Chapitre 1
Leadership Distilled: The Power of Two Words
Have you ever noticed how the most profound leadership wisdom can often be distilled into the simplest phrases? That's exactly what Bill Treasurer discovered after 25 years of coaching leaders across the globe. His book "Leadership Two Words at a Time" has become a sensation among emerging leaders and seasoned executives alike, offering a refreshingly accessible approach to leadership development when many feel overwhelmed by complexity.
The book has garnered praise from leadership luminaries like Ken Blanchard and has become required reading in many corporate leadership programs. What makes it particularly compelling is Treasurer's background-combining his experience as a former member of the U.S. High Diving Team (where he performed dives from heights of over 100 feet) with decades of leadership consulting for organizations ranging from NASA to Saks Fifth Avenue. This unique perspective allows him to understand both courage and fear intimately, elements he considers central to effective leadership.
In a business world drowning in leadership theories and frameworks, Treasurer's approach cuts through the noise with memorable two-word directives that stick with leaders long after reading. Let's explore how these simple phrases can transform your leadership journey.
Chapitre 2
The Foundation: Leading Yourself First
Leadership begins with self-mastery. Before you can effectively lead others, you must first learn to lead yourself. This means developing deep self-awareness, living with integrity, and continuously working to improve yourself.
The ancient Greek aphorism "Know Thyself" serves as the cornerstone of effective leadership. Understanding your unique talents and strengths is only half the equation-you must also recognize how these strengths cast shadows when overused. A piercing intellect becomes intimidating when wielded without care. Creativity becomes impractical when untethered from reality. The harmonizing personality that brings people together can suppress necessary conflict when taken to extremes.
Treasurer illustrates this with a powerful metaphor: "Your strengths are like sunshine, but they also cast shadows when overused." This insight helps leaders understand that weaknesses aren't separate traits but often the dark side of their greatest strengths.
Beyond understanding your capabilities, true self-knowledge requires examining your values and living in congruence with them. Treasurer shares the story of a vice president who claimed family was his highest priority yet consistently neglected his children. The gnawing guilt he felt signaled this misalignment. When he finally requested flexibility to coach his son's football team, he restored harmony between his stated values and actions.
Self-awareness also means examining your personal history-both advantages and disadvantages-to develop compassion for others with different experiences. Treasurer reframes privilege as "something you have that others could benefit from," noting that even growing up financially poor can provide privileges of resourcefulness and community support that wealthy people rarely develop.
The ultimate goal is becoming comfortable in your own skin-achieving what Treasurer calls "You United," where your authentic self aligns perfectly with your leadership persona. He points to Dolly Parton as an exemplar of this quality-someone whose inner security and confidence make her authentic and trustworthy. People instinctively trust leaders who know who they are.
Chapitre 3
Modeling Principles: Your Actions Speak Volumes
Once you've established self-awareness, you must embody the values you want to see in others. People naturally mimic their leaders' behaviors and attitudes, often unconsciously.
Treasurer illustrates this with a story about a bank president who asked for input on dress code changes but rejected his team's unanimous support for casual Fridays. When the president voiced his disapproval, the entire team immediately reversed their positions to align with his-demonstrating how easily people conform to their leader's preferences.
This conformity happens daily across organizations, with people often sacrificing their own values to mirror their leaders. The impact is profound: as a leader, you're constantly modeling behaviors whether you intend to or not.
Self-awareness enables intentional role modeling rather than having random, haphazard impact. Treasurer shares how Sara Blakely, Spanx founder, views role modeling as a primary leadership responsibility. Her father taught her to embrace failure by asking "What did you fail at this week?" and celebrating her attempts. This shaped her leadership approach, where she asks herself "If you weren't afraid, would you do it?" and responds positively to team members who take risks.
Sometimes leaders must model behaviors their teams haven't yet developed-"leading from where people haven't yet arrived." One safety director transformed his company's punitive safety culture by sharing his own vulnerabilities first. During a workshop aimed at rebuilding the safety culture after several fatalities, he shared personal safety lapses and his emotional journey through alcoholism recovery. His raw honesty created permission for others to be equally candid about their own safety shortcomings, shifting the culture from hiding mistakes to building shared responsibility.
Your character as a leader directly impacts how people respond to you. If you're anxious, people become nervous; if you're manipulative, people won't trust you; if you're arrogant, people will talk behind your back. It's behavioral science 101-your behavior is the stimulus for others' responses.
