An effective style grows from within you. It should be entirely yours. No one except you should have a style exactly like yours.

What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”

• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”

• They developed action plans.

• They took responsibility for decisions.

• They took responsibility for communicating.

• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.

• They ran productive meetings.

• They thought and said “we” rather than “I.

What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”

• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”

• They developed action plans.

• They took responsibility for decisions.

• They took responsibility for communicating.

• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.

• They ran productive meetings.

• They thought and said “we” rather than “I.

A New Lens on Leadership*

There is a great irony for me as I finish this project: I learned more about effective leadership in doing this study than in all my decades of studying what makes great organizations tick. That’s an irony because many people who know my prior work would categorize me as a “leadership expert” based on five books wherein I’d studied and written about some of the greatest corporate leaders of all time. Yet it took this project to finally see perhaps the most important ingredient in effective leadership: leading from your encodings.

Leadership effectiveness flows not from following the leadership recipes of others, or in having something we might call a “leadership personality.” There cannot possibly be a universal recipe for leadership, for the simple reason that we are all encoded differently. The key is to trust your own leadership encodings, not to follow someone else’s. If someone offers you a leadership recipe based on what worked for them, remember that it worked for them because it reflected their encodings, which likely differ substantially from your encodings. It’s okay to have a recipe for leadership, so long as it is your recipe that flows from your encodings and your inner fire.