The Art of Leadership

Introduction

This is a book full of small things. Simple, memorable leadership acts and practices that I’ve gathered and refined over the years.

Here’s my favorite: I’ve preached 1:1s, weekly recurring meetings with direct reports, for decades. I believe a 1:1 represents the simplest and most reliable way to build trust between you and your coworkers, by providing a weekly high-bandwidth conversation on current events affecting the team. 1:1s are the first meeting I schedule when I show up at a new gig and they are the last meeting I’ll reschedule or cancel during busy times. 1:1s have been my team-building go-to move for years.

Where’d this belief come from? Why do I think they’re so important? I discovered 1:1s at Netscape in the mid-1990s. A recurring weekly meeting with the boss. It was a thing that managers did, but that didn’t make them relevant. Just work that I was supposed to do, so I scheduled them.

Months and years passed, and I dutifully did my 1:1s. A habit? Perhaps a better term to describe what’s contained inside this book would be leadership habits—​small acts, repeated over time until they become second nature. There is an intersection between my list of small things and habits, but you’re not going to learn from these practices just by having them become second nature.

What I discovered after hundreds of 1:1s was that these meetings presented the highest signal of the week. Real conversations about the important topics that week. Critical bidirectional conversations ...