Speak Leadership

Epizodes

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  The Ladder of Inference: How a Fact Becomes a Verdict Without You Noticing 19.08.2026 44min

  Two people can disagree sharply in a meeting while both being completely faithful to the same facts. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Chris Argyris's Ladder of Inference — a model mapping the near-instant seven-step process by which someone moves from an observable fact to a confident, justified action, usually without ever noticing the climb.We break down each rung — from selecting data out of everything actually available, to adding meaning, to making assumptions, to drawing conclusions and adopting beliefs — and the "reflexive loop" Argyris identified, where an existing belief quietly filters what data a person notices next time, making the whole process progressively harder to question.We explore the leadership failure mode this produces: a disagreement that feels like it's about the facts, but is actually happening several invisible rungs up, in assumptions neither person can see themselves standing on. We close on the practical fix — making your own reasoning visible and genuinely asking how others reached theirs, before positions harden into unexaminable conclusions.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: ladder of inference, Chris Argyris, Peter Senge, decision-making, assumptions, communication, leadership reasoning.
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  Groupthink: Why Smart, Cohesive Teams Make Catastrophically Bad Decisions 17.08.2026 19min

  Highly intelligent, experienced people, working together as a cohesive team, can still arrive at decisions that look obviously flawed in hindsight. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Irving Janis's 1972 research on groupthink — a mode of thinking that takes over a group when the desire for consensus overrides a realistic look at the alternatives.We break down the symptoms Janis found reliably show up together — an illusion of invulnerability, rationalizing away warnings, stereotyping critics, and pressure on anyone who raises doubt — and the two symptoms he considered most dangerous because they're invisible from inside the room: self-censorship, where doubtful members assume they're the only ones uncertain, and the illusion of unanimity that results.We explore the specific conditions that make groupthink more likely — high cohesion combined with insulation from outside opinion, a directive leader who signals a preferred answer early, and pressure to decide quickly — and why cohesion itself isn't actually the problem. We close with the structural countermeasures that actually work, from a rotating devil's advocate to independent subgroup evaluation.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: groupthink, Irving Janis, decision-making, team cohesion, dissent, organizational psychology, psychological safety.
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  Toxic Leadership: Why the Damage Is Often Invisible From the Top 12.08.2026 34min

  Toxic leaders often deliver strong short-term results — which is exactly why they're so hard to catch. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into the research on toxic leadership formalized by Jean Lipman-Blumen and Marcia Whicker, and why it's defined not by leaders who are simply unpleasant, but leaders whose behavior causes serious, lasting harm while the organization's tracked metrics still look fine.We break down the recurring patterns researchers identified — narcissistic leadership centered on the leader's own image, anxiety-driven micromanagement, and "constructive toxicity," where leaders genuinely believe fear and pressure are what drive high performance. We explore why the real damage shows up in metrics organizations rarely track closely enough: turnover among top performers specifically, and a chilling effect on honest upward communication.We also dig into one of the more unsettling findings in this research — why toxic leaders often survive for years, protected by followers who rationalize harmful behavior from otherwise talented or charismatic leaders, each assuming their own bad experience was an isolated incident rather than a pattern. We close on an uncomfortable truth: the signals organizations trust most to identify strong leadership — confidence, decisiveness, composure under pressure — are exactly the signals a toxic leader is best at producing.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: toxic leadership, narcissistic leadership, micromanagement, organizational psychology, employee turnover, leadership accountability.
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  The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: What "Personal Best" Leaders Have in Common 11.08.2026 31min

