Want To Be A Great Leader? Share Your Beliefs

One of the last pieces of research I did with my mentor Dr. Don Clifton before his passing was a primary qualitative research project on the practices of the most effective leaders. We weren’t looking for lists of shared strengths or competencies; our quantitative research had long since revealed the fundamental idiosyncrasy of the best leaders. Instead, we conducted hundreds of focus groups to try to learn if the best leaders shared any actual practices. Not did they possess the same strengths or loves, but instead, did they behave the same?

We found a few, which, after much debate, we wound up calling demands. These were actions that the most effective leaders demanded of themselves.

Make sense of experience was one: this was the demand to always evaluate why things played out the way they did to ensure that the leader didn’t fall into the comfort of familiarity, and simply repeat the same moves again and again.

Build knowledge of self was another one, which speaks directly to the need to pinpoint those red threads.

But at the heart of these demands, one that we heard vividly in the interviews and focus groups, was share your beliefs.

One side of this demand was internal—these leaders disciplined themselves to find time during the year to sit with their beliefs and clarify them. Which, when we asked about it, seemed to mean: Take time away from the busyness of work, surface their core beliefs—write them down, put them up on the wall on flip charts—and then push on them. Do I still believe this? Has anything happened recently to challenge or change this belief? Why is this belief still so important to me? This demand to constantly be clarifying their beliefs undoubtedly gave them an aura of certainty and solidity—which then gave their people more confidence.

The other side of this demand was external—these leaders seemed to understand that the job of a leader was to play to an audience, and they couldn’t expect the audience to read their mind, or their heart. And so, they took it upon themselves to share their beliefs with their followers.

This insight is one of the most distinctive differences between the best leaders and the average. The average leader views the world through a primarily functional lens. There is work to be done. Tasks to be completed. Emails to send. Standard operating procedure to follow. And the job of the leader, according to this view, is to make sure that everything works as it should, and that the right people are adding their particular efforts to the workflow at the right time.

In contrast, the best leaders understand that they are on stage every day. And that their job is to plan out their words and their movements on stage so that the audience can come away with a shared understanding of the leader’s message.

This might seem obvious—Of course, the leader is being watched every day!—but you would be surprised by how many leaders forget this. They get so caught up in their own thinking and decisions that they lose sight of the audience. For these leaders the whole concept of experience-making is lost because they’ve gotten so far away from thinking about the audience and what sort of experience they are having. And once you’ve forgotten about the person who’s having an experience, well then, what’s the point of thinking about how to make a great one? There is none. And so, they don’t.

So, for you, please keep your audience in mind all the time. You are standing up there in the lights, playing to a crowd. What you say and how you say it will most definitely have an effect on this crowd—and so the demand you must hold yourself accountable to is: Have I been intentional in how and what I’ve shared?

When it comes to beliefs, the best leaders realize that unless they share their beliefs explicitly with the audience, then there’s no reason to think that the audience will figure them out for themselves. Audiences can’t read your mind, and they don’t have the time or the occasion—or the patience—to piece together your beliefs from the jigsaw puzzle of your actions over time. So, if you are to make a solid and predictable experience for your people, take it upon yourself to share your beliefs with them.

From all of my research it appears that there is no one right way to do this: Some leaders write a yearly letter to their people expressing their beliefs; some hold weekly meetings in which they ask their team to share real-world examples of the leader’s beliefs in action; some create badges and buttons to celebrate teammates who have lived up to the leader’s beliefs; some put up pictures in their office of heroes who embody their beliefs.

The method doesn’t matter. What matters is that you, the leader, are explicit about what you believe. Not what the company believes—if your efforts to share your beliefs amount to nothing more than pointing to the company values posters on the wall, they will come to naught. Not because the company’s beliefs are wrong. But because your public endorsement of the company’s beliefs doesn’t make an experience for your team—well, it does, but it’s not your experience. It’s not an experience that you made. These are not your words. These are not your beliefs. You’re just regurgitating someone else’s—and for your team this makes you less coherent, not more; less defined, less specifically you, less predictable. And so less likely to earn your team’s confidence to follow you into the future.

So, when you share your beliefs, make sure your team know they’re truly yours.

Adapted from Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Copyright © 2026 One Thing Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.