A reflection work is a conversational form of writing that

A reflection work is a conversational form of writing that encourages you to think about your own thinking in relation to other people’s thinking, so all can learn to think better.

Choose 2 articles from the list of readings posted on MOODLE under the “Course Readings and Resources” tab. Then write just 1 reflection work of 750 words, considering the following provocative questions – What did you think about the article? How does it help you better understand yourself as a leader? What insights did you gain about the world and the topic of leadership? How will you apply what you learned from the article in your life and leadership?

NOTE: All work must be clearly written and contain no APA 7/spelling/grammatical errors.

Leadership is about ideas and actions. Put simply, it is about implementing new ideas into creative

actions to achieve desired results. Doing so, however, is far from simple. We know leadership re-

quires considerable skills and abilities. It requires knowledge and insight—about one’s organization

or entity, its people, goals, strengths and market niche. Yet, something more is needed. Leadership

also requires a kind of awareness beyond the immediate, an awareness of the larger pictures—of

paradigms that direct us, beliefs that sustain us, values that guide us and principles that motivate us,

our worldviews.

This article will, first, briefly examine how the concept of worldviews is used in leadership study

and the contexts in which it arises. Second, it will critically look at worldviews, recognizing that they

are not always coherent and that our belief systems are often fragmented and incomplete. Third, it

will argue for the relevance of the concept worldview in leadership study as a way to explore vari-

ous visions of life and ways of life that may be helpful in overcoming the challenges we face today.

Fourth, it will examine how national and global issues impact worldview construction, especially

among the millennial generation. Our conclusions set some directions for leadership action in light

of worldview issues.

W O R L D V I E W S A N D

L E A D E R S H I P : T H I N K I N G

A N D A C T I N G T H E B I G G E R

P I C T U R E S

JOHN VALK, STEPHAN BELDING, ALICIA CRUMPTON,
NATHAN HARTER, AND JONATHAN REAMS

JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES, Volume 5, Number 2, 2011
©2011 University of Phoenix
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI:10.1002/jls.20218

JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls 55

as well as the effect of dispelling earlier assumptions of
an overriding homogeneous and uniform worldview
embraced by all.

At this point the concept of worldview is often used
interchangeably with terms such as mental models, par-
adigms, organizing devices, contexts, and operating systems
(Beck & Cowan, 1996; Klenke, 2008). A worldview is
seen as serving a particular function, encompassing
deeply held beliefs about reality that shape and influ-
ence how individuals think and act. Worldviews deter-
mine priorities and reinforce one’s view of reality and
of what is true and right (Barrett, 2006; Ciulla, 2000;
Hames, 2007). Yet, where it has focused specifically on
worldviews, leadership study has confined it largely to
religious and spiritual worldviews as applied to indi-
viduals and groups or organizations (Hicks, 2003;
Lindsey, 2007). It has left numerous secular world-
views largely unexamined.

The concept of worldview does surface within lead-
ership development. It is recognized that a person’s life
context shapes how one develops—altering one’s
life context alters one’s course of development (Luthans &
Avolio, 2003). Further, each person interprets and as-
signs significance of meaning to different events, which
in turn become a lens through which we view the world
around us (Avolio, 2005). These are what Gadamer,
Weinsheimer, and Marshall (2004) called prejudices:
points of view that define our immediate horizon of un-
derstanding. Self-awareness, or learning to identify and
understand one’s own worldview, becomes a cornerstone
of leadership, for a leader’s worldview impacts an or-
ganization and those that operate within it. From the
perspective of leaders as change agents, this becomes
particularly important. Leaders assist others in creating
and making sense of their experience and in so doing
“reconstruct reality” and “recompose truths” (Drath,
2001, pp. 144, 147).

How Robust Is the Idea of
“Worldviews”?
As scholars begin to incorporate the idea of worldviews
in leadership study, some may ask whether the concept
itself is sufficiently robust at this point for leadership study.
Setting aside for the time being the particular content of a
worldview, as well as the degree of one’s commitment to a

The Concept of Worldviews in
Leadership Studies
Multiple ways of knowing and cross-cultural literacy are
goals of leadership. As such, leadership study requires
broad awareness in order to build bridges of understand-
ing. It necessitates worldview literacy and the ability to
communicate in plural and diverse settings. Essentially,
it encourages awareness of one’s own view or vision of
life as a means to better engage with others. Awareness
of diverse views or perspectives is necessary so people
can engage in common cause in a multifaceted world
(Drath, 2001).

Worldview is a concept that requires an interdiscipli-
nary, multidisciplinary, and perhaps even transdiscipli-
nary approach to fully understand its tenets and
application. It is overtly and robustly defined in certain
disciplinary areas—religious studies, philosophy, and
anthropology—but is only slowly surfacing in leader-
ship study (Crumpton, 2010). Here, it is used with lim-
ited clarity and consensus, with only some semblance
and points of agreement.

Lack of worldview definitional clarity and precision
within leadership study should not be surprising given
that leadership study has undergone significant para-
digm shifts. Leadership study emerged within the con-
text of modernity and its emphasis on objective
rationality. But it came to be influenced by postmoder-
nity and its emphasis on multiple ways of knowing,
and language and knowledge construction. Today,
much of leadership study embraces what is often re-
ferred to as glocalism, an emphasis on thinking glob-
ally and acting locally (Antonakis, Cianciolo, &
Sternberg, 2004; Burke, 2008; Northouse, 2010;
Schwandt & Szabla, 2007). Leadership study recog-
nizes that increasing cultural and racial diversity have
been brought on by globalism. Further, technology has
opened the door for alternative ways of viewing the
world and the necessity of new leadership practices
such as global or cross-cultural leadership and intercul-
tural communication (Chhokar, Brodbeck, & House,
2009; Rondinelli & Heffron, 2009). As such, the im-
portance of exploring similarities and differences be-
tween worldviews has surfaced. With it comes fostering
self-awareness (what is my worldview?) and the under-
standing of others (what is another person’s worldview?),

56 JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls

Knowledge of words spoken does not automatically
imply understanding; that they make sense to someone
else. Our powers of comprehension or even inference
are not infallible.

A worldview is also dynamic—it changes over time.
Jaspers characterized “the construction of worldviews
as a continuous, lifelong process stimulated by the ex-
perience of disturbance” (cited in Webb, 2009, p. 15).
What one believes and values today can be quite differ-
ent tomorrow. Measuring something that does not hold
still is difficult (Aerts et al., 2007). Kegan refers to these
as “a succession of holding environments” (cited in
Webb, 2009, p. 50). Aerts et al. (2007) maintain that
any worldview is “fragile” (p. 10). Broekaert (1999) em-
ploys the more optimistic term openness—every world-
view is open to revision or even replacement.
Worldviews are dynamic; they can evolve (Vidal, 2007).
Webb (2009) credited Jaspers with insisting that a
worldview is indefinite and fluid, a work in progress.

Woodrow Wilson (1952) wrote about leadership
as an academic administrator. But did the same thoughts
and attitudes prevail in his mind later during his years in
public office? We know certain leaders change their
views because they attest to that change and lead dif-
ferently thereafter as a result. In other situations, of
course, the change might be subtle or even unconscious.
But do changes in some of the views one holds entail a
wholesale change in the worldview one holds?

Many people today are unaware of or have doubts
about their own worldviews. Sociologists refer to this
as anomie, based on the Latin, “being without coherent
wholeness” (Webb, 2009, p. 1). Some seem not to care
whether or not they have a worldview. Noonan (1990)
alleges that U.S. President Ronald Reagan was quite
oblivious to his own worldview. Henry Adams (1999)
said much the same thing about President Ulysses
Grant. Neither man was known for being particularly
introspective. Yet each president in his own way was a
leader. Is awareness of one’s own worldview, therefore,
a precondition for leadership?

It can, nonetheless, be argued that everyone has a
worldview of some sort ( Webb, 2009). Worldviews are
socially constructed over time (Vidal, 2007). The com-
munities to which people belong—religious, social, ed-
ucational, and political—influence what they espouse
(Smith, 2003; Wacquant, 2006). Yet, just as no two

given worldview, a question remains as to whether the
very idea of discussing or incorporating “worldviews” en-
hances leadership study (Webb, 2009). An investigation
into worldviews might begin with an epistemic question
regarding the detection and examination of a worldview.
Can one infer the presence of worldviews? If so, what
can be inferred based on the evidence?

Laing (1967) concluded that the study of the experi-
ences of others will indeed be based on inferences since
no one has direct access to the minds of others. Never-
theless, in ordinary experience, people do believe there
is something there, which suggests there is something
there to interpret. People seem to have reasons for what
they do, even if those reasons turn out to be difficult to
establish. Reasons for action are linked to worldviews.

Dennett (2005) impugns folk psychology, wonder-
ing how anyone can know what somebody else might be
thinking—or whether they are thinking at all. He main-
tains that it is next to impossible to really know some-
one else’s worldview. Even if one does claim to have a
worldview, he or she may well be mistaken as to its
structure and content. He or she may also not neces-
sarily act in light of it.

Dennett’s claims notwithstanding, perhaps most ob-
vious to the notion that a person has a worldview is
what he or she might say about it. Friedrich Nietzsche
(1887/1956), among others, speculated that humans
give reasons for their behavior not because those rea-
sons did in fact lead to particular decisions, but because
of the desire to rationalize behavior after the fact. Do
people admit to a worldview to avoid the truth about a
basis for action they would prefer to disguise or dis-
avow? Might avowals of a worldview be evasions or ra-
tionalizations, disguising what really goes on in the
human mind? Nietzsche was quite suspicious of peo-
ple’s testimony. In fact, Lansky once referred to the
“doubting of surface rationalization that so dramatically
characterizes virtually all of Nietzsche’s work” (1999,
p. 179). The suspicion is that reference to one’s world-
view might be a smokescreen of self-justification,
whether conscious or unconscious. In other words, as-
suming to know someone’s worldview based solely on
what is reported about it can be problematic.

Language itself can be a barrier to effective understand-
ing of the worldviews of others (Aerts et al., 2007). This
holds even when two people speak the same language.

JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls 57

increasingly elaborate and complex—arguably exceeding
any one individual’s powers of explanation. Understand-
ing worldview complexity becomes another challenge for
leadership study (Aerts et al., 2007; Webb, 2009).

There may be more challenges. What role, for in-
stance, do factors such as lust, pride, or greed play in
determining worldviews? We know they can play a
formative role in leadership action, but how constitutive
are they in determining beliefs and values? Do they con-
tribute to worldview incoherence, or even worldview
schizophrenia, potentially creating discrepancies be-
tween espoused belief and concrete action? These factors
may be internal to the individual but nonetheless in-
fluence and shape external behavior.