  Instead of theorizing about what leadership should look like, James Kouzes and Barry Posner collected thousands of case studies of people describing their own "personal best" leadership moment — and looked for what actually showed up across all of them. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into the five practices that emerged, first published in "The Leadership Challenge" in 1987.We break down Model the Way, why credibility is built through small, consistent, everyday actions rather than mission statements; Inspire a Shared Vision, and why the most effective visions are discovered with a team rather than handed down; Challenge the Process, the risk-taking and learning-from-setbacks found in every personal-best story; Enable Others to Act, why sharing power consistently outperforms tight control; and Encourage the Heart, why genuine, specific recognition sustains effort in a way pressure and urgency alone can't.We also tackle a common misreading — these aren't a sequential checklist, they're simultaneous, mutually reinforcing behaviors, where credibility built through one practice makes the others land more convincingly. We close on why these practices are built from small, repeated behaviors rather than grand gestures — which makes them accessible to any leader, but hard to fake over time.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge, exemplary leadership, vision, credibility, team empowerment, recognition.
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  The Peter Principle: Why Competent People Keep Getting Promoted Into Failure 10.08.2026 31min

  In a hierarchy, employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence — and it's not because they're secretly bad at their jobs. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull's 1969 Peter Principle and the mechanism behind it: organizations promote based on performance in the current role, not evidence of success in the next one.We break down the classic example — the technically brilliant individual contributor promoted into management because they were the best performer, not because they showed any aptitude for leading people — and cover research suggesting that promoting purely on past performance actually produces worse outcomes than more random promotion, because past performance in a different role is a weak predictor once the job itself changes.We explore two fixes organizations rarely implement well: giving technical experts a real path to grow without forcing them into people-management, and actually assessing the next role's specific skills before promoting someone into it. We also tackle a common misreading of the theory — it's not a claim that promoted people are secretly incompetent, it's a criticism of the mechanism used to decide who gets promoted.We close on an uncomfortable question: how many struggling leaders were genuinely excellent at something else one level down — and did the system that promoted them ever actually check for the skills the new role required?Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: the Peter Principle, promotion, management competence, organizational hierarchy, career development, leadership selection.
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  New NoteLeader-Member Exchange: The In-Group You Didn't Know You Were Building 07.08.2026 28min

  Most leadership research used to assume leaders treat everyone on their team roughly the same way. Field research in the 1970s found that assumption was wrong. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Leader-Member Exchange theory — George Graen and Fred Dansereau's finding that leaders form distinct, individual relationships with each person they lead, splitting into a high-trust in-group and a strictly transactional out-group.We explore how this split usually forms early, often within the first few interactions, and how it's frequently driven by factors that have nothing to do with actual performance — like perceived similarity to the leader — and why the gap becomes self-reinforcing once someone lands in the out-group.We dig into the research linking in-group status to higher performance ratings, higher satisfaction, and lower turnover, and the uncomfortable argument that some of what looks like "this person is just a stronger performer" is actually the effect of being handed more access and opportunity in the first place. We also tackle a common misreading of the theory — it's not a call to treat everyone identically, it's a warning about how differentiation forms unconsciously and on the wrong criteria.We close on a question every leader should be able to answer honestly: who's in your in-group, who's in your out-group, and would the reasons hold up if you had to say them out loud?Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: leader-member exchange, LMX theory, in-group out-group dynamics, leadership bias, team fairness, organizational behavior.
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  Growth Mindset: The Leadership Language You Don't Realize You're Using 06.08.2026 35min

  The words a leader uses in routine praise may be quietly training their team toward honesty — or toward hiding mistakes. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Carol Dweck's research on fixed versus growth mindsets, and what happens when it moves from individual psychology into leadership and organizational culture.We explore the specific mechanism behind it: why praising someone as "smart" or "talented" after a success actually makes them more likely to avoid future challenges, while praising the specific process or effort behind a success makes them more willing to attempt harder things. We dig into one of Dweck's more striking organizational findings — that companies with a fixed-mindset leadership culture, one built around "top talent" and inherent brilliance, see significantly more cheating, hidden mistakes, and avoidance of honest reporting.We also tackle a common misreading of the whole idea: growth mindset isn't blind optimism or just "trying harder" — it's specifically about how failure gets interpreted, not a denial that failure happened. We close on an uncomfortable question for any leader: what is your routine, unconscious language in feedback actually training your team to do?Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: growth mindset, Carol Dweck, feedback, leadership culture, psychological safety, employee development, organizational behavior.
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  Kotter's 8 Steps: Why Most Change Efforts Fail Before They Even Start 05.08.2026 33min