Chapitre 4
The Continuous Journey: Aspire Higher
Leadership requires continuous improvement-the people you lead deserve your ongoing self-development. While perfectionism can lead to micromanagement, you should always be refining, strengthening, and elevating yourself as a leader.
Becoming a better leader requires hard work-nothing will be handed to you. As Navy SEALs say, "Earn your trident every day." The trident, worn over their hearts, symbolizes their commitment to excellence. While you won't wear a physical trident, you must honor the privilege of leadership by continuously working on yourself in a disciplined way.
In construction leadership, respect is directly tied to work ethic. Nothing earns respect from crew leaders and superintendents more than demonstrating hard work-showing up early and staying late when needed. As leaders advance in their careers, they often move further from revenue-generating work into meetings, client entertainment, and strategy. This distance can create a perception gap with frontline workers who question how hard senior leaders actually work.
The most respected leaders deliberately stay connected to frontline workers, like the business owner who brings coffee and donuts to crews working overnight during blizzards. Your work ethic is the most visible demonstration of your commitment and that you don't take your role for granted.
Always deliver value beyond what you're being paid. Your organization and clients want to know you're worth your paycheck. Aim to be worth more than you're paid by continually increasing your skills, knowledge, and influence. Some leaders invest heavily in their development-earning advanced degrees despite already being established-to add more value and prove their worth to themselves.
Your career belongs to you alone, so take charge of your development regardless of whether your organization funds it. Invest in yourself however you can afford, whether through formal education, professional associations, free online courses, business retreats, or simply learning from leadership masters through accessible resources.
Chapitre 5
Mastering Self-Control: The Key to Leadership Sanity
Leadership isn't what it appears from the outside. New leaders often discover that the reality differs greatly from their expectations of spacious offices and important meetings. While leadership does offer more freedom, interesting challenges, and influence, these benefits typically come with increased stress from all directions-pressure from above to deliver results with fewer resources, demands from direct reports for attention and compensation, competition from peers, and concerns from loved ones about your changing demeanor.
Leadership is challenging largely because of unpredictable people who can be fickle, quirky, and sometimes petty-occasionally behaving like "grown-up toddlers wearing bigger clothes and sporting larger and more fragile egos." The difficulty extends beyond people to include relentless demands for results, uncomfortable change that pushes people out of comfort zones, the absence of a "cavalry" to rescue you when overwhelmed, and the reality that as a leader, you're "it"-held to different standards than others.
During leadership workshops for a fast-growing communications company, participants repeatedly mentioned "redlining" to describe their experience. While they loved the entrepreneurial energy, winning against competitors, and increased opportunities, they felt dangerously maxed out-as if operating with "the throttle all the way open" and RPMs deep in the red zone. People were simultaneously energized, exhausted, and terrified, working in an unsustainable condition.
The story of Kevin, a digital customer experience company president, illustrates the dangers. Despite being a devoted family man who made mission trips to Kenya, Kevin consistently prioritized work over self-care. A drawing by his daughter depicted his family standing together while he appeared as a tiny hand waving from an airplane-"because I'm always leaving on business trips." Despite coaching conversations about work-life balance, Kevin never implemented his self-care commitments. Tragically, he died of a massive heart attack at age 47 while entertaining clients, demonstrating how redlining can turn into flatlining.
As your leadership career progresses, making yourself a priority becomes increasingly important. "Personal Fidelity" means extending the same deep devotion, loyalty and trust to yourself that you give to others. This isn't selfishness-it's recognizing that you'll take better care of others when you first take care of yourself.
Experienced whitewater navigators know to look for eddies-calm spots outside the swift current where one can catch their breath before returning to the rapids. When navigating work's permanent whitewater, you must catch eddies whenever possible. Don't book back-to-back meetings without breaks. Don't delay lunch until 2:30 then eat at your desk. Schedule "me time" as a matter of self-respect.
Chapitre 6
The Humility Imperative: Keeping Your Ego in Check
Leadership positions naturally attract flattery and special treatment that can distort your self-perception. The power and privilege accompanying leadership can be seductively appealing. Employees tend to put leaders on pedestals, granting them special treatment and behavioral latitude that increases with advancement.
What starts small-letting you sit at the head of the table or begin meetings-can evolve into greater imbalances between "superiors" and "subordinates." Senior leaders can arrive late without explanation, interrupt others without consequence, or exempt themselves from rules binding others. When you start believing you truly are more important, you may begin exploiting these invisible privileges, treating direct reports impatiently or dismissively.
