The best leaders realize that their people are wise, that they do not need to be coerced into alignment through yearly goal setting. These leaders strive instead to bring to life for their people the meaning and purpose of their work, the missions and contributions and methods that truly matter. These leaders know that in a team infused with such meaning, each person will be smart enough and driven enough to set goals voluntarily that manifest that meaning. It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced. Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism.

To be specific, here are the three levers they used to such great effect.

The first is expressed values: what you write on the walls. We don’t mean that you should literally write out your “values.” Many leaders and many companies set about doing this and wind up with a list of generic values such as integrity, innovation, or, God forbid, teamwork—which are about as meaningful as Muzak—and then wonder why the whole exercise doesn’t seem to have made much difference. Instead, apply some creativity to how you want to bring your meaning to life for your people. Don’t tell them what you value, show them. What do you actually want them to see and to bump into at work?...

A second way to cascade meaning is through rituals… You already have rituals, whether they are conscious or unconscious, and these rituals—the things you do repeatedly—communicate to your people what is meaningful to you. If we followed you around for a week, we’d see them. Let’s say you have a meeting: What time do you show up? Are you five minutes early, or five minutes late? What are you wearing? Do you catch up with your team members about their personal lives or do you launch right into business? Who talks first? Do you allow your team members to speak, or do you cut them off? Does the meeting go long? Do you hold people back to finish things up?

These are all aspects of your rituals, and we, your team, see them, make sense of them, and draw our conclusions—whether you want us to or not. The question, then, isn’t whether you have rituals or not. The question is whether or not you are deliberate about what your rituals communicate…

The third lever is stories. Chick-fil-A makes an art of its storytelling through the operator profiles during Seminar. The company dedicates time to going out to each operator’s store, taking photos, and learning about his or her family and community, precisely so it can share these stories with the rest of the company.

Many of the best leaders are storytellers, not in the sense of writing a novel or a screenplay, but because they cascade meaning through vignettes, anecdotes, or stories told at meetings, on email chains, or on phone calls. They are always telling these little stories, because the stories that they choose to tell convey what they value. Stories make sense of the world: they are meaning, made human. That’s why religions tell stories about their messiah and the creation of the earth, and include parables within those stories that help us learn what is meaningful. And that’s why you can tell a lot about what matters to a team by the stories that the team members tell themselves.

When we carry our competencies across the measurement bridge, we enter a fake and dangerous world—as a tool of assessment, order and control, they are worse than useless. But as public signifiers for what we deem most important, they are another way we can cascade meaning in our organizations, and thereby help our leaders and teams understand what’s most important.

We have seen, already, that the best people aren’t well-rounded, but are instead spiky—they have honed one or two distinctive abilities that they use to make their mark on the world. What we see in the best leaders is a similar extremism—a few signal abilities refined over time. But now, these abilities are so pronounced, and the leaders so adept at transmitting them to the world, that they stand out to all of us. And so this truth: we follow spikes.

Each truly effective leader cultivates his or her mastery in a way that communicates to us something certain and vivid. It’s as if we trust leaders only when they’ve proven to us that they’ve opened more doors than we have, seen round more corners than we have, dived deeper than we have, taken themselves more seriously than we have. We trust the seriousness of this. We trust its predictability. We are drawn to its specialness. We sense its authenticity. We are attracted to the beautiful clarity of great ability, the brief moments of awe. We ignore everything else.