  Most major change initiatives fail — and John Kotter found they mostly fail for the same predictable reasons. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into his 1996 eight-step change model and the finding that drives the whole thing: skipping or reordering steps is the single most common cause of collapse.We explore why establishing genuine urgency is the most underestimated step, since resistance to change usually comes from people not believing the current path is unsustainable — not from disagreement over the proposed fix. We cover why change led by one person, however senior, is fragile without a credible coalition, why leaders under-communicate a vision by an order of magnitude relative to what's actually needed, and why removing structural barriers that quietly reward the old way matters as much as any announcement.We also dig into why deliberately generating short-term wins keeps skeptics from gaining the upper hand, and the final steps many otherwise successful efforts still get wrong — declaring victory too early, and failing to anchor the change in culture so it survives past whoever led it.We close on the uncomfortable pattern behind most failed change efforts: it's rarely the plan itself, it's an under-invested step earlier in the sequence, usually urgency or communication.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: change management, John Kotter, organizational change, leading change, urgency, communication, culture change.
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  Level 5 Leadership: The Paradox Jim Collins Didn't Expect to Find 04.08.2026 48min

  What actually separates companies that leap from good to sustained greatness from those that don't? In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Jim Collins's 2001 "Good to Great" research and the finding he initially resisted: every company that made the leap was led by someone combining two traits that don't normally travel together — deep personal humility and intense, almost stubborn professional will.We explore how these leaders routinely deflected credit outward for the company's success while directing blame inward for its failures, and why they were often quiet, self-effacing, and uninterested in becoming a celebrated public figure — a direct contradiction of the assumption that great leadership requires magnetic charisma.We also dig into the contrasting failure pattern Collins found: leaders with outsized personal charisma who built success visibly around their own brand, leaving behind a succession vacuum once they left because the organization had become dependent on them personally rather than on durable systems.We close on the tension at the center of the model — between a leader's own need for visible credit and the kind of leadership that actually produces results lasting beyond their own tenure.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: Level 5 leadership, Jim Collins, Good to Great, humility, executive leadership, succession, organizational culture.
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  The Speed of Trust: Why Distrust Is a Tax on Everything You Do 03.08.2026 34min

  Trust isn't just a soft virtue — it's a hard economic variable with a measurable effect on speed and cost. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Stephen M.R. Covey's 2006 concept, The Speed of Trust, and the formula at its center: when trust goes down, speed goes down and cost goes up — and low-trust environments pay a constant tax in extra approvals, documentation, and verification.We break down the two components trust is actually built from — character (integrity and intent) and competence (capability and results) — and why a leader strong in one but not the other still ends up without genuine trust. We also explore a counterintuitive finding about rebuilding trust once it's broken: it doesn't come back through grand gestures or reassurance, but through a track record of small, consistently kept commitments over time.We dig into a common failure pattern — leaders who try to build trust quickly through charisma and good intentions alone, skipping the actual track record trust requires — and we close on the uncomfortable idea that a lot of what organizations blame on process, bureaucracy, or unclear roles is actually a trust problem wearing a different name.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: trust, Stephen Covey, Speed of Trust, organizational speed, leadership credibility, accountability, character and competence.
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  Extreme Ownership: There Are No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders 02.08.2026 17min