Intimidation works because it creates the illusion of a friction-free environment-people won't question you but will silently work without complaint. However, these efficiency payoffs are short-lived, as resentment burns away genuine loyalty, making failure inevitable.
What we're discussing is ego-specifically how the natural spoils of leadership can act as atmospheric helium, swelling a leader's sense of specialness. This ego inflation eventually transforms healthy confidence into poisonous arrogance as hubris takes over. Instead of using talents to benefit others, the corrupted leader focuses on self-benefit, inverting leadership's purpose.
In "The Leadership Killer," Treasurer identifies hubris as leadership's deadliest contaminant-encompassing dangerous overconfidence, power abuse, and taking pleasure in humiliating others. Hubris kills mission focus, team morale, performance quality, follower loyalty, ethical standards, professional reputation, and ultimately, leadership legacy.
Ten early warning signs of ego inflation include: having a short fuse, feeling envious of others' recognition, being easily offended, feeling perpetually slighted, obsessively checking social media validation, rarely seeking feedback, needing to win at everything, spending more time with bosses than direct reports, fixating on compensation, and overusing "I" instead of "we."
Your ego will never be permanently subdued-it's like a private bodyguard made of your DNA, a twin absorbed solely by self-interest. While it's good to have such a loyal defender, it needs to be under your direction, not vice versa.
Eight practices can help maintain humility: 1) Daily reflection checks in the mirror; 2) Deputizing truth-tellers who'll question you when needed; 3) Spending more time with your team than with bosses; 4) Practicing listening by asking questions and using the WAIT acronym (Why Am I Talking?); 5) Staying level and resisting "superior" treatment; 6) Actively seeking honest feedback; 7) Considering quitting if you think you have all the answers; and 8) Counting your blessings through gratitude lists.
Chapitre 7
Building Trust: The Foundation of Leading Others
Trust is fundamental to leadership-people must be able to trust you before they'll give their best. Trust formation is complex, influenced by your upbringing, self-worth, disposition, and past betrayals. Everyone exists on a continuum from extreme naivety to extreme self-protection, with ignorance at both extremes. As a leader, you must find ways to trust those you lead or fail.
Before others can find you trustworthy, you must fully trust yourself-which requires the inner work of purifying your motives to rise above your base nature. Most people find trusting others more difficult than trusting themselves, though about 10% struggle more with self-trust.
Some leaders create unease through uptight, angry demeanor-they're rulers, not leaders, and they receive fearful, resentful responses. People build walls after betrayals, creating distance through "trust rejection." Using Rodin's sculpture "The Gates of Hell" as metaphor, Treasurer warns that living only from rational thought disconnected from heart leads to misery. Heads keep us from impulsive decisions; hearts prevent us from becoming impersonal robots.
Untrustworthy leaders trust only their own instincts, assign impossible goals, give meaningless busy work, never apologize, punish honest mistakes, maintain an emotionless poker face, lack backbone with superiors, manipulate truth, encourage backchanneling, and keep people anxious through unpredictability. These "Byzantine" leadership approaches treat people as objects to be manipulated rather than individuals worthy of dignity and development.
Some leaders mistakenly keep employees anxious to ensure conscientiousness, using fear and threats instead of proper guidance. Treasurer argues this approach is counterproductive-adults don't need threats to perform well. Clear standards, involving employees in planning, and providing support creates genuine ownership.
Trust requires courage because it involves accepting the risk of being let down. The dangers of not trusting are far worse than the potential disappointment from trusting-leaders who can't trust others become micromanagers with stunted teams and shallow relationships.
Leadership expert Ken Blanchard shared that great leaders invest time building trust with their people. He recommended spending just fifteen minutes every week or two with each direct report-not discussing work status but focusing on them as humans. These conversations should explore how they're doing personally, what's important to them, their career aspirations, and how you can better support them. As Blanchard emphasized, "Any leader who says they can't find fifteen minutes a week for a direct report is full of baloney!"
Chapitre 8
Creating Psychological Safety: The Courage to Speak Truth
Would you prefer employees who play it safe or those who act with courage? The obvious answer is courageous employees. However, during times of change and uncertainty, people naturally seek safety and are driven by fear, becoming distracted and unproductive. In today's constantly changing workplace, this means many workers exist in a perpetual state of fear.