Worldviews and Their Implications
for Leadership
It was the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won-
derland who said, “If you don’t know where you are
going, any road will get you there.” To rephrase only
slightly, if you do not know your own beliefs and values,
any will do, as will any road or virtual highway. But
thoughtful minds are more discerning. A Lutheran
“Here I stand” or a Gandhian “Be the change that you
want to see in the world” requires careful reflection in
order to achieve the world we need or want, for the
world we need or want is crucially linked to our world-
view—our beliefs and values. Leadership for action re-
quires reflection on our worldviews.

In light of the challenges posed in regard to use of
the concept of worldview in leadership study, world-
view development, or “know thyself ” as the Oracle of
Delphi decreed, is crucial for studying the past, assess-
ing the present, and planning for the future. Worldview
development, however, must also be linked to compar-
ative religionist Max Muller’s dictum, “He who knows
one, knows none”: knowledge of one’s own worldview
cannot be accomplished without some knowledge of
those of others (cited in Sharpe, 1975, p. 36).

G. K. Chesterton argued that “the most practical and
important thing about a man is his view of the universe”
(1986, p. 41). According to Parks (1991), humans have
an inherent desire to make sense of their universe: we are
meaning-makers. We need and desperately want to make
sense of our world: to compose/dwell in some conviction

people are the same, so no two worldviews are the same.
No matter how thick the spirit of homonoia or like-
mindedness, there will always be at least some variation
(Webb, 2009). Further, worldviews are not ascribed ex-
clusively to individuals; a community can also be de-
fined by a particular worldview (Aerts et al., 2007;
Webb, 2009). Thus, one can speak of a collective world-
view influencing individual worldviews and that indi-
vidual worldviews can also influence a collective
worldview.

In all of this, worldviews require interpretation. Here,
two challenges present themselves. First, any interpreta-
tion of a worldview will be filtered through the world-
view of the interpreter (Klüver, 1926). An investigator
must recognize and take into account that he or she,
too, has a worldview. That worldview serves as a lens or
framework through which the worldview of another is
interpreted and described. The existence, character, and
content of one’s own worldview do not imply anything
similar in regard to that of another person. One is ill
advised to jump too quickly from the content of one’s
own mind to inferences about the content of another.

Second, worldviews can often be fundamentally inco-
herent, inconsistent, and unclear (Aerts et al., 2007).
They may be tattered, makeshift constructs that make
some sense of daily life, but may also be little more than
evolutionary truces or temporary versions of an adopted
worldview, as Kegan (1982) inferred. Worldviews may
be partial—comprised of bits and pieces that lack ap-
parent connection. They may be filled with unresolved
contradictions and may change over time. A person’s
worldview may resemble a patchwork of evolving sub-
worldviews and not something coherent and complete,
a notion consistent with the pluralistic imagery es-
poused by James (1909/1996).

Yet, any concept is an abstraction from lived reality
and certain features will be included and others ex-
cluded. No worldview is so elaborate as the reality it at-
tempts to depict. That is impossible, and misses the
point of worldview construction ( Whitehead, 1938,
1951). Worldviews, however articulate or inarticulate,
coherent or incoherent, complete or incomplete, are ab-
stractions of the world in which we live. But worldview
development is the very act of overcoming inarticulate-
ness, incoherence, and incompleteness (McKenzie,
1991). What is constructed will invariably become

58 JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls

academic disciplines attempt to understand, identify,
and describe larger patterns of thinking and/or acting,
frequently employing the term worldview in the process
(Foltz, 2003; Kriger & Seng, 2005; Sire, 2004).

These larger patterns of thinking or worldviews come
with totalizing narratives: assertions or explanations of
“the way the world is” as seen from a particular perspec-
tive. But all perspectives require interpretation, for real-
ity and a particular view of it are not synonymous. No
one stands at the mountaintop. For this reason, our
worldview is necessarily a “leap of faith” about the na-
ture of reality, which requires at minimum a small meas-
ure of humility and a great deal of interpretation.

Perhaps it has been the reluctance to distinguish real-
ity from its interpretations that has led postmodernism
to reject the totalizing or meta-narratives often implied
or assumed in worldviews, arguing that these narratives,
if not the worldviews themselves, need to be decon-
structed for what they really are—struggles for power,
control, and domination. History is replete with such
worldview struggles, and the current era is no different.
Yet, it would be an oversimplification to assert that all
attempts to understand one’s own worldview or those of
others automatically translate into struggles for or pre-
sumptions of moral, religious, cultural, and economic
superiority. In leadership studies a genuine desire to un-
derstand “the other,” in order to better know the self,
might be more appropriate as we come increasingly to
recognize ourselves as citizens of a global world.

Reflection on our visions of life and our ways of life—
on what we believe and value and why, and the partic-
ular kinds of directives and actions that result from
them—is important in the academic training of lead-
ers, especially when postmodern fears of distinguishing
differences will lead to pursuits of power, attitudes of
superiority, or false notions of what is real and true.
That became apparent in issues surfacing at the 1993
World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago. Ingham
(1997) mentions that leading scientists stated, in a sur-
prising turn of events, that solutions to the world’s
biggest challenges lay not in more political action, better
technology, or increased economic initiatives. Solutions,
they argued, lay rather in guidance from some of the
world’s most respected spiritual leaders. Tapping into
the wisdom of the past, understanding its relevance
for the present, and allowing it to guide us into the

of what is ultimately true (Peterson, 2001). In the
process, we create things, ideas, stories, and experiences
that speak to some of the deepest realities of our lives.
The result is “worldview construction”—creating mean-
ing in a world that can appear confusing and meaning-
less (McKenzie, 1991; Naugle, 2002). Worldviews are
thus meaningful visions of life.

Worldviews are also ways of life. Everyone has a con-
scious or subconscious way of acting and behaving in
the world based on particular beliefs and values. These
may be known, articulated, or discerned by individu-
als or groups to greater or lesser degrees. Achieving con-
sistency and congruency in our visions and ways of life
is challenging: We all readily profess one thing and do
another. Beliefs can be loosely adhered to, incompatible,
or in tension, leading to inconsistent or contradictory
action: “talking our walk” does not always match “walk-
ing our talk” (Olsen et al., 1992; Olthuis, 1985). This
may readily reflect human weakness but does not erode
the need to be anchored in some coherent sense of the
reality we experience.

The reality that we experience does, of course,
change. As our reality changes, so does our understand-
ing of ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit. In
some cases, our worldview changes dramatically but
more often than not it is aspects of our worldview that
are expanded and deepened. Core philosophical, onto-
logical, or epistemological aspects are seldom discarded
or abandoned. Further, giving articulation to our world-
views is not easy. Often, philosophers, theologians, or
poets express what others may only feel or believe in-
tuitively. As such, they become spokespersons, leaders,
or individuals of great influence, of which Socrates,
Martin Luther King Jr., or Vaclav Havel are but a few
examples.

When we hear and read of perceptions of the world
expressed by persons of great influence, or even others,
we come to recognize that those perceptions or perspec-
tives can be considerably different. The worldview per-
spectives of a Richard Dawkins, Donald Trump, or Karl
Marx, for example, differ radically from those of a
Desmond Tutu, Chief Seattle, or the Dalai Lama: They
are simply not the same and we know it. We also see
them played out. We come to know that Capitalism,
Communism, and Confucianism differ from one
another both as visions of life and ways of life. Various

JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls 59

future may greatly assist us in overcoming our greatest
challenges. It has been noted, sadly, however, that the
depths of wisdom offered by many of the world’s tra-
ditional religious worldviews, each accustomed to ask-
ing life’s so-called “ultimate or existential questions,”
are accessed by only a very small percentage of leaders
today (Valk et al., 2010).

Asking these big questions in regard to business devel-
opments, political action, international relations, and
concern for the environment might well, however, lead
to some startling discussions and revelations. Incorpo-
rating worldview study into leadership study might, for
example, change our notions and understandings of
wealth and wealth creation. The capitalistic drive to gen-
erate wealth might lead from a narrow focus on maxi-
mizing profit to a broader one that includes living wages
for workers, healthy families, and sustainable environ-
ments. Engaging multiple perspectives or worldviews
can enhance dialogue as debates of intense public in-
terest play out in the public square.

It is also in engaging multiple perspectives in the pub-
lic square that we need to increase our critical aware-
ness of the different perspectives that are part of our
plural society. Fixating on “Christianity lite” or “Bud-
dhism lite” renders only dumbed-down and distorted
versions crafted for media sound bites or scoring points
in public debates. In-depth leadership study must avoid
cheapened versions, opting rather to plumb the depths
of various perspectives to extract wisdom so desperately
needed in our society today.

Critical awareness is also required to achieve balance.
Careful scrutiny is needed in discerning when, for ex-
ample, consumer capitalism’s desire to generate wealth
throughout the world digresses to little more than a
dominant strategy to increase world market share and
seek cheap labor in order to maximize profits (Wexler,
2006), or when religious worldviews focused exclusively
on the spiritual neglect the impoverished reality of their
devotees. Open dialogue and discernment involving
multiple perspectives will assist in distinguishing true
human needs and longings from those that are con-
trived, truncated, and insatiable. Discussions also should
not be confined to national boundaries or single disci-
plines: economic issues are at the same time environ-
mental, cultural, spiritual, religious, scientific, and
political.

As we deal with the challenges of the 21st century,
clearer senses of purpose and direction are required—in
essence, clearer visions linked to specific actions. Inves-
tigating the bigger pictures—worldviews of self and
others—will give guidance and direction to leaders in
new or unique ways. We live in a global world. Chal-
lenges and issues confronted by one organization, re-
gion, or nation invariably become global challenges and
issues. Just as leadership must extend beyond the narrow
confines of one’s own organization, it must also extend
beyond the narrow confines of one’s own perspective.
As well, it must dissuade giving prominent voice to
those with worldviews that dominate and distort, dis-
tain and detract, impede and restrict. Rather, opportu-
nities ought to be created for those with visions that
strive for balance, have concern for the common good,
are understanding of others, and discern paths needed
to create the world we truly need or want. This becomes
most relevant as dynamics unfold at a larger national
and international scale. Those dynamics are beginning
to shape individual and collective worldviews in ways
not previously experienced, and the changes are impact-
ing some generations more than others.

Worldviews and Generational
Change
Winston Churchill once said that “the longer you can
look back, the farther you can look forward” (Langworth,
2008, p. 577). Amidst the current global economic cri-
sis there is a need to examine and learn from the past
mistakes of the global consumer capitalist worldview in
order not to perpetuate those mistakes in the future. Ig-
noring the past and looking only to the future may be
a human tendency, but it is fraught with shortsighted-
ness. Can a people, nation, or organization truly move
forward without continually examining its presupposi-
tions and paradigms?

