Your challenge as a leader is not to try to acquire the complete set of abstract leader competencies—you will fail, not least because the first hurdle you will fall at is authenticity. Instead, your challenge is to find and refine your own idiosyncratic way of creating in your team these eight emotional outcomes. Do this well and you will lead well.

Interestingly—and happily—a close study of the real world reveals that these two are linked. Your ability to create the outcomes you want in your followers is tied directly to how seriously and intelligently you cultivate your own idiosyncrasy, and to what end. The deeper and more extreme your idiosyncrasy becomes, the more passionately your followers follow—and while this is frustrating to us when we happen to disagree with the ends of a particular leader, it is so nonetheless.

“The uncomfortable truth is that, more than likely, no one is worrying about what makes you unique. Nobody is dedicated to introducing you to yourself, to helping you get curious about and build a really deep relationship with you at your best. School doesn’t do it: schools want to make sure that everybody learns what everybody is supposed to learn. Work doesn’t do it: work is most concerned about performance, about what needs to get done. Everybody in your life, since childhood, has had expectations and demands that don’t necessarily have any direct connection to you discovering the unique things you love and building a life around them.

Of course, your parents want you to be happy. But if you told them that living in your van and selling burritos to hungry surfers is what makes you happy, I think they’d start pointing to alternative, more “successful” paths.

What no one is doing is starting with you, listening to you, paying attention to what you instinctively pay attention to, and giving you methods and techniques to then apply these unique gifts in the world. Which is a problem for you since, as Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford commencement address, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

None of the above has anything to do with who you are on the inside. The uniqueness of what you love or loathe is beside the point. Instead, you are—from school on into the world of work—assessed against a set of models. You are judged not by how intelligently you’ve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely you’ve matched the models. So, in truth, you won’t just get lost. You’ll get hidden—and by the very institutions that are supposed to reveal you. Little wonder we’re facing such an epidemic of lost people.

Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can't design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don't get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the out- standing ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn't produce anything else.

Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can't design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don't get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the out- standing ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn't produce anything else.