Fear is devastating for business, creating a "Total Cost of Fear" that manifests in lower morale, hidden mistakes, stifled communication, disengagement, lack of innovation, and eventual turnover. Despite these costs, many leaders still use fear as motivation. Courage is the antidote to fear, enabling initiative, honest communication, and the ability to face challenges. While fearful workers seek safety, courageous workers seek opportunity.
Many leaders focus more on what they don't want than what they do want, which Treasurer calls "enfearing" people rather than encouraging them. A leader's emotional state is contagious-being critical or short-tempered creates an environment where people become tentative and hesitant. Leaders who are comfortable in their own skin and skilled at managing stress create more enjoyable, productive, and innovative workplaces.
TELL Courage is the courage to speak candidly and assertively. It's commonly cited as examples of courageous workplace behavior, like when someone speaks up to leadership about issues everyone is experiencing. This type of courage is essential when giving direct feedback, during vigorous disagreements aimed at better outcomes, when stopping production for safety concerns, or when delivering difficult news.
Leaders must distinguish between challenges to their ideas versus challenges to their authority. Good ideas can withstand scrutiny and disagreement-in fact, good decisions require these elements. Treasurer highlights McKinsey and Company's approach of fostering "independent perspectives" through an "obligation to engage and dissent." At McKinsey, every consultant, regardless of rank, has the duty to dissent when they can substantiate their thoughts with clear rationale.
New leaders often become overly attached to having their authority respected, possibly stemming from childhood lessons about respecting authority figures. However, expecting childish subservience from adult team members endangers leadership effectiveness and prevents idea improvement. Psychological safety allows people to challenge ideas without fear of punishment.
The most admired leaders maintain composure during high-anxiety situations. A leader's ability to influence others depends significantly on their personhood-people should feel more confident after interacting with you. To stay composed when triggered, observe yourself without judgment, acknowledge emotions without identifying with them, take pauses before acting when emotionally rattled, and consider how your leadership can best serve the situation.
Chapitre 9
Developing Your Team: The Heart of Leadership
Developing people is a core leadership responsibility despite time pressures and competing demands. After working with a good leader, direct reports should be enhanced by the experience.
Effective talent nurturing means providing work opportunities that utilize people's current skills while developing latent abilities. These should be genuine opportunities aligned with their passions, interests, and natural strengths, which increases engagement and ownership. Leaders should honor this tradition by creating similar growth opportunities for their teams. Even without formal promotions, everyday work can offer development through "Gulp Goals" (challenging but achievable objectives), involving team members in consequential decisions, assigning special projects that increase visibility, and rotating meeting facilitation responsibilities.
Delegation isn't just about managing your time-it's a powerful tool for developing your people. Many leadership careers stall because leaders refuse to let go of tasks they've outgrown, claiming no one else can do them properly. The real reasons often include enjoying the task or fearing loss of visibility. Effective delegation creates a positive cycle: you're freed for higher-order work while team members build skills that enable them to handle increasingly complex responsibilities.
Development inherently involves discomfort-people grow in zones of discomfort, not comfort. As a leader, you must support team members through this uncomfortable growth process. Learning is often messy, filled with self-doubt and setbacks, and your encouragement becomes especially crucial during these rocky periods. When people extend themselves by trying new things and taking appropriate risks, acknowledge their courage explicitly.
TRY Courage-the third behavioral expression of courage-involves intentionally moving outside one's comfort zone to attempt something new. It's about taking initiative and action despite discomfort, particularly when people "step up to the plate" for first-time tasks. Leaders can promote TRY Courage by modeling courage themselves, reminding team members of past successes, helping them envision successful outcomes, praising productive mistakes, and normalizing discomfort as part of learning.
Too many organizations lack regular performance feedback processes, or treat them as inconvenient formalities. Some employees only receive feedback when they make mistakes, while others face a year's worth of accumulated feedback in a single overwhelming review. Better leadership means providing frequent, routine feedback as part of development-simply reinforcing good performance and coaching areas needing improvement.
After thirty years in leadership development, Treasurer confidently asserts that leadership skills can indeed be developed-they're not merely innate qualities. Leadership development is a baton-passing tradition where experienced leaders support, develop, and coach emerging leaders-leaders creating leaders is what leadership is all about.
Chapitre 10
Delivering Results: The Ultimate Leadership Test
Results are the fundamental reason leadership exists. Delivering them consistently is your primary responsibility and the key to job security. When evaluating you for leadership, bosses primarily ask: "Can you make it happen?" If you can be trusted to deliver results, many other leadership shortcomings may be overlooked.