According to Strauss and Howe (1991, 1997) and
Howe and Nadler (2010), we are living in a period of
“civic crisis.” The West is confronted with environmen-
tal devastation, economic downturns, social upheavals,
housing crises, civic unrest, and political polarization
in a manner not seen for some time. While most of this
turmoil is not new on the human stage, what is new
is the extent of its reach in the information age. Crises

60 JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES • Volume 5 • Number 2 • DOI:10.1002/jls

networking occurring across cultural, national, and
worldview divides on a scale never witnessed before.
Fourth, family is again seen as the ultimate safety net,
largely out of economic necessity in light of a weaken-
ing or collapsing of public support mechanisms. Rela-
tionships of intergenerational trust are emphasized and
strengthened, with less focus on materialism and money as
primary drivers. Finally, diversification, which nets knowl-
edge and fluency in languages, cultures, and technology,
is stressed. A generalist with survival skills may have an
edge over specialists with focused skills (Strauss & Howe,
1997).

Strauss and Howe (1997) make the case that the
worldviews of Millennials are more globally focused, a
shift from the individual to the community. Social net-
working takes them outside national borders to the
global stage, where technology provides open channels
for communication and information sharing to all parts
of the world. They exhibit a common willingness to col-
laborate among all nationalities, working together to
help solve societies problems in ways that will benefit
all (Bradley, 2010; Hernandez, 2008; Howe & Strauss,
2007).

Franklin Roosevelt once remarked that the objectives
of his generation of young people had changed away
from “a plethora of riches” to one of a “sufficiency of
life”—an advancement “along a broad highway on
which thousands of your fellow men and women are
advancing with you” (Roosevelt & Hardman, 1944,
p. 243). For the Millennials, this highway is the virtual
one, the World Wide Web that has facilitated commu-
nication in real time across the globe. Its ability to reach
the far corners of our world has seen a transformation
that bodes well for the Millennials as they spread their
community-based leadership and action across our
world, in essence, as they spread their worldview.

Conclusion
There is an extensive if not diverse use of the concept of
worldview in scholarly literature. That use has also
slowly begun to emerge in the leadership literature. The
need to link this literature and get beneath the casual
uses of the concept becomes paramount. The forego-
ing begins a process of laying out the parameters neces-
sary to link worldviews and leadership in a scholarly
manner.

played out on the world stage are today visible in our
very living rooms. But according to Strauss and Howe,
they impact different generations in different ways.
They have formative influence on the worldview devel-
opment of younger generations and increasingly so.

Generational scholars have characterized the large
postwar Baby Boom generation as predominantly self-
focused—inward-looking to fulfill individual needs
(Dychtwald, 2005; Howe & Nadler, 2010; Strauss &
Howe, 1991, 1997). The Baby Boom generation has
been privileged with tremendous social mobility, eco-
nomic growth, political liberty, and individual freedom
of the last half-century. But they have also witnessed
environmental …

Winning the Talent Hunt

This excerpt taken from – “Learning to Lead: The Journey to Leading Yourself, Leading Others,
and Leading an Organization” (pp. 197-198) by Ron Williams.

How to Build Your Team
One way to define leadership is the art of achieving things through other people.
To make that possible, you have to learn how to recruit, train, and motivate the
most talented working team possible. Here are some ideas about how to make it
happen.

One of the most crucial challenges you’ll face as a leader is the development of
an empowered, highly motivated team—a team that is capable of achieving
extraordinary things even in the most challenging circumstances. To create such
a team, the leader must always remember that the people he works with are
even more important than the job or the organization and its problems, and
behave accordingly. Several basic skills are involved in building your team of
miracle workers. These include learning how to set expectations rather than
simply issuing demands, being able to accurately read and describe reality rather
than being imprisoned by false assumptions, and putting people first rather than
killing their zeal through indifference, as many would-be leaders do. These
fundamental leadership techniques add up to what I call people-centered
leadership. Applying them can help to transform a seemingly modest collection of
talent into a team of world beaters. Of course, a fundamental element in building
your team is recruiting and hiring the right people in the first place. Doing that
isn’t quite as simple as many leaders appear to assume.

THE VALUE OF INCLUSION: IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT DEMOGRAPHICS
A leader should recruit a team that complements the leader’s own strengths—
and compensates for any weaknesses—rather than simply mirroring the leader’s
personality. Especially in times of stress and turmoil, the smart leader recognizes
the power of attracting team members whose unique perspectives may offer
fresh problem-solving approaches that the organization desperately needs. For
this reason, some of the most common ways of thinking about the recruiting and
hiring process are dangerous, even potentially fatal, to the effort to build a
powerful team. For example, many hiring managers and human resources

professionals talk about “cultural fit” as an important element in selecting new
employees. In one sense, this is correct: You want to have a clear sense of the
values that your organization seeks to embody, and you want to attract people
who generally share those values and will be proud to help you uphold them.

Thus, at Aetna, we tried to hire people who truly cared about the health-care
needs of ordinary individuals and would always aspire to making sure that our
customers and clients would be treated with respect and consideration. But all
too often, leaders use the word “fit” to describe people who are culturally and
personally similar to an organization’s current employees—the kinds of people
they are accustomed to working with and whom they might enjoy hanging out
with in the company cafeteria or on off-site retreats. This in turn tends to morph
into a search for people who come from the same background as the leaders—
who grew up in the same kind of neighborhood, went to the same kind of college,
studied the same kinds of subjects, and have the same kinds of personal tastes
and interests. When they find a job candidate who gives them this kind of warm-
and-fuzzy feeling, they say, “He really looks as though he’ll fit in here!” or “I can
definitely see her becoming a part of our team!” Conversely, people involved in
the hiring process often use vague observations like “I’m not sure he fits in to this
department” or “I don’t think she’s ready for the assignment” as a way of vetoing
a particular candidate. I don’t believe in blocking an opportunity for an otherwise
well-qualified candidate based on such data-free comments. I think a leader
should challenge remarks of this sort by asking probing questions: What exactly
do you mean? In what specific way is he unready? What particular skills do you
think are missing? Can you give me an example of what you are saying? These
sorts of questions gently force people to “get real” about the hiring process rather
than falling back on empty assertions about “fit” that often amount to nothing
more than “I kinda like her! Let’s hire her.”

More important, the search for “fit” can hurt your quest to build the most powerful,
effective team. In practice, it often means avoiding people with new perspectives,
ideas, approaches, and personal styles—which can be a big mistake. Hiring
people who are in the same mold as everyone else in the organization strongly
reduces the odds of getting the kind of innovative, out-of-the-box thinking that
makes reframing possible. In an age when change and adaptation are among the
chief imperatives for every organization, choosing people in a way that reinforces

the path of least resistance is a recipe for long-term decline. Instead, I suggest
you make a deliberate effort to choose people who are different from those you
already employ. This is about much more than just demographic diversity. Yes,
it’s valuable to build a workforce that includes people of differing ethnic, racial,
religious, and class backgrounds, as well as people of different genders and of
varying sexual orientations.

The best way to understand the needs and values of customers from every
background is to have employees from every background who speak their
language and understand their experiences. But the deepest value of diversity is
derived from cultural and intellectual inclusion, not just demographic variation.
When employees with a wide range of different sensibilities offer fresh
perspectives on the organization and its mission, it helps you tap new sources of
knowledge and creativity that will enable your organization to thrive and grow.

When you approach the recruiting challenge with this in mind, you avoid the trap
of hiring too many people in your own image. Instead, you open your doors to the
broadest possible candidate pool, and you develop the ability to recognize and
appreciate talent no matter where you find it or what it may look like on the
surface. In many cases, the most effective leadership teams involve “odd couple”
combinations of individuals who seem, at first glance, wildly different, even
incompatible—but who have complementary skills that, taken together, provide
exactly what the organization needs to succeed. At Aetna, Jack Rowe and I
formed such a team. When the headhunter for Aetna originally called Rowe to
ask if he would be interested in joining the company, he was incredulous. “Are
you kidding? I’m suing Aetna!” he replied. That was more or less true. One
symptom of the problems Aetna was having with its physician stakeholders was
several lawsuits against the company, one of which had been brought by Mount
Sinai, where Rowe was president. Recognizing the seriousness of this issue,
Aetna was determined to fix it, which was why they were recruiting their “enemy,”
not only to join but to lead the Aetna team. Rowe knew the world of medicine
inside and out. But he knew little about insurance and had never studied
management, although his role with Mount Sinai called for considerable
leadership and organizational skills. When he agreed to take on the
chairmanship of Aetna, Rowe knew he needed to complement his own talents
with a second-in-command whose aptitudes and knowledge were drastically

different from his own. Rowe recalls: I needed someone who understood
everything about the nuts and bolts of health insurance—someone capable of
taking the engine apart, spreading out all 250 parts on the floor of the garage,
and putting it back together better than before. And then, when the key was
inserted and turned, we needed to be sure the engine would start! So we started
searching for that kind of guy—a person who understood the atomic structure of
insurance right down to individual products and the markets they served. I could
help formulate a top-down vision for our industry. But I couldn’t make it real
without the help of a bottom-up guy. Rowe and I became a highly effective team.
I could take the broad ideas we developed, translate them into practical, concrete
steps, and then show people how to implement them. I had the patience and
fortitude needed to stick with the task until all the thousands of tiny
administrative, organizational, and systemic pieces were fitting together and
operating smoothly. Our complementary strengths and our mutual respect
enabled us to effectively guide the company’s turnaround.

Working with Rowe reinforced my appreciation for pursuing inclusion in hiring—
not by checking off demographic traits on a list, but by recruiting people who
differ from you rather than people you are “comfortable with.” When you cast a
wider talent net, you’re likely to hire people with a less traditional image—in
terms of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and other characteristics—but more
important, they will bring varied backgrounds, perspectives, insights, and gifts to
the challenges you face. The result: fresher ideas, greater creativity, and a higher
rate of successful innovation. With this kind of inclusion in mind, as president and
CEO of Aetna, I consciously recruited and promoted team members who were
nontraditional. Even before I joined Aetna, the company had many successful
female managers, and I maintained and expanded this emphasis. I also looked
for smart, talented people with unusual business backgrounds and then tried
slotting them into assignments that would give them a chance to grow in new
ways. For example, I took Kim Keck out of Aetna’s finance department and gave
her the job as my chief of staff. She had to take a crash course in the entire
structure of our corporation, which she knew little about before. But working with
me, she quickly got up to speed and used her people skills, her communication
talents, and her leadership instincts to become an amazingly effective right-hand
person for me. As I’ve mentioned, Keck has since gone on to become a CEO in
her own right.