  When something fails, where does a leader's mind go first — to their own decisions, or to who on the team dropped the ball? In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Jocko Willink and Leif Babin's 2015 principle of Extreme Ownership, drawn from their experience commanding SEAL platoons: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.We break down the discipline behind it — genuinely examining your own training, communication, and planning before looking at individual performance — and why teams that learn failure gets pinned on them regardless of cause become risk-averse and start hiding problems instead of surfacing them.We also cover the related "Cover and Move" principle, about a leader's responsibility for the friction between teams rather than treating it as someone else's problem, and we tackle a common misreading of the whole idea: Extreme Ownership doesn't mean shielding a team from all accountability. Individual performance still gets addressed directly, once genuine leadership failure has been ruled out.We close on a simple but revealing question: is a leader's first instinct after a failure "what did I fail to do," or "who failed to do their job" — because that ordering may matter more than any policy change.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: extreme ownership, Jocko Willink, Leif Babin, accountability, leadership responsibility, team trust, military leadership.
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  Radical Candor: Why "Nice" Feedback Is Often the Cruelest Kind 01.08.2026 43min

  The most common failure mode among well-meaning managers isn't cruelty — it's kindness that withholds the truth. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Kim Scott's 2017 framework, Radical Candor, and the four quadrants it maps out: Radical Candor, Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and the one Scott argues is most common and most underestimated — Ruinous Empathy.We explore why caring about someone and staying quiet to protect their feelings often does more long-term damage than an honest, direct conversation would have — and why direct challenge without a genuine foundation of care just reads as an attack, no matter how good the intent behind it.We also dig into the mechanics that separate real Radical Candor from a bad imitation: feedback that's specific and tied to observable behavior rather than character judgments, and a two-way street where the leader can take challenge as well as give it. And we tackle a common misreading of the whole idea — that it's permission to be blunt as long as you claim good intentions afterward.We close on an uncomfortable question: which of your team's mistakes have you been quietly letting slide out of a desire to be liked — and what is that avoidance actually costing them?Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: radical candor, Kim Scott, feedback, ruinous empathy, management, trust, leadership communication.
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  Adaptive Leadership: The Problems No Expert Can Solve For You 31.07.2026 34min

  Not every problem a leader faces is the same kind of problem — and treating them as if they are is one of the most common ways leadership fails. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Ronald Heifetz's 1994 distinction between technical problems, which have known solutions an expert can apply, and adaptive challenges, which require the people affected to actually change their own values, habits, or ways of working.We explore why leaders so often apply a technical fix to an adaptive challenge — a new policy, a new tool, a reorg — and why it tends to produce short-term relief and long-term recurrence instead of real change. We break down Heifetz's "balcony" metaphor, the skill of stepping back from the immediate noise to see the larger pattern, and "work avoidance," the distractions groups reliably generate to dodge the harder conversation.We also dig into what might be the most counterintuitive part of the model: an adaptive leader's job often isn't to supply the answer, but to hold the discomfort of not having one and manage what Heifetz calls the "productive zone of disequilibrium" — enough pressure to drive change, not so much that people disengage. We close on the uncomfortable paradox at the center of it all: technical competence, the thing most leadership training actually builds, can become a liability the moment it's pointed at a problem that was never technical to begin with.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: adaptive leadership, Ronald Heifetz, technical vs adaptive challenges, change leadership, organizational behavior, leading through ambiguity.
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  Followership: The Leadership Skill Nobody Studies Until It's Missing 30.07.2026 26min

  Leadership research has spent decades obsessing over what makes a good leader while almost ignoring what makes a good follower — even though in most organizations, at any given moment, far more people are following than leading. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Robert Kelley's landmark 1988 research and his five follower styles: sheep, yes-people, alienated, pragmatists, and the rarest and most valuable style, exemplary followers.We explore what separates these styles along two dimensions — independent critical thinking and active engagement — and why exemplary followers, who support a leader's goals while still challenging bad decisions, are so hard to find and even harder to keep.We also dig into an uncomfortable finding: followership style isn't mostly a fixed personality trait. It's shaped heavily by how leaders respond when someone pushes back. Punish or ignore constructive disagreement often enough, and exemplary followers don't stay exemplary — they become yes-people or quietly disengaged alienated followers instead.We connect this directly to psychological safety, and close on the real implication for anyone in a leadership role: a team full of yes-people isn't a sign of strong leadership. It's often evidence of the opposite.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership — including the half of the story that happens on the other side of it.Topics covered: followership, Robert Kelley, follower styles, psychological safety, leadership feedback, organizational behavior, team dynamics.
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  Authentic Leadership: Why the Best Leaders Stop Performing a Role 29.07.2026 45min

