Preface

There are many different ways to think about or characterize leadership—what it is, what it should be, what is right or wrong with it today, where it works, and where it fails.

These views are usually shaped by our own personal experiences, beliefs, values, culture, and other factors. You may have observed effective leadership in a particular situation and thought, “Now that’s leadership.”

However, leadership often involves ambiguity, volatility, change, and uncertainty. It plays out over the long term, and in specific moments. What looks like a failure at first may prove to be exactly what is needed in the long run. What looked good initially may prove fatal. Sometimes, it is not clear until later.

Even so, there is a way of thinking about the practice of leadership that constitutes a “lens.” Holding this lens up to anyone leading—perhaps most interestingly, yourself—you gain insight into a powerful way that leadership can be assessed and understood. This way of looking at leadership integrates a wide range of what must be grasped, worked on, and then mastered for leadership to be effective across a wide range of circumstances and challenges.

That metaphorical lens through which I examine leadership is the commitments a leader makes, or doesn’t, as he or she attempts to lead others. Consequently, this book explores what I believe to be the most important commitments a leader can make:

To the self

To people

To the organization

To the truth

To leadership.

We can all look at our day-to-day and long-term patterned actions through the lens of these five critical commitments and ask a very clarifying, and sometimes tough, question: “Am I leading while staying true to these commitments?”

Leaders are certainly expected to do a great deal. Some leadership models feature dozens of specific behaviors, competencies, or techniques. Much of the impetus for this book came from wrestling with all these expectations that are placed on leaders. Through distillation, integration, and attempting to understand “What’s really underneath all this?” the concept of core, essential commitments in vital areas emerged. I think of the five commitments as the source code for leadership—the fertile ground out of which effective leadership behaviors emerge.

The word commitment is interesting. It comes from the Latin mittere, meaning “to send.” (Think of transmit, remit, or submit.) Your real commitments reveal what you, through your actions (not just words), send out into the world and workplace. These commitments are necessary for authentic, congruent, and powerful leadership behaviors.

I hope that thinking about your leadership commitments will help you be able to ask yourself important, accountability-creating questions, resolve to answer them in a productive way, and as a result enhance your leadership effectiveness. For once you as a leader accept that these five commitments are real, and that they matter, you are in the same stroke accepting responsibility for turning them into action.

Through self-assessments, exercises, and practice tools, this book invites you to continually ask yourself a simple question: “How am I doing with this commitment?” The accompanying CD offers resources to print and use along with the tools, techniques, exercises, and leadership vignettes provided in the book. Along the way, I hope to offer insights and help guide you on your own unique path to becoming a true leader who makes good on these critical commitments.

That can make all the difference for yourself, those you lead, and the legacy you leave.

Mark Leheney

Arlington, Virginia