DEMOGRAPHIC INCLUSION: IT STILL MATTERS
I’ve been emphasizing the importance of intellectual and cultural diversity when
building your organization’s team. But demographic inclusion based on concrete
traits like race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and disability is also important. Surveys
show that many Americans—especially white Americans—assume that racial
prejudice is a matter of ancient history, that programs of affirmative action have
long since equalized the opportunities available to people of all races, and that
therefore deliberate efforts to encourage encourage racial inclusion in US
businesses are, at best, unnecessary, and, at worst, divisive and harmful. These
assumptions ignore the reality that people of color are still quite rare in American
boardrooms and executive suites. They ignore, too, the fact that efforts to
integrate US society began only recently in historical terms. I mentioned earlier
that landmark laws and court rulings eliminating legal segregation occurred
during my own lifetime (and in fact have yet to be fully implemented in practice). I
am a member of the first generation of black Americans to enter historically white
institutions—colleges, universities, social organizations, and businesses—in
significant numbers. Like practically all other black Americans, I’m familiar with
the experience of being the only person of color in a conference room or lecture
hall filled with white people. I’m profoundly aware of how awkward and
disconcerting it can be to feel culturally isolated from those around you; to
encounter no natural role models or mentors when entering a new environment;
to be the subject of embarrassing questions, comments, looks, and assumptions;
and to be accepted, if at all, merely as a token representative of “my people” who
is supposed to speak for an entire race rather than simply myself.

At the time I started my business career, few black Americans held leadership
positions. Those who’d managed to climb a few rungs up the corporate ladder
were often confined to a handful of specialized departments—human resources,
community relations, “special markets” (a term often used as a euphemism for
“black customers”). These were mostly staff jobs rather than line jobs, which
meant they were viewed as cost centers rather than profit centers. Those who
held these positions had extremely limited growth opportunities and were highly
vulnerable to layoffs in times of financial stress, since they weren’t believed to be
generating profits for the corporation. The real power centers in most companies
were off-limits to blacks, so virtually no CEOs, chief financial officers, chief
marketing officers, divisional vice presidents, or factory managers were black.

The reality is that, had I been born just five or ten years earlier, none of the
opportunities that I’ve experienced would have been available. I’ve mentioned
the chance I had to go to a better public school outside of Chicago because of
my grades. During and after college, I was able to get jobs at the Federal
Reserve and in the Illinois governor’s office. These were all opportunities that
simply hadn’t existed for black Americans of previous generations. I have a
tremendous amount of appreciation for those people who dedicated their lives to
creating the social changes that opened those doors. Yet today, fifty years after
the heyday of the civil rights movement, the process of creating a society in
which all Americans have equal opportunities has barely begun.

Black executives lead only a handful of major US corporations—for example,
three in the Fortune 500. (For the record, they are Merck, headed by Kenneth
Frazier; TIAA, headed by Roger Ferguson Jr.; and Lowe’s, headed by Marvin
Ellison.) Until the retirement in May 2017 of my friend Ursula Burns, Xerox was
also on this list. Importantly, Burns was also the first black woman to serve as a
Fortune 500 CEO. The United States has done much to break down institutional
barriers between races in recent decades. But the work of creating true diversity,
and of taking full advantage of the rich variation in perspectives and life
experiences that Americans of all backgrounds offer, is far from complete. For
these reasons, as Aetna’s CEO, I put my weight behind the traditional kinds of
demographically oriented diversity programs, which helped to bring fresh talent
and new thinking to the company. I chaired Aetna’s corporate diversity council, an
unusual step for a CEO, and made sure it included many of the company’s most
important executives—the directors of purchasing and marketing and the chief IT
officer, for example. We urged Aetna’s vendors—outside companies that
provided us with services such as advertising, media, printing, accounting,
investment banking, consulting, and legal advice—to create inclusive client
services teams so people from many backgrounds could learn about our
business and provide us with their unique insights. Also, within Aetna, we created
affinity groups to address the needs of specific sectors of our workforce and to
represent their interests in the company’s councils. We had affinity groups for
black Americans, working parents, and veterans, among others. Encouraging
and supporting these groups, listening carefully to their concerns, and helping to
address their problems made it easier for Aetna to draw on the talents of a wide

array of people—all of whom had something important to contribute to our long-
term mission as a company.

I also pushed the envelope on racial awareness through an occasional personal
gesture. For example, I made a point of inviting several top Aetna executives to
the annual Golf & Tennis Challenge, a networking event hosted by Black
Enterprise magazine. I suspected these colleagues of mine—who happened to
be white—might find it interesting and eye-opening to spend a weekend as
members of a racial minority group (since the vast majority majority of attendees
at the Golf & Tennis Challenge are black). They did. A number commented about
the awkwardness they felt, the difficulty in launching conversations, and the
anxiety about saying and doing “the right thing” in an unfamiliar cultural setting.
Several years later thanked me, commenting on the greater sense of empathy
they now felt for people of color.

When you have the opportunity to help select new people to join your
organization, I urge you to consider inclusion of all kinds as part of the
recruitment and hiring process. We live in a world where people from every
background are important—as customers, suppliers, investors, and fellow
citizens. So organizations need input and contributions from people of all kinds—
and the most successful businesses are likely to be those that draw on the
widest possible pool of talent. If Silicon Valley wants to make significant progress
on this front, companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook need to
make inclusion a high priority. Rather than delegating the job, their CEOs should
devote some portion of their own time and energy to leading the charge. They
need to insist on considering diverse slates of candidates for every important
position before hiring the best person. When a CEO fails to personally
emphasize and invest time in this effort, it sends a signal that the issue isn’t really
important. Demographic diversity often pays immediate, short-term benefits. I’ve
seen it happen many times.

Here’s an example. When I was at Blue Cross of California, we were once in
competition with another health-care company for a major contract with a large
corporate client. After both potential suppliers had provided written proposals with
contract terms, costs, and other details, the day came for an extensive
presentation before a group of executives who would make the final decision. I

arrived at the client’s offices with my team from Blue Cross. It included our
network manager, who was a Hispanic man; our chief actuary, an Asian-
American woman; our general manager of geography, another woman; and me,
a black man. In the waiting area outside the boardroom where the big
presentation would take place, we met our counterparts from the rival supplier.
Every member of their team was a blond, blue-eyed male between six feet and
six feet three inches tall. We shook hands and wished one another well—and of
course we couldn’t help noticing the surface differences between the two teams.
Our team from Blue Cross made the second presentation that morning. When we
walked into the room, we saw that the members of the client’s team were as
diverse as we were—there were men and women of various ages, colors, and
ethnic backgrounds waiting to hear our presentation. The team was a cross-
section of the company’s working population—and, like our team, it was also a
cross-section of twenty-first-century America. We immediately felt confident that
we could “speak the language” of everyone in that room. Blue Cross won the
contract.

CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE: THE LEADER SETS THE
PACE
Building your team isn’t only about choosing the right people. It’s also about
creating an organizational culture that enables your team members to give the
best of themselves to the organization. And here again, I return to the theme of
self-leadership. Unless you learn to manage your own time, energy, and focus so
that you are giving one hundred percent to the organization—or even a bit more
than that—you will never be able to get one hundred percent from your team
members. I’m generally recognized as a hard worker. It’s a habit I developed long
ago, going back to when I worked alongside my dad in the car wash. I
maintained that self-discipline during my years in high school, college, and
graduate school, as well as throughout my working career. The habit was
facilitated by the fact that I liked my work. When you are fascinated by the
challenges and problems that crop up every day on the job, then you don’t mind
devoting countless hours to them, even on evenings and weekends—just as an
avid painter, surfer, rock climber, or dancer never gets tired of the long hours they
dedicate to mastering the activity they love. I didn’t necessarily expect the people
who worked for me to put in the same kinds of hours I did. But I did expect them
to devote the time and energy needed to attain the results that the organization

needed and expected. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t, then they needed to find
another job that suited them better, and I needed to replace them with someone
who could pull their weight as a member of our team.

Over the years, I had to learn the right ways to communicate my work
expectations to my team members. I think people sometimes felt intimidated
when they saw how many hours I put in. I guess it can be a bit daunting when
your boss is at his desk before you arrive in the morning, is still there when you
leave in the evening, and sends you work-related emails throughout the weekend
—maybe even in the wee hours of Sunday night. But my intention wasn’t to
impress people or to extract the same level of dedication from them. If a team
member could accomplish everything that was required at a high level of
excellence within the hours of nine and five, more power to them! I became
concerned only when people let the clock dictate the amount of work they put in
rather than obeying the genuine demands of the job. I’ve been told that my style
of relating to my team members was also a bit intimidating. I’ve never been one
for small talk. The typical watercooler chitchat is mostly uninteresting to me. So I
tended not to participate in the usual conversations about movies, family outings,
or the performance of the local sports teams. As a result, people would get the
idea that I was all work and no play—and that I expected the same from my
colleagues. Some even assumed that I was unconcerned about them as people
—that I viewed them simply as cogs in the corporate machine, and that all I
cared about was their productivity. That’s certainly not the message I was trying
to convey.

Reflecting on this issue, I came to realize that my level of focus on the tasks we
needed to accomplish was so high that I needed to raise my level of focus on the
people I worked with as well. When I didn’t do this, the disproportion felt jarring to
those around me. So over the years, I learned to adjust my communication style
to express more accurately my concerns about the people I worked with. I
developed the habit of checking in with people about their family lives and their
personal interests—to ask how an elderly mother was doing or how a teenaged
daughter’s latest track meet went. I even learned to show a little interest in how
the New York Giants football game turned out on Sunday! (Although if the sports
talk dominated the office for more than a few minutes on Monday morning, I was
known to remind my team members that there was work to be done.)

Setting appropriate expectations for your team members involves understanding
their individual capacities. The metaphor of the Navy SEAL that I explained in an
earlier chapter can be helpful here. SEALs and regular Navy sailors are two
different kinds of people with different roles. You bring in your SEALs for crucial,
time-sensitive tasks that require maximum sustained effort for a specific period of
time. Your sailors may be equally talented, but they are steadier and more
capable of working on the same task over a long period of time. To get the most
satisfactory results for the company as well as for the individuals involved, make
sure that both you and your team members recognize the difference and know
which group they fit into best.

