are?

We are scholars and writers, coaches and company builders, optimists and (on our best days) accelerators of action. It has been the privilege of our lives to work as change agents at some of the world’s most influential organizations—companies like Uber, WeWork and Riot Games—and with some of the world’s most inspiring business leaders, people like Jen Morgan at SAP, Doug McMillon at Walmart, and Bozoma Saint John at, well, any room she decides to walk into. But at the core of our identities, we are educators, which is why we wanted to write a book about leadership. 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.

We were both taken by the idea of leadership at a curiously young age. Frances first became interested in the context of sports: 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. For Anne, oddly enough, it turned into an obsession with the American Revolution at the delicate age of nine. Side effects included regular appearances as a cross-dressed minuteman and middle-of-the-night reenactments of Paul Revere’s ride.b We were not like the other kids.

In both of these arenas, it was the poetic, often breathtaking acts of leadership that captured our early imagination: Michael Jordan’s embodiment of excellence in his dazzling drives to the basket, John Adams’s willingness to defend enemy soldiers in court, on principles that would inspire the best version of a new nation. These were people who seemed to defy the limits of their humanity in pursuit of something bigger than themselves. Their example expanded possibilities for anyone paying attention, even centuries later, even for two wide-eyed and slack-jawed little girls who had no real business dreaming of living outsized lives.

We assumed to be a leader meant to “Be Like Mike,” which seemed like a highly unlikely prospect. As we both started playing sports ourselves—and starting revolutions, in our own small ways—we discovered leadership was a lot messier (and less beautiful to watch) than we had imagined. It wasn’t only about the guy flying through the air, but also about—indeed, primarily about—what everyone else on the court was doing.

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. That kind of work happens in the honest conversation with a colleague who’s not meeting your expectations or in the decision to take a chance on someone who’s not sure they’re ready for the job. It happens in the long walk to your boss’s office to tell them that you’ve looked at the data from every possible angle and their strategy isn’t working. The practice of leadership almost always asks you to risk something, but it only sometimes requires a midnight ride or a clutch, buzzer-beating jump shot. And there’s rarely a crowd that goes wild when you get it right.

A new definition of leadership

We have dedicated our lives to making leaders and organizations better. 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. It isn’t so worried about the speechifying person at the front of the room. Whether they’re loved or feared. How smart they sound. Whether their rival is becoming too powerful. Yes, those things can end up mattering around the edges, but they are sideshows to leadership’s genuine ringmaster. 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.

The practical definition of leadership we use in our work is that 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.

This orientation becomes more important as your leadership mandate grows. When Stacy Brown-Philpot, now the CEO of TaskRabbit (more to come on Brown-Philpot) went from managing a fourteen-person team to ultimately more than a thousand, she realized she had to rethink her approach to leadership.2 For context, Brown-Philpot was working at Google at the time, where she was already well known as a strategic, results-oriented leader. She was in the process of rocketing to the top of Sheryl Sandberg’s operations organization, pausing to launch the Black Googlers Network along the way. Brown-Philpot had gone to Sandberg with the observation that black professionals were underrepresented at Google—and the conviction that a dedicated effort to recruit, retain, and connect them to each other would make a difference. Sandberg challenged Brown-Philpot to lead the effort herself: “You’re it. You’re the person that you’ve been waiting for to do this.”3

Brown-Philpot already was, to use a technical term, a rock star. And yet she found herself walking out of meetings with her direct reports, incredibly frustrated. The way she tells the story, she would show up with her own agenda—a list of the “ten things” she wanted to accomplish—and after only getting through one of them in the course of the meeting, she would code the interaction a leadership failure. Her breakthrough came when she reframed her purpose: “What I needed to learn … was that this meeting is not about you, Stacy. This meeting is about the person that you’re leading.”4 As 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. This reframing has powered her to the very top of the tech industry, a place where it’s not so easy to find a woman of color in senior leadership.

If we look at leadership from this perspective, then it’s less about what the C-suite is up to at any given moment and more about what the rest of the company is doing. A 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. (See the sidebar “Ten Signs It Might Be All about You.”)

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. This has arguably always been true, but it is certainly true now, as our challenges become larger in scale, faster to mutate, and grislier in their complexity than ever before. Leaders today need to spend less time checking their teeth in the mirror and more time getting other people to pull up their socks.

The leadership pivot

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.

For a good example of what we’re talking about, watch Reid Hoffman in action. Hoffman was cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn—among the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet—and is also one of the most empowering leaders we’ve ever observed. Hoffman founded LinkedIn after helping to build PayPal, and now shares his capital, wisdom, and infectious brand of optimism across multiple platforms. 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

We love the movie metaphor. In fact, the central questions of leadership have little to do with your own performance as a leader (how’d I do?) and almost everything to do with the performance of others (how’d they do?). Figure 1-1 is the visual translation of your mission as a leader: to continuously improve the performance of the people around you.

