Leadership isn’t about you. Leadership is about what you do for others, specifically, whether you create the conditions for them to thrive. Do people grow around you? Do they do their best work? Are they engaged and excited about striving for excellence?
Harvard professor Frances Frei puts it this way: real leadership begins with trust, grows through love, and shows up most clearly in your impact on others.
The Three Anchors of Trust
If you want people to follow you, they have to trust you. Frei breaks trust into three clear, actionable components:
Authenticity
People need to feel like the real you is showing up. Not some polished “leader” persona. Just you. But authenticity isn’t just self-expression—it’s also about creating space for others to show up fully. That’s leadership—not just being real yourself but building a team where everyone feels safe enough to be real, too.
Logic
Your thinking has to be clear and clearly communicated. Start with your conclusion. Then back it up. Don’t bury the lead. Don’t bluff your way through things you don’t understand. People can smell when you’re guessing. And they stop listening.
Empathy
Be present—not just physically but emotionally and mentally. When you check your phone in a meeting or rush through a 1:1, people know. They feel it. Attention is the currency of empathy—and in leadership, it’s priceless.
Love as a Leadership Discipline
Let’s talk about love. Not the Hallmark kind. The kind that demands you hold people to high standards and invest deeply in their success. Most leaders swing to one side: tough but distant or warm but accommodating. Neither works.
Great leaders don’t lower the bar to be liked. And they don’t raise it just to see who clears it. They set the bar high because they believe in their people. Then they do everything they can to help them reach it. This is how high-performing teams are built.
Leading When You’re Not in the Room
The real test of leadership is what happens when you’re not around. Are people making smart decisions on their own? Are they aligned? Do they understand how to act?
You’ve only got two levers:
- Strategy—Clear strategy helps people make good decisions. It tells them what matters and what doesn’t. Without it, they’re just guessing.
- Culture—Culture kicks in where strategy ends. It answers the unspoken questions: Is it safe to speak up here? Who gets heard? What does good look like?
Get these two right, and you’ve built something that lasts. Get them wrong, and you’ll find yourself answering every little question because no one else knows how to decide.
Change That Sticks
One of Frei’s best insights is about the pace of change. She’s blunt: change needs to happen fast—or it doesn’t happen at all. The longer you wait, the more likely people will settle into “business as usual.”
Real culture change? It’s not a memo. It’s a movement. It starts with clear data that shows the need. Then you move—urgently, decisively, and with moral clarity. People don’t follow plans. They follow purpose.
The part that stuck with me most is that true transformation begins when people feel seen, respected, and called to rise. When that happens, performance becomes personal, excellence becomes a shared standard, and leadership becomes something bigger than you.
2025 is already underway, and this video is here to help you make it a standout year. In it, I share six key insights about what you should focus on that will have a strong positive impact on your organization. Six important ideas to make you more successful.
I’m confident you’ll find it valuable.
