Being a Leader Is a Privilege

These conversations used to happen in the hallway, the lunchroom, a quick aside on the way out of a meeting. Now it’s a text. “Got a sec for a quick call?” You hop on, and there it is. “Hey, quick thing. We’ve got a problem with the rollout.” You listen, you care, and you say the sentence that feels helpful in the moment. “Let me think about it and get back to you.”

Count what just happened. The next move is now yours. A capable person walks away lighter, and you walk away carrying their open question. You’ve slowed them down and burdened yourself, and neither of you needed either one. Do that a few times a day, across a team, across a quarter, and you become something nobody sets out to be. A bottleneck with good intentions.

The deeper cost lands on your people. Every question you absorb is a decision they didn’t get to make, a rep they didn’t get, a week they spent waiting on you while the world kept moving. Teams today have to move at a pace that doesn’t leave room for a leader in the middle of every decision, and people can’t grow into judgment they never get to exercise.

I’ve led teams for a long time now, from combat Marines to engineers, architects, and consultants around the world, and I watch this moment play out every week. The fix is a discipline I strive for every day. Let your people make the calls. Give the reins back and let them fail, succeed, learn, and grow. Keep the person closest to the work doing the thinking and the execution of the work. The lessons on this page exist to help your people become everything they can be, and to help you give them everything a leader should.

Being a leader is an immense privilege and comes with great responsibility. You get a hand in developing someone’s craft, their career, their confidence, the future their family gets to have. I take that seriously. I treat it that way, and I love it.

That said, I’ll also tell you the part most books tend to skip. If you allow it, leadership will not stop taking from you. The calendar, the weight of other people’s hard days, the decisions that follow you home at night. Nobody carries that on charisma and good intentions. You carry it on craft. Leading is a tradecraft. You study it, you practice it, you keep honing it. Or, if you let it, it will grind you down. Some people come to it naturally. Everyone can get better at it. The day you stop being a student of the craft is the day you begin to stagnate, burn out, and hurt the people you lead.

Taking the privilege seriously starts with what people can count on from you. Your brand as a leader matters, inside and outside of work, and its foundation layer is trust. People have to be able to look to you and depend on you before anything else on this page works. Mine got set early, by a boss who didn’t waste words.

My first job out of the Marine Corps was managing a bank branch. Combat to a lobby, in one jump. The CEO gave me one rule, and I can still hear him say it.

It took me years to see everything inside that sentence. He was teaching me something bigger than banking. Trust is the product, and everything else you sell rides on it. I’ve carried the rule into every job since, and it grew into standards I won’t trade, whether I’m selling a product or making a commitment to a teammate. Every claim ships with evidence or it doesn’t ship. Say what you mean, mean what you say, and live up to it. When you miss, own it immediately and directly. I call that fierce ownership, and I hold myself to it before I ask it of anyone.

Your yes is only worth acting on if it holds when you’re not in the room. That’s why integrity opens this page instead of closing it.

With the foundation set, the next question is the one every leader should sit with. When the people you’ve led describe you, what do you hope they say? My hope is that people who’ve worked with me land near this. People first, execution obsessed. Both halves carry full weight.

People first starts with a fact that’s easy to say and easy to forget. Every person on a team is a full human being before they are a role. Real lives, real cares, real pains, real dreams that have nothing to do with the org chart. The person in the meeting might be carrying a sick parent, a struggling kid, or a season of grief you know nothing about. Lead like that’s true, because it is. The Marine Corps gave me the shortest job description I’ve ever heard for this. Know your people and look out for their welfare.

Knowing your people means leading individuals. Nobody leads a roster. You lead this person, then that person, and they are wired differently. What motivates one will flatten another. Some need a bigger challenge, some need a door opened, some need an advocate in a room they can’t enter, and some just need to be heard this week. Your job is to know which, and the only way to know is to pay attention like it matters, because it does.

People first also includes doing the right thing when the right thing is hard. Care that never says the hard word is comfort wearing care’s uniform, and comfort develops nobody. The kindest leaders I’ve known were also the most honest ones. And people first includes joy. Work should have some fun in it, and I’ll open the meeting with a corny joke to make sure. Come with some.

Execution obsessed means I love to win, and I believe winning comes from clarity, discipline, and running after things together. In practice, five moves.

People first sets a standard for how I treat the team. It also sets a standard for how the team treats each other, and this one has teeth. We treat each other the way we want to be treated. Respect, kindness, and candor, assuming positive intent. I keep a strict no-jerks policy, and the policy part matters more than the slogan.

There’s a difference between a peacemaker and a peacekeeper. A peacekeeper avoids the confrontation and calls it kindness, and the festering they allow will take a culture down, because people won’t stay where they’re mistreated. Everyone is watching what you tolerate. A peacemaker walks toward the conflict, with care.