Try drawing your own leadership performance curve. Recall a team you’ve been on, one where you’ve spent some real time (no less than three months). What happened to the slope of other people’s performance after you showed up? Did it go up or down? If your curve generally looks like the one in the figure, then you (likely) helped to create the conditions for other people to succeed. But if it’s flat or negative or simply not as steep as you know was possible, think back to the choices you made as a leader and teammate. What could you have done—big or small—to improve your team’s performance?

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. Of course, there are things that can impact performance that have nothing to do with you, externalities that may be outside your control (e.g., a competitor moves in next door). The point is to gain insight from the idea, however delusional you think it may be, that it all came down to your ability to create the conditions where other people could perform. If this level of accountability feels uncomfortable and unreasonable, then you’re doing the exercise correctly.

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 taken thousands of executives through this exercise, and the piece of paper in front of them is never blank. 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. As Hoffman might say, you couldn’t figure out how to turn off your own movie.

Here’s an example: for some of us, the decision to lead has sometimes felt too presumptuous or risky. It can take courage to own your ability to make something better, and there can be financial or political costs in refusing to accept the status quo. 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?

Full disclosure: we’re not all that interested in the details of your answer—this is your own backstory, which we assume is filled with rational, hard-earned choices. We are, however, deeply invested in the trade-offs of these choices and in removing any barriers to your impact in the world. The truth is that we’re all susceptible to prioritizing security, incredibly helpful in getting us through the day, to say nothing of surviving the human experience. If your objective is to lead, however, then you’ll eventually need to give up some of that security, at least some of the time.

Our advice is to follow Hoffman’s lead and risk making other people the heroes of your leadership story. 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 your success, your way to go faster and farther than you ever could on your own. That’s the transformative impact of empowerment leadership.

Empowerment leadership

It all starts, we believe, with trust. Trust creates the conditions for other people to be guided by you, which is the focus of chapter 2. 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.

We summarize this worldview in figure 1-2, which also provides the structure for the book. 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). This is our take on what we call empowerment leadership, and it’s the ride we’ll go on together over the course of this book.

In other words, the first step on the leadership path—once you can reliably build trust—is to create a context where the people around you can thrive. This requires you to set high standards and reveal deep devotion at the same time, a nontrivial challenge we call love and the idea we explore in chapter 3. To create a context where teams thrive, however, requires something more. 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. This is the essence of belonging and the theme of chapter 4.

Mastering trust, love, and belonging—the core competencies of empowerment leadership—is an extraordinary achievement. But practicing them requires you to be present for the action (or at least not missing from it for long) and limits your impact to the people you can directly influence. The most successful leaders are influencing people far beyond their direct reach and intensely aware that success depends on what happens in their absence. Which brings us to the outer rings of our model: strategy and culture. 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.

One leader who embodies this approach is the wildly effective Claire Hughes Johnson, chief operating officer of the payments company Stripe. 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.”6 Those decisions, we argue in chapters 5 and 6, are guided primarily by strategy and culture. (See the sidebar “Less Control, More Command: Empowerment Leadership in Action.”)

It’s hard to overstate the emotional power of being unleashed by someone. Most people can remember, even with the watery recall of a distant memory, what it felt like when a teacher or coach or friend made it clear that they saw something better inside us. It’s electrifying to be seen not only as we are, rare enough in its own right, but also as the people we might become. When Lisa Skeete Tatum founded Landit, a breakthrough professional development company, she created a space where women and people of color could dwell on their future selves and be valued for their potential. Even a single session with a Landit coach has been described to us as “life-changing.”

One female CEO we worked with could summon with spectacular detail a brief exchange with one of her business school professors, who answered a simple clarifying question after class by saying, “Well, when you’re a CEO one day … ” This woman’s highest aspiration at the time was to go back to the consulting firm that paid for her degree and get on track to a midlevel advisory role. It had never occurred to her that she might one day have the audacity to lead a company. In describing the memory to us, now decades old, she could remember the shirt she was wearing that day, how the classroom lighting reflected off the carpeting she was standing on, how her mind canceled out the noise around her for a few seconds as she absorbed the comment. 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.”

The heady truth is that we all have the ability to release the energy of possibility in someone else’s life. For a feel-good illustration of the kind of magic that can happen when you make this choice, consider the runaway success of the show Queer Eye. Hosted by a team of five talented lifestyle experts (four identify as gay men, one as gender nonbinary), the show invites viewers into the lives of real-life “hero” protagonists who—with the experts’ help—transform their wardrobes, grooming, interior design, eating habits, and often their relationships with work and family.