Sometimes, setting the right tone is a matter of clearing up misunderstandings.
When I would ask to review my team members’ vacation schedules, they
occasionally thought I was trying to keep tabs on them, or even hinting that a
week in the Caribbean might be excessive. That wasn’t my purpose at all.
Actually, I just wanted to be sure I could anticipate issues that might arise during
their absence so I could avoid interrupting their vacations with emails or phone
calls. Once I realized the confusion I was causing, I found that explaining my real
intention made a big difference in people’s reactions. Still, there were times when
I drove people hard—especially during my early years at Aetna, when the
company was in crisis and we were devising and implementing emergency
measures. Evening and weekend meetings fueled by pizza and cartons of
Chinese take-out were common. For many on my top leadership team, family
lives were disrupted, vacations were short and infrequent, and thoughts about
work and the problems we faced were constant. I know that the stress this
caused on people’s personal lives was real and sometimes quite painful. I hope
and believe that I never exerted more pressure on my team members than was
absolutely necessary to meet the genuine needs of the organization. And I hope,
too, that the rewards we shared over time—both financially and in other, less
tangible forms—made the sacrifices worthwhile. The fact that so many of the
people I worked with during those tough times at Aetna have remained
colleagues and treasured friends of mine suggests that’s the case.

In my latter years as Aetna CEO, people sometimes told me that I seemed to be
“mellowing” as a leader—that I wasn’t quite as demanding and single-minded as
when I first joined the firm. Maybe there’s a bit of truth to that. But more important

is the fact that all the hard work we put in enabled Aetna to get out of crisis mode.
Once the company was on an even keel, there was less need for evening and
weekend sessions and emergency meetings to put out the latest fires. What’s
more, as the pressure lessened, the leaders around me were able to devote
more of their time to developing the people who worked for them. As my team
members built teams of their own that could keep the business running smoothly
in their absence, it became easier for people to take weekends off and vacations.

A well-run company doesn’t require routine superhuman feats of effort to remain
successful. An organization that accomplishes great things without outrageous
work schedules is one of the rewards you get for building a smart system and
staffing it with talented people in the first place.

THE REALITIES OF WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Having said all this, let me be clear: Even when the business is running smoothly,
being the leader of a large, complex organization is never less than extremely
demanding. If you aspire to leadership, don’t imagine it will ever be easy. It will
be engrossing, challenging, fascinating, and at times exhilarating—but easy?
Never. Earlier in this book, I described how my friend Ursula Burns learned so
much about the life of a top corporate leader when she served as the executive
assistant to Wayland Hicks at Xerox. She traveled with him, organized and
attended his meetings, and managed his contacts with hundreds of colleagues
inside and outside the company. In Burns’s words, Hicks was “all in, all the
time”—engaged at the highest possible level every moment of the day. For
example, she recalls seeing Hicks fly coach from the United States to Japan—
working most of the way—check in to a Tokyo hotel on arrival, take a quick
shower, and immediately head out to a round of business meetings. This was a
typical performance, not an extraordinary one. Burns remembers telling her
boyfriend (now her husband), “If this is what it takes to be a top executive, I never
want to do it!” But Burns changed her mind when she went to work as the
executive assistant to Paul Allaire, then chairman and CEO of Xerox. Allaire was
every bit as engaged, energetic, and dedicated as Hicks. But he had a wider
array of outside interests that fascinated and revitalized him, and he’d managed
to develop ways to integrate them into his schedule without sacrificing his
productivity and focus. Allaire was an avid biker and motorcyclist, and he made
the time to take cross-country trips; he was also a ballet aficionado and

occasionally arranged his schedule so he could leave the office early to attend a
special performance. Watching Allaire in action made Burns realize that it might
be …

Beyond the False Choice

Two questions haunt every human life and every human
community. The first: What are we meant to be? The
second: Why are we so far from what we’re meant to be?

Human beings have an indelible sense that our life has a
purpose—and a dogged sense that we have not fulfilled our
purpose. Something has gone wrong on the way to becoming
what we were meant to be, individually and together.

The first question exposes the gap in our own self-
understanding, our half-formed sense that we are meant to
be more than we know. How can we have such a deep sense
of purpose but find ourselves unable to easily name or
grasp that purpose? Yet this is the human condition.

The second question exposes the gap between our aspira-
tions and our accomplishments, between our hopes and our
reality, between our reach and our grasp. If the first question
gives voice to our greatest hopes, the second brings to the

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10 St rong a n d We a k

surface our deepest regrets. Having both great hopes and
great regrets is also, alas, the human condition.

In this book I offer a way of answering both of these
questions. It’s simple enough to explain in a minute or
two of conversation, or in a page or two of a book—it’s
coming up in just a few pages, and you’ll grasp its essence
almost immediately. You’ll see it in action in your friend-
ships, your workplace, your family and your favorite TV
show or movie—you’ll find it in the pages of Scripture
and in the most mundane moments of day-to-day life.
You’ll see it in the most horrifying contexts of injustice
and exploitation, and in the most inspiring moments of
compassion and reconciliation.

Many simple ideas are simplistic—they filter out too
much of reality to be truly useful. This one is not, be-
cause it is a particular kind of simple idea, the kind we
call a paradox. It holds together two simple truths in a
simple relationship, but it generates fruitful tension,
complexity and possibility. I’ve come to call it the
paradox of flourishing.

“Flourishing” is a way of answering the first great question,
What are we meant to be? We are meant to flourish—not just
to survive, but to thrive; not just to exist, but to explore and
expand. “Gloria Dei vivens homo,” Irenaeus wrote. A loose—
but by no means inaccurate—translation of those words has
become popular: “The glory of God is a human being fully

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Beyond the False Choice 11

alive.” To flourish is to be fully alive, and when we read or
hear those words something in us wakes up, sits up a bit
straighter, leans ever so slightly forward. To be fully alive
would connect us not just to our own proper human purpose
but to the very heights and depths of divine glory. To live
fully, in these transitory lives on this fragile earth, in such a
way that we somehow participate in the glory of God—that
would be flourishing. And that is what we are meant to do.

Every paradox requires that we embrace two things that
seem like opposites. The paradox of flourishing is that true
flourishing requires two things that at first do not seem to
go together at all. But in fact, if you do not have both, you
do not have flourishing, and you do not create it for others.

Here’s the paradox: flourishing comes from being both
strong and weak.

Flourishing requires us to embrace both authority and
vulnerability, both
capacity and frailty—
even, at least in this
broken world, both
life and death.

The answer to the second great question—Why are we
so far from what we’re meant to be?—is that we have for-
gotten this basic paradox of flourishing, which is the secret
of being fully alive. Actually, we haven’t just forgotten it, as
if we had misplaced it absentmindedly. We’ve suppressed

Flourishing comes from
being both strong and weak.

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1 2 St rong a n d We a k

it. We’ve hidden it. We’ve fled from it. Because we fear it.
I used to think that what we feared was vulnerability—

the “weak” part of the paradox. But in the course of
writing this book and talking with many others about the
paradox of flourishing, I’ve realized that we fear authority
too. The truth is that we are afraid of both sides of the
paradox of flourishing—and we especially fear to combine
them in the only way that really leads to real life, for our-
selves and others.

This book is about how to embrace the life for which we
were made—life that embraces the paradox of flourishing,
that pursues greater authority and greater vulnerability at
the same time.

But most of all, this book is about a picture, the simplest
and best way I know to explore the paradox of flourishing.
It’s really just a sketch, the kind of thing you can draw on a
napkin, but it will give us plenty to think about for the rest
of this book (see figure 1.1).

It’s one of my favorite things: a 2×2 chart.

The Power of the 2×2
There’s nothing I find quite as satisfying as a 2×2 chart at
the right time. The 2×2 helps us grasp the nature of paradox.
When used properly, the 2×2 can take two ideas we thought
were opposed to one another and show how they com-
plement one another.

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Beyond the False Choice 13

The world is littered with false choices. The leadership
writers Jim Collins and Scott Porras talk about “the tyranny
of the OR and the genius of the AND.” Should products be
low cost or high quality? Whom do managers serve, their
investors or their employees? The most transformative
companies manage both. Are we the products of our
nature or our nurture? They are not opposites—they have
to go together.

The Christian world has its own versions: Is the mission of
the church evangelism and proclamation or is it justice and
demonstration? Are we supposed to be conservative or radical,
contemplative or active, set apart from the world or engaged
in the world? Or take the topic that almost generated the first

IV I

III II

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

AU
TH
OR
IT
Y

VULNERABILITY

Figure 1.1

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1 4 St rong a n d We a k

great biblical 2×2 chart. Is the life of the Christian about faith
or works? (“Show me your faith apart from your works, and I
will show you a 2×2 chart of my faith and works”—James 2:18,
my take on the original Greek!) Then you’ll be ready for the
ultimate question: Was Jesus of Nazareth human or divine?
Was he Son of Man or Son of God?

In all these cases, what we need is not a linear “or” but
a two-dimensional “and” that presses us to see the sur-
prising connections between two things we thought we
had to choose between—and perhaps even to discover that
having the fullness of one requires that we have the fullness
of the other.

One of the best examples comes from studies of effective
parenting—the kind of parenting that produces children
who display self-confidence and self-control. Which is
better, to be a strict, demanding parent who sets firm
boundaries, or a responsive, engaging parent who interacts
with their children with warmth and compassion? If you
were a parent, where on this spectrum would you want to
be (see figure 1.2)?

Put the question this way and most parents will lean one

FIRMNESSWARMTH

Figure 1.2

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Beyond the False Choice 15

way or the other. Some will quote Proverbs—“spare the rod,
spoil the child”—and opt for firmness (see Proverbs 13:24).
Others will quote Paul—“Fathers, do not provoke your
children to anger”—and opt for warmth (see Ephesians 6:4,
Colossians 3:21).

Both are right.
Firmness and warmth, it turns out, are not actually op-

posites. They can go together—in fact, they must go to-
gether for children to flourish. Their relationship is much
better shown with a 2×2 (see figure 1.3).

Map firmness and warmth this way, and you quickly dis-
cover that either one, without the other, is poor parenting.
Firmness without warmth—authoritarian parenting—leads

FI
RM

NE
SS

WARMTH

Figure 1.3

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16 St rong a n d We a k

eventually to rebellion. Warmth without firmness—in-
dulgent parenting—leads eventually to spoiled, entitled brats.

In fact, there aren’t just two ways to be a bad parent—
there are three! The worst of all is parenting that is neither
warm nor firm—absent parenting (see figure 1.4).

There is a difference, it turns out, between being nice
and being kind. “Nice” parenting drifts down to the bottom
right, settling for easy, warm feelings without ever setting
high expectations. Kind parenting manages to be clear and
firm while also tender and affectionate. Psychologists call
it authoritative parenting rather than authoritarian. The
best parenting, in our 2×2, is up and to the right.

