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The best leaders don’t share traits. They do this instead.

April 08, 2026 • 5 min read • views
The best leaders don’t share traits. They do this instead.
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View our Twitter (X) feed View our Youtube channel View our Instagram feed View our Substack feed View our Spotify feed Search What are you curious about? Popular SearchesCritical thinkingPhilosophyEmotional IntelligenceFree Will Latest Videos Latest Articles The best leaders don’t share traits. They do this instead.

Leadership isn’t about mastering a fixed set of skills, but creating the meaningful, human-centered experiences that inspire others.

by Marcus Buckingham April 8, 2026 Book cover of "Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business" by Marcus Buckingham, featuring bold "design love in" text and colorful, intersecting lines on a sleek black background. Key Takeaways
  • Great leaders don’t share a common set of competencies; they share only the fact that people follow them.
  • Effective leadership comes from designing meaningful experiences that drive positive behaviors in others.
  • Leaders should aim to nurture environments where people feel valued, supported, and motivated

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Excerpted from Design Love in: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business by Marcus Buckingham. Published by Harvard Business Review Press. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.

You might think that the best leaders possess a long list of competencies. Perhaps you’ve read books detailing these competencies, or perhaps your company measures its leaders against some required list, using 360-degree surveys or performance ratings.

No matter how specific these lists are, or how tightly the ratings are tied to specific behaviors, the overwhelming body of data-based evidence reveals that all of these lists lack validity: We have no reliable way of measuring leader competencies, and so no valid way of proving that the best leaders possess more of them than average leaders.

The fact is, the best leaders do not have much in common at all. They do not all possess the same list of competencies. Nor do these leaders get better by identifying and then trying to acquire the competencies on the list that they lack.

Yes, it might be desirable for a leader to possess strategic thinking or executive presence or emotional intelligence, but the data shows that all of these skills are simply nice-to-haves. For every leader who excels at strategic thinking, you find a different excellent leader whose influence comes from their ability to build consensus. Another leads through salesmanship. Another is an empath. Another executes with predictability and precision.

All truly influential leaders are different. For every Steve Jobs, there’s a Warren Buffett. For every Barack Obama, there’s a Margaret Thatcher. For every Elon Musk, there’s a Greta Thunberg. Think of the very best leaders you know. Line them up in your mind. Visualize how they led, the moves they made, their tone of voice, their passions, their concerns, the level of their intensity, their intelligence, their creativity. They were all so different, weren’t they? Virtually nothing in common at all.

Look closely at excellent leaders and you realize that, in the real world, they all shared only one thing: followers. Though each possessed their own style and was animated by different missions and goals, they all excelled at getting others to follow them. These leaders all did some specific things that touched the hearts of other people — so much so that these people became followers, and were prepared to go through hell-and-high-water to help the leader make real their vision of a better world.

And these “things” are, simply put, experiences. Leaders make experiences for their followers, and these experiences drive behaviors that drive outcomes. These leaders are not strategists, or analysts, or planners, or team builders, or salespeople. Well, they may be all of these things. They may even excel at some of these. But a person can excel at all of them and still struggle as a leader.

Leaders make experiences for their followers, and these experiences drive behaviors that drive outcomes.

The only surefire way to excel as a leader is to excel as a maker of experiences for your people. Create extreme positive experiences for your people, and you will create extreme positive behaviors: You will get all their “discretionary effort,” you will see them at their very best. Ignore your role as an experience-maker and you’ll get the minimum behaviors, the phone-it-in behaviors, the ROAD warrior behaviors (Retired while On Active Duty.)

Experience-making. It’s your fundamental job as a leader.

Of course, this is not to say that you can’t lead people using power from other sources. You can get power from your position or your title or your ability to control budgets or timelines or permissions. And using this power, you can coerce people into behaving in a certain way. But this sort of coercion, while it can affect people’s behavior and sometimes be mistaken for leadership, never leads to sustained excellence.

To achieve sustained excellence requires that your people, your followers, are themselves choosing to behave in certain ways. Giving their maximum is a choice. And the only way for you to get this from your people is to design for them the kinds of experiences that they want to step into. Your true power as a leader comes from your ability to create [feelings of control, harmony, significance, warmth, and growth in others].

Eight open magazines are displayed in two rows, with a headline above reading "A NEW HOME FOR CURIOUS MINDS" and a yellow "JOIN TODAY" button below.

How to lead your team with love

Since leadership, at its core, is about making experiences, every time you walk into a room, speak in a meeting, or respond to an email, you add one more touchpoint to the experience you’re making, whether by design or by default. The question is not whether you are making experiences, but whether you are doing so deliberately.

We now know that the kind of experiences that lead people to perform at their best are genuinely loving experiences, with this as our definition of loving: the deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human.

In theory this can seem like a heavy lift: Who has the time to be deep and unwavering about anything?! But in practice, this feeling of love-in-my-heart for my leader, or love-in-my-heart for my team, grows over time. It doesn’t require an outlandish display of altruism or self-sacrifice on the part of you, the leader. All it requires is the intelligent design of daily and weekly experiences.

You don’t need anyone else’s permission to make these experiences for your people. You can use the five feelings as a channel for your own power, and find your way of helping your team feel them.

And in doing so, you can lead with love.

    BusinessLeadershipEmotional IntelligenceEmpathyInfluence
Marcus Buckingham

Author and Motivational Speaker

Full Profile A man with short gray hair wearing a blue blazer and black shirt sits on a brown couch, smiling, with bookshelves and warm lighting in the background. Monthly Issue March 2026 The Roots of Resilience In this monthly issue, we look at resilience not as a buzzword or a self-help prescription, but as a property — one that shows up, or doesn’t, at every scale. 2 videos 14 articles Illustration of five humanoid figures with green bodies, root-like veins, and tree branches growing from their heads, holding hands against a yellow and red background.

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