Two guardrails keep the policy honest. Nobody gets defined by a single moment. People carry grief and seasons you know nothing about, so watch patterns, never snapshots. And coaching comes before consequences, every time. But a pattern that survives honest coaching gets a decision. I once inherited an organization where one person, tenured and deeply knowledgeable, had spent years mistreating colleagues, their own team, even executives, and everyone had learned to work around it. I coached. It didn’t resolve. I removed them. The team didn’t heal overnight, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The healing started the day the standard became real.

Communication is the thread that ties the people and the execution together, and my rule for it is simple. I’d rather repeat our priorities until you’re tired of hearing them than leave one person guessing about where we’re headed. Guessing is expensive. It shows up as hesitation, duplicated work, and people running while looking over their shoulder. That’s why I hold regular cadences with my leaders and the whole organization. We celebrate the wins, and we talk straight about the risks, the challenges, and the asks. My goal is that everyone knows where things stand, all the time. It’s why meeting together matters.

One of my closest friends, Shane Miller, is an executive leader himself. After he read an earlier version of this article, he told me common language is the core of success, and that the lack of it sits at the root of many organizational problems. I completely agree. Say the priorities enough times and they stop being announcements and become a shared language, and that language is the linchpin of a healthy culture. The standards a team lives by, the no-jerks line, challenge and commit, what winning looks like, they hold because they keep getting said out loud and executed to.

A team with a shared language never has to translate its leader.

And a reality the classics never had to deal with. Most of leading now happens through a screen. The person on the other end of the virtual call is every bit as human as the one you used to catch in the hallway, and the quick asides that used to carry half a team’s context, after the meeting, in the lunchroom, on the walk out, aren’t happening the same way anymore. Leading through a screen takes a level of intentionality that leading in person never demanded.

Written words carry their own danger. Email, text, and chat always read colder than you meant them, and they get left to interpretation. On the receiving end, assume positive intent. On the sending end, write with clarity and re-read your words through a lens outside your own before they go. And when it matters, get on a call and see each other’s faces. Hard conversations get a face. Look somebody in the eye and deliver it, so they get your tone instead of their worst guess at it. When something doesn’t feel right, say so early. Misunderstandings don’t age well.

Clarity about direction solves half of a leader’s time problem. The other half arrives the way this page began, with a quick call and a problem. In 1974, Oncken and Wass diagnosed why leaders run out of time while their people end up waiting on them, and their answer still holds. Every problem you absorb takes its initiative with it. The next move leaves the conversation with you, and the person closest to the work loses the chance to make it.

Everything on this page builds toward one result. When the why is clear, the execution is shared, and the communication is open, trust grows, and trust is a force multiplier. A team that trusts each other moves faster, challenges ideas respectfully, recovers from setbacks quickly, and has more fun winning together. Trust is also the only fuel the initiative spectrum runs on. Covey made the point in 1999, and I watch it prove itself constantly. People who fear what happens when they miss will keep bringing you the problem, and you will keep taking it.

A result that valuable has no shortcut. Trust is consistency over time, and it gets read more closely than most people realize. I spent years in the intelligence world, where you never take a single source and call it the story. You listen for the reflections. What people do, what they deliver, what they say in rooms you’re not in. Everyone around you is reading your reflections the same way, whether they’d call it that or not. When the words and the reflections line up, trust compounds quietly. When someone tells me one thing and the reflections say another, it erodes fast, and it doesn’t come back at the speed it left. Trust arrives in drips and leaves in buckets, so guard it.

Consistency is one half of trust. The other half is what you do with the truth, in both directions. Feedback is a gift, and I say that as someone who has been given a lot of it across my career. Times it was hard to hear. Times I didn’t get the role I wanted. Times I was failing and couldn’t fully see it. Feedback stings for a while, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the sting fades, and what remains is a choice. Weigh it honestly, because you shouldn’t swallow every piece of feedback whole. When you get introspective and truly absorb the ones that are right, they change you. The hardest feedback I ever received made me a better leader and, honestly, a better person. There’s a reason coaches exist, and the best people I know are still asking for one.

So bring the good, the bad, and the ugly, in both directions. We’re going to have warts. I’m not going to be scared away.

Trust builds fastest when expectations are explicit, so let me make mine explicit. Everything above is philosophy. This part is the contract. If you work with me, this is ours.

A team that waits at levels one and two moves at the speed of its leader. A team that lives at three, four, and five sees around its own corners. Building the second kind was never about protecting a leader’s calendar. The calendar is just the evidence. The real result is people who own things, a leader freed up for the work only the leader can do, and the scoreboard that outlasts every quarter. People who leave your team bigger than they arrived.

My dad used to tell me he wanted me to stand on his shoulders. He started with less than he gave us, and he wanted us to reach further than he could. Twenty years of leading later, I don’t have a better description of the job.

Being a leader is a privilege, and it’s one you have to keep earning. Stay a student of the craft, hold the standard, and hand the reins back.

This is how we grow.