PART ONE

PRESENCE

The practical frame on leadership we use in this book is that it’s all about empowering other people, in both our presence and our absence. In this first section—what we call “presence” chapters—we focus on opportunities for leadership when you’re in the proverbial room, when the people you seek to lead are within your immediate reach (a text message counts, too). This is what we mean by “presence.”

In chapter 2, we explore how to build and maintain a foundation of trust, the starting point for empowerment leadership. In chapter 3, we lay out a battle-tested framework for creating conditions in which other people can reliably excel. We examine our very rational, human tendency to sometimes dilute our commitment to the success of other people or lower our standards for the people we’re most devoted to. Finally, we discuss how to unapologetically defy these instincts and make sure everyone around us can thrive.

We also make the case for truly inclusive leadership, for enabling people who don’t look and think and talk like you. In chapter 4, we discuss how to build diverse teams that excel, not just in spite of their differences, but precisely because of them. We give you a framework for understanding the escalating noise around the topic of diversity and use our experience with large-scale, transformational inclusion initiatives to show how effective leadership can create the conditions for more and varied people to thrive—and for organizations to benefit wildly from it.

In effect, this section is about mastering the inner rings of our empowerment leadership model: trust, love, and belonging. Again, when you get it right, your presence as a leader has progressively positive impact, starting with yourself and then expanding to more and more people.

Let’s begin.