Your greatest challenge as a leader, then, is to honor each person’s legitimate fear of the unknown and, at the same time, to turn that fear into spiritedness. We, your followers, like the comfort of where we stand, yet know that the flow of events is pulling us inexorably into the unknown. So when we find something, anything, however slight, that lessens our uncertainty, we cling on for dear life.

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.

Leading and following are not abstractions. They are human interactions; human relationships. And their currency is the currency of all human relationships—the currency of emotional bonds, of trust, and of love. If you, as a leader, forget these things, and yet master everything that theory world tells you matters, you will find yourself alone. But if you understand who you are, at your core, and hone that understanding into a few special abilities, each of which refracts and magnifies your intent, your essence, and your humanity, then, in the real world, we will see you.

And we will follow.

The effects of humble leadership tend to cascade down to the rest of the organization, turning leaders into genuine role models. These effects have been demonstrated in recent studies by Brad Owens from the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University and David Hekman from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado. When leaders behave humbly, employees emulate this behavior and display more modesty, admit mistakes, share credit with others, and are more receptive to others’ ideas and feedback. Using data from 607 individuals grouped into 161 teams (both in research labs and in real work environments), the authors demonstrated a social-contagion effect for humble leadership, which enhanced selfless and collaborative behaviors in their followers and, in turn, in team performance.

As I described at the beginning of the book, many organizations impose on you processes and tools that appear to have been designed to deliberately distance you from who you really are. Your unique loves, your uniqueness in general, runs counter to the organization’s need for uniformity—of products, services, even values—and so the goal of work is experienced by you as an ongoing effort to make you as much as possible like every other salesperson, housekeeper, teacher, manager, nurse, machinist, or whatever your role might be.

Wrongheaded though this is, you’re not going to be able to recreate your organization’s talent management practices all by yourself. Yes, folks like me and others are trying to influence your leaders to throw out these uniformity-focused talent practices in favor of more individualized ones, but this will take a few years. What can you do in the meanwhile? You want to find love in your work, you want to be seen for your whole, authentic self at work, and for the very best of you. How can you pull this off, when so many of the tools and technologies and processes at work are trying—well intendedly—to smother you?