It all makes for good television, with lots of big reveals and before-and-after moments. But the thing that makes these transformations possible is something that all of us can offer: the unapologetic belief in a better version of someone. By the end of the episode, what’s different for each hero is that they also believe in that better version of themselves.

Getting out of your own head

Counterintuitively, an “other” orientation can be harder to sustain for people who represent marginalized groups, one of the reasons we love the Queer Eye example. The show’s hosts often work their magic in spaces where queer identities are rare and sometimes unwelcome, where they have good reason to retreat to a position of self-preservation. Instead, the opposite happens. They show up exposed and emotionally generous, putting everything they’ve got into unleashing someone else.

Underrepresented leaders sometimes have a harder time looking beyond themselves in a world that still questions, at times, whether who we are may be disqualifying. As two women who check a few unconventional boxes (for example, we’re married to each other), we’ve had our own experiences of costly self-distraction.

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. One setting that took us years to embrace as inclusive leaders was formal gatherings of colleagues more senior to us. 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. In our attempt to protect the more vulnerable flesh underneath, we would show up in ways—sometimes too timid, other times too brash—that materially reduced our chance of influence.

That’s the irony of many of the tactics we use to protect ourselves as leaders. They can backfire and undermine the perceptions we’re working so hard to cultivate. 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.

We’ve spent too much of our own careers caring what other people think of us, of our identities as gay women, of the strength of Frances’s opinions or the way Anne’s voice sometimes shakes when she feels strongly about something. First of all, to be clear, while some people have occasionally held those things against us, most people didn’t notice, didn’t care, or actually preferred interacting with the raw, unvarnished versions of us. More important, if our ambition was to lead, then we were asking the wrong question. 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. It’s the unapologetic part of this. Think conductor or director rather than star of the show. Your job is to make Oscar-worthy movies about other people. (See the sidebar “Wait, Can’t It Sometimes Be about Me?”)

Getting started: How about now?

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. 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 arguably describes a lot of what happens in today’s default employer-employee dynamic.

Leadership is predicated on the idea that human beings can adapt and that we can play an important role in each other’s adaptation. 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.

There are countless ways to tell someone what you see in them, and we recommend experimenting with signals that feel authentic to you. For example, spotlight their work in a meeting, or ask them for advice before they’ve “earned” the right to give it, or offer them your full, device-free attention, a strikingly powerful gesture in this pandemic of digital distraction that we’re all living through right now. 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.

To help people practice this leadership skill, one of our favorite exercises is to send them out into the world as ambassadors of other people’s awesomeness (OPA).c It works like this: choose someone in whom you see some kind of talent, however big or small, and find a 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. While you’re at it, go ahead and generate some unexpected joy. Talk to different kinds of people, from loved ones to colleagues to strangers you happen to catch in the act of expressing their gifts. Include people who are like you and people who are not, both demographically and from the standpoint of worldview and personality.

Be sure to include at least one person who is convinced that they are past their alleged prime, someone who believes they peaked years or even decades ago. As you’ll discover out on the OPA trail, people don’t stop reacting powerfully to being seen once they reach full adulthood and its corresponding delusion that they’ve stopped evolving as people. Indeed, in our experience, it can be even more impactful for seasoned professionals to be reminded of their capacity for unrestrained growth.

The unapologetic leader

An extraordinary amount of energy is being stored up in the distance between who we are and who we might become. In 2017, Gallup did a survey of the American workplace that found that close to 70 percent of employees are not engaged at work.8 Pause and take that number in, even its directional implications. This means that most of us are walking around with mostly unused capacity most of the time, and it is nothing less than an astonishing opportunity cost. 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.

This revolution will require us to change the way we think about leadership. Paul Revere earned glory by tearing through the Massachusetts countryside, but the real plot point in leadership history is what happened next, the men and women who stepped out into the streets of Lexington and Concord to determine their own destinies.d We believe you can trace a line from their courage to the hundreds of civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, to the thousands who lined up behind Gandhi and marched for self-rule, to the millions of global supporters of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and their assertions of a universal right to dignity, regardless of who you are.

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? This book is about choosing the second path, unapologetically. It’s about what leaders say and do and feel when they’re at their most effective. It’s about leadership as an adventure of infinite possibility, one that starts by honoring the true (and ancient) art of empowering everyone around you. Once you make that shift in perspective, then the next set of questions is about the practical ways to pull it all off. We begin that conversation in chapter 2, the first ring of our leadership framework. Empowerment begins, we believe, with trust.

GUT CHECK

Questions for Reflection

• Why are you reading this book? Why is it worth your time and energy to get better at the practice of leadership?
• How does the performance of other people change when you’re around? If you observe any patterns, write them down.
• In your capacity as a leader, how much of your time do you spend thinking about yourself and your own needs versus other people and their needs?
• 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?