There are a few more insights hidden in this simple diagram.

ABSENT INDULGENT

AUTHORITARIAN KIND

IV I

III II

FI
RM

NE
SS

WARMTH

Figure 1.4

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Beyond the False Choice 17

I’ve numbered the quadrants using Roman numerals I to IV,
starting with the ideal quadrant up and to the right and con-
tinuing around clockwise—in the same order and direction
we’ll consider them for the next four chapters. Consider the
line from the top left to the bottom right, from quadrant IV
(Authoritarian) to quadrant II (Indulgent), from firmness
without warmth to warmth without firmness.

Remember our one-dimensional line with warmth on
the left and firmness on the right? In practice, if that is your
mental model of parenting, you’ll end up becoming either
authoritarian (firmness without warmth) or indulgent
(warmth without firmness). The IV-II line describes the
line of false choice—the world we often think we live in (see
figure 1.5). It describes our default way of thinking about

IV I

III II

FALSE CHOICE

Figure 1.5Cop
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18 St rong a n d We a k

how the world works—at least when we are limited to a
linear model.

Because neither authoritarian nor indulgent parenting
produces healthy results, they tend to generate and rein-
force one another. Grow up in an authoritarian home, and
you may well react by being an overly indulgent parent.
Grow up with indulgence, and you may well overcorrect
toward strictness when your own children come along.
Much of the dysfunction of our lives comes from oscil-
lating along the line of the false choice, never seeing that
there might be another way.

One other observation: There is one quadrant that really
is the worst of all. It’s quadrant III (Absent), the quadrant
of withdrawal and disengagement. Authoritarian parents
may not meet their children’s need for affection, but at least
they provide structure. Indulgent parents may not provide
structure, but at least they create an environment of ac-
ceptance and affirmation. But absent parents leave two
voids in their children’s lives, not just one. There’s some-
thing about the Absent quadrant that is uniquely dam-
aging—the total opposite of the Kind quadrant.

You could sum it up this way: We tend to think that our
lives have to be lived along the line of false choice, the IV-II
line. But actually the deepest question of our lives is how
to move further and further away from quadrant III
(Absent) and more and more fully into quadrant I (Kind).

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Beyond the False Choice 19

The III-I axis is the one that matters the most—the one that
leads from a life that is not worth living to the life that really
is life. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about.

The Paradox of Jesus
No human being ever embodied flourishing more than
Jesus of Nazareth. No human life (let alone death) ever un-
leashed more flourishing for others. And precisely for this
reason, no other life brings the paradox of flourishing so
clearly into focus. In the life of Jesus we see two distinct
patterns that can seem impossible to reconcile.

On the one hand, consider the bookends of his life on
earth. He was born an infant, utterly dependent like every
other human being. He ended his life on a Roman cross,
was buried and descended to the dead. One of Christian-
ity’s oldest texts puts it this way:

Though he was in the form of God,
[he] did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)

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2 0 St rong a n d We a k

On the other hand, there were Jesus’ three years of flour-
ishing public ministry, the culture-making effects of which
resound through history and throughout the world—the
most consequential life ever lived. Christians believe that
this very Son of Man and Son of God now sits at the right
hand of the Father, truly the world’s Lord, and sends his
Spirit of power to equip us to live his life in the world. To
quote the very next line of that same ancient text: “Therefore
God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is
above every name” (Philippians 2:9). Indeed, Jesus himself
told his first followers that they would do even greater
things than he himself had done (John 14:12).

But how can these two callings—to humility and to
boldness, to death and to life, to submission to the worst

the world can do and to reigning
with Christ over the world—
possibly coexist? What do they
mean for those of us who have
some scope of choice and
action—those of us who have
been granted privilege and
power? What do they mean for
those who live at the cruelest
edges of the world, in settings

of implacable injustice and oppression? Is there really any
Christlike way to exercise leadership within our broken

How can these two
callings—to humility and
to boldness, to death and

to life, to submission to
the worst the world can
do and to reigning with
Christ over the world—

possibly coexist?

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Beyond the False Choice 21

human institutions all the way up to (or down to) the
church itself? What would be the specific practices we
could adopt to live in ways that bear the true image and
bring lasting flourishing?

We need a way to hold these two seemingly opposing
facets of Jesus’ life, and our calling, together—a way to
navigate this complexity without being overwhelmed.
Which means we need a 2×2 chart, of course.

The Dimensions of Power
I’m sure you see it coming already—the two dimensions of
Jesus’ life, his vulnerability in dependence and death on the
one hand, his authority in his earthly ministry and his
heavenly exaltation on the other hand, can easily start to
seem like linear alternatives. Exaltation or humiliation?
Ascension or crucifixion? Miracles of healing, deliverance
and even resurrection, or, “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?” The empty tomb or the cross? The only way
to hold them together is a 2×2 (see figure 1.6).

Some of us will instinctively identify with, or aspire to,
the “vulnerability” dimension. Perhaps that is the reality of
our lives—it is, eventually, the reality of every mortal life.
It may be the reality of the community or family into which
we were born, making us keenly aware of the limits of our
power and the precariousness of our circumstances. Or we
may aspire to identify with vulnerable people and places.

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2 2 St rong a n d We a k

From those places and with those people, we look at Jesus
and see vulnerability. Jesus identified with the vulnerable
in his birth, life and death. Whether we identify with vul-
nerability or aspire to it, Jesus is there.

On the other hand, others of us identify with, or aspire
to, authority. We have been told we can make a difference
in the world; we’ve been given opportunities for creativity
and leadership. Other people respond positively when we
suggest a course of action. Maybe we’ve invested sub-
stantial amounts of our time and money (maybe our
parents’ money) in gaining authority in the form of training
and certificates and degrees. We look at Jesus and see au-
thority—as early as age twelve in the temple, engaging

FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU
TH
OR
IT
Y

VULNERABILITY

Figure 1.6

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Beyond the False Choice 23

powerfully with the scribes; standing up in his hometown
synagogue and boldly proclaiming himself as the ful-
fillment of the prophet’s vision; confounding Pilate and the
Jewish leaders even when he was in chains; breathing on
his disciples after his resurrection and giving them his
Spirit, telling them they were now commissioned to go out
into the whole world with his authority. Whether we
identify with authority or aspire to it, Jesus is there.

When we identify with one dimension or another, it’s
easy to become impatient with people who emphasize the
other one. I worked in a campus ministry on an Ivy League
campus where we emphasized the Christian call to

“downward mobility,” to use one’s privilege and power as an
opportunity to serve the materially and spiritually poor.
One day an African American student confronted me.

“When I came to college,” he said with some frustration,
“my entire community held a prayer service and laid hands
on me to commission me to go to Harvard. And now you
want me to tell them that I’m just coming back to the hood
to work for a nonprofit ministry?” His community had
commissioned him for authority—power and position in
parts of the culture where they had historically been absent
or underrepresented. Who was I to tell him not to stay on
that path?

What I was missing, at that point in my life, was a 2×2
conception of authority and vulnerability—the possibility

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2 4 St rong a n d We a k

that the journey of Christian discipleship, and true power,
would involve not just a progression toward one or the
other, but toward both at the same time. Such a conception
would not simply authorize my student to leave his vulner-
ability behind and pursue privilege and power, but it also
did not authorize me to ignore his (and his community’s)
legitimate pursuit of flourishing and the authority that
flourishing requires.

This book is my long overdue answer to that student.
First we will examine the four possible combinations of au-
thority and vulnerability on that 2×2 diagram. Properly
combined, authority and vulnerability lead to flourishing
(chapter 2). But when either one is absent—or even worse,
when both are missing—we find distortions of human
beings, organizations and institutions. We find suffering,
withdrawing and exploiting (chapters 3, 4 and 5)—which in
their most virulent forms become poverty, apathy and
tyranny. They don’t always appear to be that bad—poverty
can look like mild disempowerment, apathy can look ap-
pealingly like safety, tyranny often seems like mastery. In
another layer of complexity, it will turn out that all of us
inevitably spend time in each of these three quadrants, and
God’s grace is real and available in them all. But none of
them is the fullness of what we are made for, the life that is
really life.

So how do we move up and to the right on this 2×2 chart?

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Beyond the False Choice 25

Surprisingly, rather than simply moving pleasantly into
ever greater authority and ever greater vulnerability, we
have to take two fearsome journeys, both of which seem
like detours that lead away from the prime quadrant. The
first is the journey to hidden vulnerability (chapter 6), the
willingness to bear burdens and expose ourselves to risks
that no one else can fully see or understand. The second is
descending to the dead (chapter 7), the choice to visit the
most broken corners of the world and our own heart. Only
once we have made these two fateful journeys will we be
the kind of people who can be entrusted with true power,
the power that moves up and to the right (chapter 8) and
brings others who have been trapped in tyranny, apathy
and poverty along with us.

In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, the re-
nowned public health physician Paul Farmer tells his bi-
ographer, Tracy Kidder, “People call me a saint and I think,
I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great
thing to be.”

I think Farmer is entirely right that a saint would be a
great thing to be. The saints are, ultimately, the people we
recognize as fully alive—the people who flourished and
brought flourishing to others, the ones in whom the glory
of God was most fully seen. There really is no other goal
higher for us than to become people who are so full of au-
thority and vulnerability that we perfectly reflect what

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 1/11/2021 11:34 AM via TRINITY WESTERN UNIV
AN: 1160528 ; …

BL
AN

CH
AR

BO
OK

S I
N

BR
IEF

LEADING AT A
HIGHER LEVEL

Blanchard on Leadership
and Creating High

Performing Organizations

Third Edition

V021119

BLANCHARD
BOOKS IN BRIEF

Blanchard Books in Brief 5

CONTENTS
Synopsis ………………………………………………………………………………… 6
What Is Leadership? …………………………………………………………….. 9

SECTION I Set Your Sights on the Right Target and
Vision ……………………………………………………………. 11

Is Your Organization High Performing? …………………………….. 13
The Power of Vision …………………………………………………………….. 17

SECTION II Treat Your People Right …………………………….19
Empowerment Is the Key ……………………………………………………. 21
SLII®: The Integrating Concept ………………………………………….. 23
Self Leadership: The Power Behind Empowerment …………. 25
One-on-One Leadership ……………………………………………………. 29
Building Trust ………………………………………………………………………. 31
Team Leadership ………………………………………………………………… 35
Organizational Leadership …………………………………………………..37
Leading Change …………………………………………………………………… 41
Coaching: A Key Competency for
Leadership Development …………………………………………………… 43
Mentoring: The Key to Life Planning …………………………………. 45
Collaboration: Fuel for High Performance ………………………….47

