The Leaders You Leave Behind is a practical leadership guide designed around the idea that people are the way the mission survives. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I’ve been thinking about and working on this book for almost 10 years.  I’ve been learning about leadership for much longer. This book grew out of more than three decades of watching leadership practiced in very different environments.I’ve led and learned in the military during peacetime, during a deployment to Iraq, in public education, with technology companies, and in nonprofit organizations. Across all of them, I saw the same thing: leaders are responsible for accomplishing the mission, but they can only accomplish it through people, and more importantly, with people. I saw too many leaders behave as though results and relationships were competing or mutually exclusive priorities. Some achieved short-term results while exhausting or diminishing the people around them. Others cared deeply about their teams but were reluctant to establish clear expectations or hold people accountable. Neither approach creates lasting success.  The best leaders establish high standards, provide clarity, build trust, provide support, and prepare others to lead. They enable others to succeed.

I have always been a teacher and a trainer at heart.  This is another way for me to share what I’ve learned with others. I wrote The Leaders You Leave Behind because I wanted to offer a practical and effective leadership style based on my experience.   I want people to succeed as leaders, so I wrote.

You write about balancing high standards with genuine care for people. Why do you think so many leaders believe those two qualities are in conflict? 

They are not in conflict; high standards are easier to maintain when people know you genuinely care about their success. I think many leaders mistake care for softness, or they see being harsh and distant and the only way to enforce high standards.  They have seen accountability modeled as harshness and compassion modeled as permissiveness. As a result, they assume that holding people to high standards means being uncaring, or that caring about people means protecting them from difficult expectations.

Genuine care requires standards. People deserve to know what success looks like, why their work matters, and where they stand. Avoiding a difficult conversation may feel compassionate in the moment, but it often leaves someone without the feedback or support needed to improve. At the same time, standards without trust, context, and support quickly become mere demands. A leader’s responsibility is not simply to insist on results. It is to create the conditions in which people can succeed—providing clarity, resources, development, honest feedback, and meaningful accountability.

High standards and genuine care are mutually supporting leadership philosophies. Each makes the other more effective.

One of the recurring themes is that leadership is about service rather than authority. What misconceptions about servant leadership do you most hope this book corrects? 

That servant leadership is passive, soft, or primarily about keeping people happy. Servant leadership does not mean avoiding difficult decisions, lowering expectations, or giving people everything they ask for. It means understanding that authority exists to serve the mission and the people responsible for accomplishing it. A servant leader provides clear direction, removes unnecessary obstacles, secures the resources people need, and creates an environment in which they can exercise judgment and take ownership. It also means giving honest feedback and holding people accountable, because allowing someone to continually fall short without addressing it and supporting them serves neither that person nor the team.

Servant leadership is about empowering others to grow, achieve the mission by removing obstacles, and providing support. The leader may have the final authority, but the purpose of that authority is not control or status. It is to help others succeed, grow, and eventually lead without depending on you.

Robert Greenleaf gave us a way to measure servant leaders in his original essay: “The best test, and difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”

Many people discuss supporting and growing others when talking about servant leadership, but they forget the last two questions.  We should not only look out for our employees or those we lead, but also considerthe impacts on “the least privileged”. 

What is one thing you hope your readers take away from The Leaders You Leave Behind?

I hope readers come away understanding that their greatest leadership legacy will not be a project, a title, a strategic plan, or a set of performance numbers. Those things matter, but they are temporary. The more lasting measure of leadership is what happens after you leave. I constantly return to Greenleaf’s test. Did your leadership make people more confident and capable? Did people learn to make sound decisions without waiting for permission? Did you create a culture in which people understand the mission, trust and serve one another, maintain high standards, and develop the next generation of leaders? Will others become servant leaders as well?

Leadership is not about making yourself indispensable. Leadership is not about being loud, or in charge, or the smartest person in the room. It is about building people and organizations that can succeed without you. Accomplish the mission, care for your people, and leave behind leaders prepared to do the same for others.

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