Far better to be an uncharismatic leader who gets the right people to confront the brutal facts than to be a magnetic force of personality who leads compliant followers to disaster. If you have charisma, you can still build an enduring great company. But never forget: If your company cannot be great without your personal charisma to inspire, then it is not yet a great company.

Yes, you should be fanatical about getting the details right. Yes, you should shape the group’s values with symbolic acts on certain specific details, but not on every detail. The symbolic acts are meant to lead the way—to guide, to show, to set an example. They are meant to leave a lasting impression so that you don’t need to tightly control people—so that people will behave of their own accord consistent with the core philosophy.

You can be hands-on without stifling people; you can have your fingers on the pulse of the organization, yet not suffocate folks. Indeed, a non-controlling personal touch has just the opposite effect of micro-management. Instead of demoralizing people, it elevates and inspires them to perhaps do more than they would otherwise think possible, which leads us right into our next leadership style element.

In the early phases of an organization, a company’s vision comes directly from its early leaders; it is very much their personal vision. To become great, however, a company must progress past excessive dependence on one or a few key individuals. The vision must become shared as a community, and become identified primarily with the organization, rather than with certain individuals running the organization. The vision must actually transcend the founders.

It’s good practice to codify your vision on paper. Writing it down forces you to think rigorously about what exactly you are trying to do. Even more important, it’s a critical step in making it the organization’s vision, rather than the vision of a single leader.

As a leader, you are trying to unlock the judgment, the choices, the insight, and the creativity of your people. But, as we’ve seen in the last two chapters, the way we go about this doesn’t make much sense. We cloister information in our planning systems, and we cascade directives in our goal-setting systems. Instead, we should unlock information through intelligence systems, and cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories. We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to make a contribution. They will invariably make better and more authentic decisions than those derived from any planning system that cascades goals from on high.