SECTION III Treat Your Customers Right …………………… 49

Serving Customers at a Higher Level …………………………………. 51

SECTION IV Have the Right Kind of Leadership ………… 55
Servant Leadership ………………………………………………………………57
Determining Your Leadership Point of View …………………….. 59

6 Leading at a Higher Level

SYNOPSIS
Leadership guru Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute
Manager® and cofounder of The Ken Blanchard Companies®,
has spent more than 40 years helping good leaders and
organizations become great and stay great. Now, in this fully
updated third edition of Leading at a Higher Level, Blanchard
and his colleagues have brought together everything they’ve
learned about outstanding leadership. This brief summarizes
the four aspects of higher level leadership, showing readers
how to:

• Go beyond the short term and zero in on the right target
and vision

• Empower people and unleash their incredible potential

• Deliver legendary customer service and earn raving fans

• Ground your leadership in humility and focus on the
greater good

In addition, this brief summarizes material from the new
chapters in the updated edition:

• Building Trust: Creating a High Trust Environment

• Collaboration: Fuel for High Performance

• Mentoring: The Key to Life Planning

• Organizational Leadership: Leading Organizations at a
Higher Level

Blanchard Books in Brief 7

This brief is based on material created by the founding
associates of The Ken Blanchard Companies: Ken Blanchard,
Marjorie Blanchard, Don Carew, Eunice Parisi-Carew, Fred
Finch, Laurence Hawkins, Drea Zigarmi, and Pat Zigarmi. It also
includes the thinking of Scott Blanchard, Madeleine Blanchard,
Randy Conley, Kathy Cuff, Garry Demarest, Claire Diaz-
Ortiz, Chris Edmonds, Susan Fowler, Bob Glaser, Lael Good,
Vicki Halsey, Judd Hoekstra, Fay Kandarian, Linda Miller, Alan
Randolph, Jane Ripley, and Jesse Stoner. Together they present
more than 40 years of breakthrough leadership insights.

8 Leading at a Higher Level

LEADING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

by Ken Blanchard and the Founding
Associates and Consulting Partners of

The Ken Blanchard Companies

Blanchard Books in Brief 9

What Is Leadership?

For years we defined leadership as an influence process. We
believed that anytime you tried to influence the thoughts
and actions of others toward goal accomplishment, you were
engaging in leadership. In recent years, we have taken the
emphasis away from goal accomplishment and have redefined
leadership as the capacity to influence others by unleashing their
power and potential to impact the greater good.

When the definition of leadership focuses on goal
accomplishment, one can think that leadership is only about
results. Yet goal accomplishment is not enough. The key phrase
in the second definition is “the greater good”—what is best for
all involved. Leadership should not be done purely for personal
gain or goal accomplishment; it should have a much higher
purpose than that.

When you are leading at a higher level, you have a both/and
philosophy. The development of people is of equal importance
to performance. As a result, the focus in leading at a higher level
is on long-term results and human satisfaction.

Leading at a higher level can be defined as the process of achieving
worthwhile results while acting with respect, care, and fairness
for the well-being of all involved. When that occurs, self-serving
leadership is not possible. It’s only when you realize that it’s not
about you that you begin to lead at a higher level.

Blanchard Books in Brief 11

SECTION I
Set Your Sights

on the Right
Target and Vision

Blanchard Books in Brief 13

Is Your Organization
High Performing?

Those who want to lead at a higher level need to understand
what a high performing organization looks like and what is
necessary to create one. They need to aim for the right target.

The Right Target: The Quadruple
Bottom Line
In high performing organizations, everyone’s energy is focused
on not just one bottom line, but four bottom lines — being the
provider of choice, the employer of choice, the investment of
choice, and the corporate citizen of choice. The quadruple
bottom line is the right target and can make the difference
between mediocrity and greatness. The leaders in high
performing organizations know that their bottom line depends
on their people, their customers, their stakeholders, and the
citizens and communities affected by their actions.

1. Provider of Choice: To keep your customers today, you
can’t be content just to satisfy them; you must create
raving fans. Raving fans are customers who are so
excited about the way you treat them that they want to
tell everyone about you.

2. Employer of Choice: Today’s workers seek opportunities
where they feel like their contributions are valued and
rewarded.

14 Leading at a Higher Level

3. Investment of Choice: All companies require funding
sources, through stock purchases, loans, grants or
contracts. To be willing to invest, people must believe in
the company’s viability and performance over time.

4. Corporate Citizen of Choice: In an increasingly
connected world of rising populations and shrinking
resources, organizations must balance the needs of
their stakeholders with the environment and treat those
affected by their actions ethically and respectfully.

The HPO SCORES Model
High performing organizations (HPOs) are enterprises that,
over time, continue to produce outstanding results, achieving
the highest level of human satisfaction and commitment to
success.

SCORES is an acronym that represents the six elements evident
in every HPO. An HPO scores—hits the target consistently—
because it demonstrates strength in each of these six elements:

S = Shared Information and Communication

Information needed to make informed decisions must be readily
available to people and openly communicated.

C = Compelling Vision

When everyone supports a compelling organizational vision—
one that includes a purpose, a picture of the future, and values—
it creates a deliberate, highly focused culture that drives the
desired business results.

O = Ongoing Learning

HPOs are constantly focusing on improving capabilities through
learning systems, building knowledge capital, and transferring
learning throughout the organization.

Blanchard Books in Brief 15

R = Relentless Focus on Customer Results

HPOs understand who their customers are and measure
their results accordingly. People throughout the organization
passionately hold and maintain the highest standards for quality
and service from their customers’ perspectives.

E = Energizing Systems and Structures

The systems, structures, and processes in HPOs are aligned to
support the organization’s vision, strategic direction, and goals.

S = Shared Power and High Involvement
In HPOs, power and decision making are shared and
distributed throughout the organization, not guarded at the
top of the hierarchy.

Leadership Is the Engine
If becoming a high performing organization is a destination,
leadership is the engine. While the HPO SCORES model
describes the characteristics of a high performing organization,
leadership is what moves the organization in that direction.

Blanchard Books in Brief 17

The Power of Vision

When leaders who are leading at a higher level understand
the role of the quadruple bottom line as the right target—to
be the provider of choice, employer of choice, investment of
choice, and corporate citizen of choice—they are ready to focus
everyone’s energy on a compelling vision.

A compelling vision creates a strong culture in which the energy
of everyone in the organization is aligned. This results in trust,
customer satisfaction, an energized and committed workforce,
and profitability.

Vision and Leadership
Vision always comes back to leadership. People look to their
formal leaders for vision and direction. While leaders should
involve people in shaping direction, the ultimate responsibility
for the visionary/direction aspect of leadership remains with
the leaders and cannot be delegated to others. This is where
the traditional hierarchical pyramid is effective.

CUSTOMERS

Supervisory
Management

Customer
Contact People

Middle
Management

Top
Management

RESPONSIBLE

RESPONSIVE

18 Leading at a Higher Level

CUSTOMERS

Customer
Contact People

Supervisory
Management

Middle
Management

Top
Management

RESPONSIBLE

RESPONSIVE

Once a vision is agreed upon, the leader’s role moves to
implementation to ensure that people respond to the vision.
Now the traditional hierarchical pyramid turns upside-down as
the leader supports people in accomplishing the vision.

The leader supports by removing barriers; by ensuring that
policies, practices, and systems make it easier for everyone to
act on the vision; and by holding themselves, their peers, and
their people accountable for acting consistently with the vision.
This way the leader assures that everyone is serving the vision,
not the leader.

Blanchard Books in Brief 19

SECTION II
Treat Your

People Right

Blanchard Books in Brief 21

Empowerment
Is the Key

How do the best-run companies in the world beat out the
competition day in and day out? They treat their customers
right. They do that by having a workforce that is excited about
their vision and motivated to serve customers at a higher level.
So how do you create this motivated workforce? The key is
empowerment.

Empowerment means letting people bring their brains to work
and allowing them to use their knowledge, experience and
motivation to create a healthy quadruple bottom line. Leaders
of the best-run companies know that empowering people
creates positive results that are just not possible when all the
authority moves up the hierarchy and managers shoulder all
the responsibility for success.

Researcher Edward Lawler found that when people are given
more control and responsibility, their companies achieve a
greater return on sales than companies that do not involve their
people. Scholar Thomas Malone believes that empowerment
is essential for companies that hope to succeed in the new
knowledge-based economy.

22 Leading at a Higher Level

The Three Keys to Empowerment
To guide the transition to a culture of empowerment, leaders
must use three keys:

1. Sharing Information. One of the best ways to build a
sense of trust and responsibility in people is by sharing
information. Giving team members the information they
need enables them to make good business decisions.
High performing organizations continually look for
ways to incorporate knowledge into new ways of doing
business. Michael Brown, former chief financial officer
of Microsoft, says, “The only way to compete today is
make your intellectual capital obsolete before anyone
else does.”

2. Declaring the Boundaries. In a hierarchical culture,
boundaries are really like barbed-wire fences. They are
designed to control people by keeping them in certain
places and out of other places. In an empowered culture,
boundaries are more like rubber bands that can expand
to allow people to take on more responsibility as they
grow and develop.

3. Replacing the Old Hierarchy with Self-Directed
Individuals and Teams. As people learn to create
autonomy by using newly shared information and
boundaries, they must move away from dependence on
the hierarchy. Self-directed individuals and Next Level
teams—highly skilled, interactive groups with strong
self-managing skills—replace the clarity and support of
the hierarchy.

Blanchard Books in Brief 23

SLII®:
The Integrating

Concept

If empowerment is the key to treating people the right way
and motivating them to treat your customers right, having a
strategy to shift the emphasis from leader as boss and evaluator
to leader as partner and cheerleader is imperative. But what,
exactly, is the right leadership style?

Is the direct report new and inexperienced about the task at
hand? Then more guidance and direction are called for. Is the
direct report experienced and skilled? That person requires
less hands-on supervision. All of us are at different levels of
development depending on the task we are working on at a
particular time. To bring out the best in others, leadership must
match the development level of the person being led. Giving
people too much or too little direction has a negative impact on
their development.

SLII® is based on the belief that people can and want to
develop, and there is no best leadership style to encourage that
development. You should tailor leadership style to the situation.

Leadership Styles
There are four basic leadership styles in SLII® leadership:
directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. These
correspond with the four basic development levels: Enthusiastic

24 Leading at a Higher Level

Beginner, Disillusioned Learner, Capable but Cautious Performer
and Self-Reliant Achiever.

Enthusiastic Beginners need a directing style, Disillusioned
Learners need a coaching style, Capable but Cautious
Performers need a supporting style and Self-Reliant Achievers
need a delegating style.

