How Do Other People Experience You? These 4 Things Determine Your Leadership Profile

Leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence–and making sure that impact continues into your absence.

Leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at unleashing other people. So says Frances Frei, the TED talker and Harvard Business School Professor hired by Uber and WeWork to turn around their toxic cultures.

I interviewed Frei recently in conjunction with the release of her new book with Anne Morriss, UNLEASHED: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You.

Empowerment leadership

Think of empowerment leadership as a target, with trust in the center and four rings around it: first love, then belonging, then strategy, and finally culture. Trust, love and belonging are all empowering leadership currencies you exchange directly with other people. Strategy and culture are invisible forces that can shape organizations and empower other people—lots of other people—whether or not you happen to be present.

In our conversation, we delved deeper into love. “The gift of helping someone reach for a better future than the present they’re living in is the purest form of love we know,” Frei says.

Leaders are most effective in empowering other people when they combine high standards and deep devotion. “When a leader’s expectations are high and clear, we tend to stretch to reach them,” she says. “And we are far more likely to get there when we know that leader truly has our back.” It’s a version of tough love that places equal emphasis on the toughness and the love.

To figure out your leadership profile when it comes to standards and devotion, Frei and Morriss suggest thinking about four ways in which the people you lead may experience you (as outlined below): Fidelity, Severity, Neglect and Justice. 

Don’t judge yourself if you react differently to different people and situations. For example, someone may need your unconditional fidelity to get through a tough experience, and severity may be exactly the right response to a willful violation of your company’s rules or values.

Even neglect may have a strategic role to play in organizations with limited time and resources. The key is to understand your patterns–and how they may be impacting your ability to unleash other people.

1. Fidelity.

Who has a prized place in your life, but pays a low price for maintaining that position? Who gets what they want from you (status, freedom, extra dessert), with relatively few conditions placed on the exchange? Maybe it’s your boss or a longtime colleague with whom you’ve worked for a while. Maybe it’s someone who’s hitting their numbers but otherwise wreaking havoc. One clue to this segment is whether you regularly protect someone from hard truths such as how others experience them.

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