  The leaders who last aren't the ones who best imitate a leadership archetype — they're the ones who lead in a way that actually matches who they are. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Bill George's 2003 concept of authentic leadership, and the more rigorous academic framework built by Bruce Avolio and William Gardner around four components: self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized moral perspective.We explore a finding that runs against a lot of conventional leadership advice — followers consistently trust leaders more when they admit uncertainty appropriately than when they project flawless, unwavering confidence, as long as that honesty is paired with real competence rather than substituting for it.We also dig into a specific trap this research uncovers: performed authenticity, where a leader strategically deploys vulnerability as a tactic rather than because it's genuinely relevant — and why that pattern, once noticed, can damage trust more than never sharing anything personal at all. And we tackle a common misreading of the whole idea: authentic leadership isn't just "being yourself" without further thought. It demands ongoing, honest scrutiny of your own instincts and blind spots.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership — including the one that asks you to stop performing.Topics covered: authentic leadership, Bill George, Avolio and Gardner, self-awareness, relational transparency, leadership trust, vulnerability in leadership.
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  Delegation: The Leadership Skill Most Leaders Only Pretend to Do 28.07.2026 43min

  Every unresolved problem is a "monkey" sitting on someone's back — and in most organizations, those monkeys have a strange habit of migrating upward. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into William Oncken and Donald Wass's classic 1974 concept from "Who's Got the Monkey?" and what it reveals about how delegation quietly fails in two opposite directions.We break down reverse delegation, where a leader appears to be managing a team but is actually accumulating everyone else's decisions and becoming the bottleneck, and abdication, where a leader hands off a task with no context, no criteria for success, and no support, then calls the resulting mess "empowerment."We explore what real delegation actually requires — genuine decision-making authority, not just task execution; clarity about what success looks like communicated up front; and a leader who stays available as a resource without becoming an automatic rescuer the moment things get uncomfortable.We also dig into why both failure modes are so common: they're simply easier and more emotionally rewarding for the leader in the short term than doing the harder, slower work of real delegation. And we close on the one signal that actually reveals whether delegation happened — whether the team keeps functioning well when the leader isn't there.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: delegation, Oncken and Wass, management, empowerment, decision-making authority, team autonomy, leadership development.
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  Emotional Intelligence: The Leadership Skill That Beats IQ at the Top 27.07.2026 41min

  The best leaders aren't always the smartest people in the room — and the research backing that up is more striking than you'd expect. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Daniel Goleman's landmark 1998 findings that emotional intelligence outweighs IQ and technical skill at senior leadership levels, and the gap only widens the higher up you look.We break down Goleman's five components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill — and explain why leadership increasingly becomes about people rather than tasks the higher someone rises. We also take on a common misreading of this idea: that emotional intelligence means being universally warm or avoiding hard conversations. It doesn't. Empathy means understanding someone accurately enough to have the hard conversation in a way that actually lands.We explore what happens when emotional intelligence is missing even alongside strong technical skill — leaders blindsided by how their behavior is perceived, or leaders making technically sound calls that fail anyway because they misjudge the human reaction. And we close on the most useful part of this whole idea: unlike IQ, emotional intelligence can actually be built.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, leadership psychology, senior leadership skills, leadership development.
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  Transformational vs. Transactional Leadership: The Two Engines Behind Every Leadership Style 26.07.2026 41min