Development level varies from goal to goal or task to task. An
individual can be at one level of development on one goal or
task and be at a different level of development on another goal
or task.

The Three Skills of an SLII® Leader
To become effective as a SLII® leader, you must master these
three skills:

1. Goal Setting. All good performance starts with clear
goals. Clarifying goals involves making sure that people
understand two things: first, what they are being asked
to do—their areas of accountability—and second,
what good performance looks like—the performance
standards by which they will be evaluated.

2. Diagnosis. You must diagnose the development level of
your direct reports on each of their goals and tasks by
looking at two factors—competence and commitment.
Competence is the sum of knowledge and skills an
individual brings to a goal or task. Commitment has to
do with a person’s motivation and confidence about a
goal or task.

3. Matching. You must match your leadership style to the
development level of the person you are leading. Over
supervising or under supervising—that is, giving people
too much or too little direction—has a negative impact
on people’s development.

Blanchard Books in Brief 25

Self Leadership:
The Power

Behind Empowerment

Managers must learn to let go of command-and-control
leadership styles, because soon they will have no choice.
In the 1980s, a manager typically supervised five people—
in other words, the span of control was one manager to five
direct reports. Today, companies have more mean-and-
lean organizational structures, where spans of control have
increased considerably. Now it is common to find one manager
for 25 to 75 direct reports. Add to that the emergence of virtual
organizations—where managers are being asked to supervise
people they seldom, if ever, meet face to face—and we have an
entirely different work landscape emerging.

The truth is that most bosses today can no longer play the
traditional role of telling people what, when, and how to do
everything. More than ever before, the success of organizational
initiatives depends on the proactive behavior of empowered
individuals.

Creating an Engaged Workforce
Just as leaders must move from a command-and-control
relationship to a partnering relationship with their people, so
too must those who are being led move from “waiting to be
told” to taking the initiative to lead themselves.

26 Leading at a Higher Level

People need to be trained in self leadership. Organizations on
the leading edge have learned that developing self leaders is a
powerful way to positively impact the quadruple bottom line.

For example, Bandag Manufacturing experienced the value of
self leadership after a major equipment breakdown. Rather than
laying off the affected work force, the company opted to train
them in self leadership. A funny thing happened. Direct reports
began holding their managers accountable and asking them to
demonstrate their leadership capabilities. They were asking
managers for direction and support and urging them to clarify
goals and expectations. Suddenly, managers were studying up
on rusty skills and working harder.

When the plant’s ramp-up time was compared to the
company’s other eight plants that had experienced similar
breakdowns in the past, the California plant reached pre-
breakdown production levels faster than any in history. The
manufacturer studied other measures as well and concluded
that the determining factor in the plant’s successful rebound
was primarily the proactive behavior of the workers, who were
fully engaged and armed with the skill of self leadership.

The Three Skills of a Self Leader
Self leaders must be actively developed by teaching people
skills and mental attitudes that foster empowerment. Here are
the three skills of self leadership:

1. Challenge Assumed Constraints. An assumed constraint
is a belief, based on past experience, that limits current
and future experiences. Self leadership teaches that the
constraints are not the problem; the problem is that we
think these things are the only sources of power available
to us.

Blanchard Books in Brief 27

2. Activate Points of Power. The five points of power are
position power, personal power, task power, knowledge
power, and relationship power. The sole advantage of
power is the ability to do more good. To increase that
ability, develop your weak points of power or gather
people around you who have points of power you don’t
have.

3. Be Proactive. Self leaders take the initiative to get the
direction and support they require to achieve their
goals. Direct reports can use self leadership to diagnose
their own development level on a particular goal or task
and take the initiative to get from their managers the
leadership style they need to succeed.

Blanchard Books in Brief 29

One-on-One Leadership

At its best, leadership is a partnership that involves mutual trust
between two people who work together to achieve common
goals. Both leader and follower influence each other. Leadership
shifts between them, depending on the task and who has the
competence and commitment to deal with it. Both parties play
a role in determining how things get done.

One-on-one leadership is about creating such side-by-side
leadership relationships. It is a process for increasing the
quality and quantity of conversations between managers and
direct reports. These alignment conversations not only help
people perform better, but they also help everyone involved feel
better about themselves and each other.

One-on-One Leadership and the Performance
Management System
When one-on-one leadership is done well, it becomes an
integral part of an effective performance management system.
This system consists of three parts:

1. Performance Planning. After everyone is clear on
the organizational vision and direction, it’s during
performance planning that leaders agree with their
direct reports about the goals and objectives they
should be focusing on. At this stage the traditional
hierarchal pyramid is effective, as the leader provides
vision and direction.

30 Leading at a Higher Level

2. Performance Coaching. Next, the hierarchal pyramid
is turned upside-down as leaders support people in
accomplishing the goals, doing everything they can
to help direct reports be successful. At this stage,
managers work for their people, praising progress and
redirecting less than optimal performance.

3. Performance Review. This is where a manager and
direct report sit down and assess the direct report’s
performance over time. When one-on-one weekly
meetings are scheduled, open and honest discussions
about the direct report’s performance and concerns
take place on an ongoing basis, creating mutual
understanding and agreement.

Blanchard Books in Brief 31

Building Trust

Trust is the foundation of all healthy relationships, so it comes
as no surprise that a leader’s ability to build trust is the key to
effective one-on-one partnerships, teams, and organizations.

Studies show that productivity, income, profits, and retention
are positively or negatively impacted depending on the level of
trust in the work environment. Blanchard’s research confirms
that employees will leave an organization where trust is
lacking. In a study of more than 1,000 leaders, 59 percent of
respondents indicated they had left an organization due to
trust issues, citing lack of communication and dishonesty as
key contributing factors.

The Benefits of Trust
When people believe they are working for trustworthy
leaders, they are willing to invest in making a difference in an
organization. They feel more connected and invest more of
themselves in their work. High trust levels lead to a greater
sense of self-responsibility, deeper interpersonal insight, and
more collective action toward achieving common goals.

The Four Elements of Trust
Because trust means different things to different people,
decision makers must first find a common language of trust—
qualities they agree are consistent with trustworthiness. The
ABCD Trust Model™ * identifies four qualities leaders can
use to define and discuss trust with the people they lead.
*Now called Blanchard’s Building Trust Model.

32 Leading at a Higher Level

Able is about demonstrating competence. Do the leaders know
how to get the job done? Are they able to produce results?

Believable means acting with integrity. In practical terms, this
means creating and following fair processes. Believability is
also about acting in a consistent, values-driven manner that
reassures people they can rely on their leaders.

Connected is about demonstrating care and concern for other
people. Connectedness is supported by good communication
skills. Leaders need to openly share information about the
organization and about themselves.

Dependable is about honoring commitments by following
through on what the leaders say they are going to do.

Creating a High Trust Environment
Using the ABCD Trust Model™ as a guideline, leaders can create
high-trust environments that foster involvement and energy by
taking four steps:

1. Know the behaviors that support the ABCDs of trust.

2. Assess the current trust level.

3. Diagnose areas that need work.

4. Have a conversation to restore trust.

Repairing Damaged Trust
When a breach of trust is so severe that the relationship is
strained to the breaking point—or breaks completely—we
call this damaged trust. If a situation is so explosive—or the
stakes are so perilous—that a conversation could cause further
damage, you probably need to engage the services of a qualified
mediator or therapist. If you think the risks are manageable,
you can use the following five-step process to begin rebuilding
the relationship and restoring trust.

Blanchard Books in Brief 33

Step One: Acknowledge and Assure

As you acknowledge the problem, assure the other party that
your intention is to restore trust between the two of you
and that you are willing to take the time and effort to get the
relationship back on track.

Step Two: Admit

Own up to your actions and take responsibility for whatever
harm was caused. Admitting your part in the situation is a
crucial step that should not be overlooked. Refusing to admit
your mistakes undermines your believability.

Step Three: Apologize

Even if you don’t feel you were entirely at fault, apologize
for your part in the situation. Avoid making excuses, shifting
blame, or using qualifying statements, as these will undermine
your apology.

Step Four: Assess

Invite feedback from the other party about how they see the
situation. Together, assess which elements of the ABCD Trust
Model™ were violated. The purpose of this step is not to point
fingers, but rather to identify problem behaviors so they can be
avoided in the future.

Step Five: Agree

The final step in rebuilding damaged trust is to work together to
create an action plan. Mutually identify the positive behaviors
you’ll use going forward. Clarify your shared goals for the
relationship and make requests about what you’d like to see
both more and less of in the future.

34 Leading at a Higher Level

Blanchard Books in Brief 35

Team Leadership

As the business world becomes increasingly competitive, the
issues it faces are increasingly complex. Organizations can
no longer depend on hierarchical structures and a few peak
performers to maintain a competitive advantage.

Leading with teams is the best approach in today’s business
environment. Working effectively, a team can make better
decisions, solve more complex problems, and do more to
enhance creativity and build skills than individuals working
alone.

Building highly effective teams, like building great organizations,
begins with a picture of what you are aiming for—a target. The
journey to a high performance team begins with understanding
its characteristics. By benchmarking your team in each of the
following four areas, you can identify where you need to focus
for team development:

1. Align for Results: Clarify team purpose, define goals,
define roles, and agree on behavioral norms.

2. Perform Under Pressure: Embrace and address conflict,
invite self expression, encourage candor, and listen with
curiosity.

3. Develop Team Cohesion: Work collaboratively, promote
accountability, build trusting relationships, and
appreciate each other’s contributions.

36 Leading at a Higher Level

4. Sustain High Performance: Demonstrate unity,
share leadership, adapt to change, and accept greater
challenges.

The Power of Teams
When faced with pressure or complexity, leaders must
acknowledge that it is often the actions and skills of many,
as opposed to those of one person, that make a complicated
procedure successful. Today’s complex work can no longer be
left to a lone hero’s expertise; we need high performance teams
working together to achieve results.

When teams function well, miracles can happen. A thrilling
and inspiring example of a high performance team is the 1980
United States Olympic hockey team. Twenty young men—many
of whom had never played together before—came from colleges
all over the country. Six months later they won the Olympic
gold medal, defeating the best teams in the world—including
the Soviet Union, a team that had been playing together for
years.

Or think about the Hudson River plane crash in 2009, when
Captain Sullenberger, First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, and the rest of
the flight crew worked together to land the plane safely under
dire circumstances, saving all the lives aboard.

Whether it’s a medical team of surgeons, anesthetists, and
nurses all working together and using their individual specialties
as a team to save lives—or a team of tech wizards collaborating
on a new software that changes the world we live in—humans
can achieve great things when they …

A reflection work is a conversational form of writing that

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