Leadership's most rewarding aspect is inspiring a team to create meaningful impact through intentional hard work. Rehnuma Karim exemplifies this through her journey from Bangladesh, where she rebelled against gender expectations from childhood. At UNICEF Bangladesh, she observed her female boss's openness to ideas regardless of rank. During a leadership retreat, she proposed Bangladesh's first Youth Forum including children from all income levels who would help design it. The successful forum gained media attention and culminated with government officials listening to children's proposed solutions.
Leaders must follow through on plans to achieve meaningful results. Treasurer shares his frustrating experience with a marketing firm run by Caleb, who was full of creative ideas but never delivered on them. Caleb would excite clients with possibilities, saying "What we could do is..." but implementation would stall. The lesson is clear: as a leader, you don't have to do all the work yourself, but you must ensure the work gets done, whether through your own efforts or by engaging people who can convert ideas into tangible actions.
Some leadership initiatives don't have clear endpoints but require continuous improvement. Treasurer co-developed The Walsh Group Leadership Initiative (WGLI), an eighteen-month program for emerging leaders at a Chicago construction company that has run successfully since 2007. Despite the program's success with over 150 graduates across seven iterations, the developers still hold regular "Design Days" to continuously refine and enhance it. They refuse to put it on autopilot, committed to making it "Mo' Better" rather than becoming stale.
Results rarely come instantly, especially as you advance in leadership. Before becoming a leader, you can quickly complete tasks on your to-do list. As a leader, assignments become more complex, involving more people and strategic considerations. Senior executives might work on decisions that take years of data gathering, discussion, and implementation before seeing results. One company owner reminds employees that "business is a marathon, not a sprint." New leaders should work with urgency but not fury, making results part of their regular routine: plan-work-finish, repeat.
Chapitre 11
Embracing the Business: From Obligation to Passion
Business fundamentals matter in all sectors-nonprofit, government, and for-profit alike. Leaders must understand organizational operations: funding flows, customer relationships, risk management, talent development, and countless other elements. Though initially intimidating with its specialized terminology, business becomes less daunting with experience.
When you shift from fearing business to loving it, work transforms from a grind into an adventure that inspires creativity and builds confidence. With experience, your judgment becomes more decisive as fewer problems seem novel. You'll be included in solving larger problems and seizing bigger opportunities, building credibility and influence. The camaraderie developed with fellow leaders creates enduring bonds through collaboration, competition, and mutual respect.
Perhaps most rewarding is empowering your team to achieve more than they imagined possible, watching them develop new skills and confidence. Since you'll spend more time at work than home, immersing yourself in business can be like attending a university that teaches everything from strategy to psychology-if you're willing to be a good student.
There's a critical distinction between loving business and mere infatuation. Early-career professionals often become enamored with trendy startups and charismatic founders raising capital for undefined ventures. The allure of risk-taking, potential IPO windfalls, and freedom from conventional management can be intoxicating. But before betting your career on a startup, perform due diligence: examine the business model, profit timeline, growth plans, and leadership continuity.
Genuine business love stems from deep caring and interest. The more you follow your curiosity, open your mind to learn, and roll up your sleeves, the more business will fascinate you. This combination creates passion-the magical quality separating great leaders from average ones. The word "passion" derives from Latin "passio" meaning "to suffer"-passionate people willingly toil, struggle and sacrifice for what they care about.
New leaders often feel overwhelmed, believing they need to know everything immediately. You attend meetings with superiors fearing being called on, assign tasks you've never performed yourself, and watch peers get promoted while you feel inadequate. On difficult days when emergencies arise, remember you don't need to carry this burden alone-your boss exists to support you. Ask questions when you don't understand terminology, request help when needed, and make your case for additional resources. Pace yourself in building business knowledge-you can't and shouldn't learn everything immediately.
Chapitre 12
The Courage to Lead: A Final Word
In the end, leadership is about courage-the courage to know yourself deeply, to model principles worth following, to trust others and create psychological safety, to develop your team members, and to deliver results consistently.
The journey of leadership is both joyfully hard and immensely rewarding. You'll face tough times, big challenges, and complicated people, but keep doing the next right thing, especially when doing wrong would be easier. Face your fears, help others face theirs, and take action.
Many people are counting on you to use your leadership influence to make the world better and leave people better than you found them. Stay connected to your integrity, let your values guide you, and resist the temptation to lower standards or mistreat people.
Remember Treasurer's wisdom-take leadership two words at a time. Trust first. Create safety. Nurture talent. Get results. And above all, be courageous.