  Every leader runs on one of two engines — and most people have never heard either one named. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah break down the distinction political scientist James MacGregor Burns introduced in 1978: transactional leadership, built on clear exchanges of reward and consequence, versus transformational leadership, which works by shifting what followers actually want rather than just what they do.We dig into psychologist Bernard Bass's later framework, the "Four I's" — idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration — and unpack what each one actually looks like in practice. We also explore why these two styles aren't rivals: most functioning teams need both, in different amounts and at different moments.Research consistently shows transactional leadership produces steady, predictable performance — people do what's rewarded and rarely more. Transformational leadership tends to produce higher engagement and more innovation, but takes more from the leader and can falter if the vision starts to feel disconnected from day-to-day reality.We close on the real question every leader eventually has to answer: not which style is correct, but which one the moment actually calls for — and what happens when a leader only speaks one of these two languages.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: transformational leadership, transactional leadership, James MacGregor Burns, Bernard Bass, the Four I's, leadership engagement, leadership styles, organizational performance.
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  Leading Up: Why Managing Your Boss Is a Leadership Skill, Not Office Politics 25.07.2026 31min

  Managing your boss isn't sucking up — it's a leadership skill nobody teaches you. In 1980, Harvard professors John Gabarro and John Kotter published a paper with a blunt title: "Managing Your Boss." Its argument was almost heretical at the time — that managing the relationship with your manager is a legitimate and necessary form of leadership, not office politics.In this episode, we go deep on why this direction of leadership gets so little attention. Your manager isn't all-knowing — they have their own pressures, blind spots, incomplete information, and limited time. Gabarro and Kotter found the most effective employees weren't the ones who executed instructions most precisely, but the ones who understood their boss's goals, working style, and pressures well enough to adapt how they communicated, what they flagged, and when they pushed back.We explore what this looks like in practice: knowing whether your manager prefers a two-line summary or a detailed brief, surfacing bad news early instead of hoping it resolves itself, and pushing back on an unreasonable deadline with a proposed alternative rather than silent compliance or flat refusal. None of these require managing anyone — but all of them are acts of leadership.We also unpack the two failure modes on either side of this: pure deference, where every instruction from above is treated as final regardless of whether it makes sense, and quiet resistance or workaround culture, where disagreement gets undermined rather than engaged with directly. Leading up sits between these — engaging honestly with authority rather than obeying it blindly or subverting it silently.We close on the paradox at the heart of this topic: leading up requires many of the same skills as leading down — reading unstated needs, communicating in the format that lands, building enough trust that hard truths get heard. The direction changes. The skill set barely does.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership — including the one aimed upward.Topics covered: leading up, managing your boss, Gabarro and Kotter, workplace leadership, upward communication, leadership failure modes, influence without authority.
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  Situational Leadership: Why the "Right" Way to Lead Depends on Who You're Leading 24.07.2026 43min

  Micromanaging your best employee and "trusting the process" with your newest hire — you've probably got it backwards. In 1969, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard published a model that quietly undercut decades of leadership advice built around finding "the one right way to lead."In this episode, we go deep on their Situational Leadership model and its four styles: Directing (high instruction, close supervision, for someone new to a task), Coaching (direction plus explanation and encouragement, for someone with some ability but shaky confidence), Supporting (the leader shifts to encouragement and removing obstacles, since the person already knows the work), and Delegating (handing over the task and decision-making almost entirely, for someone with high competence and commitment).We explore the uncomfortable implication of this model: using the wrong style for the wrong person actively damages performance in both directions. Directing a highly competent, confident team member feels condescending and erodes trust. Delegating to someone who isn't ready feels like abandonment, often read as "my manager doesn't care whether I succeed." Neither leader is wrong in general — they're just using the wrong style for the specific person and moment.We discuss why the same leader has to be fluent in more than one register, sometimes within the same day, and why Hersey and Blanchard's follow-up research found leaders frequently default to whichever style feels most comfortable personally, rather than accurately diagnosing what the situation actually calls for.We close on the deeper point buried in this model: that "good leadership" might not be a fixed trait some people have and others don't — it's closer to a language with several dialects, and the leaders who succeed across a range of situations are the ones fluent in more than one.Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.Topics covered: situational leadership, Hersey and Blanchard, leadership styles, delegation, coaching, directing, employee competence and commitment, adaptive leadership.