You know I'm all about leader-follower synergy. It's the secret sauce — the thing that makes teamwork make the dream work. And you can't build it without knowing what your people are actually measuring you against.
So in almost every leadership session I teach, I run a four-minute exercise from the Offermann, Kennedy, and Wirtz scale. Nine traits. Rate each one from 1 to 5 — 1 meaning it doesn't matter to you in a leader, 5 meaning it's essential. Then total them in three clusters.
The relational lens — the heart — is sensitivity (empathetic, approachable, tuned into other people's emotions), dedication (loyal, hardworking, committed to the mission), and charisma (magnetic, inspiring, draws people through personal presence).
The cognitive lens — the head — is intelligence (analytical, knowledgeable, quick to solve problems), strength (resilient, firm, capable under pressure), and assertiveness (bold, clear, not afraid to speak up).
And the status lens — the crown — is authoritarianism (directive, chain of command, expects obedience), attractiveness (well-groomed, confident, looks the part), and dominance (commanding, forceful, projects power and control).
Three years of running this. I have never once had a participant score status highest. Not once. Heart wins or head wins. The crown finishes last, every single time.
Why nobody picks it
Read those three words again the way they land in a room full of your peers: authoritarianism, attractiveness, dominance.
Nobody wants to circle a 5 next to "expects obedience." Nobody wants to admit on paper that they're moved by whether a leader looks the part. Those are the most socially undesirable words on the page, and we're all sitting at a table together.
So here's what the exercise actually measures. Not what moves us. What we're willing to say moves us.
Because we constantly respond to the crown lens, we decide in the first ninety seconds whether the person in front of the room has the authority to be there. We notice who commands a meeting and who merely attends one. Implicit Leadership Theory calls this the prototype, and the timeline is unnerving: children begin forming their picture of what a leader looks like around five or six. Long before anyone met you, they had a template — and you're being compared to it whether or not you consent.
I come by my own prototype honestly. From the time I was old enough to travel, my father took me along to his seminars and conferences, and that is where I formed my picture of the ideal leader. I sat under the tutelage of Zig Ziglar, Norman Vincent Peale, Jim Rohn — and of course Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. Every one of them commanded a room. They looked the part, sounded the part, and acted the part before they'd said anything worth remembering. That was my template, set long before I had any say in it. So when I score that exercise myself, I know exactly which way my thumb presses.
Leadership is in the eye of the beholder.
The danger of leaving your rank at the door
Here's where it turns costly.
We've been so thoroughly steeped in servant leadership that many of us have forgotten the other half of the job. We were placed in a position of service, yes. We were also placed in a position of authority. Both were given. Neither is optional.
That isn't a quarrel with servant leadership — it's a quarrel with the flattened version of it. Greenleaf's formulation was servant first, then leader: a sequence about how power gets stewarded, not a case against holding it. Somewhere along the way we kept the first word and dropped the second.
Jesus never confused the two. He washed their feet — the lowest job in the room — and then said, plainly: You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. He didn't pretend he wasn't the authority in that room. He was the authority in that room, kneeling.
And he asked for obedience without flinching — a word we've made ugly, because we hear it and picture a will bent by someone with the power to bend it. He tied it to something else entirely: If you love me, keep my commandments. Obedience as the fruit of love rather than its opposite. He'd modeled it downward first, obedient unto death, before he was exalted to anything. He never asked for what he hadn't already done.
That's the thread between the heart and the head. Knowing and caring stay inert until somebody does something. Obedience is where the other two lenses turn into motion — which is exactly why we can't afford to be squeamish about it.
Two ways it breaks
A leader looks at those scores and draws the obvious conclusion. Nobody wants a dominant boss. Nobody's asking for chain of command. So she leaves her rank at the door — flattens the crown lens on purpose, because it seems like the humble thing to do.
Her people never stopped scoring it. She's simply the only one in the room who thinks that part of the test is over.
One of the best parts of my job is coaching fellow leaders who want to grow their trajectory, which means I get a close look at this failure. It's rarely the troops. It's our own blind spots that turn out to be our worst enemy.
It shows up in two shapes.
The first is over-collaboration, and I see it more in women, myself included. We work so hard to be inclusive that we consult when we should decide. The team reads it as a leader who won't commit. Familiarity really can breed contempt — not because people are ungrateful, but because the contract quietly stopped being honored.
The second is the leader who tries so hard to be relatable that he stops sounding like a chief executive. Every sentence hedged, every decision framed as a group discovery. He thinks he's being human. His people hear someone who won't say the thing out loud, and they start looking elsewhere for the signal.
Paul knew better. He and Silas were beaten publicly at Philippi and jailed, and when the magistrates sent word the next morning to let them slip out quietly, he refused to go: They beat us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens — and now they want to send us away secretly? Let them come themselves. He'd been a citizen the entire time. He didn't invoke it to escape the beating; he invoked it afterward, on the record, for the young church he was leaving behind in that city. Those believers needed to know their leaders hadn't been run out of town like criminals.
That's rank spent on the people who need it. The chief executive who won't sound like one is doing the reverse: spending his people's confidence to buy his own comfort.
Both are the same error. Both come from believing the scores.
And let's call that error by its name. Flattening your crown is not humility. It's false humility — as much a distortion as pride, just pointed the other direction. We're told not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, but to think with sober judgment. Sober is the word doing the work. Understating what you've been given misses true by exactly as much as overstating it.
The servant who buried his talent wasn't commended for modesty.
RHIP — and RHIR
In the Air Force we had a phrase for this. RHIP. Rank Has Its Privileges.
It got said with an eye-roll, usually about parking spaces. But there was always a second half, and the second half is the whole point. RHIR. Rank Has Its Responsibilities.
That's the contract. The status lens grants you legitimacy — people extend it, and it buys you the room's attention and the benefit of the doubt. What it costs is that you carry things other people don't have to. You hold the weight, you hold the line, and you hold your own counsel about how heavy it is.
Break the second half and the first evaporates. People stop extending legitimacy to a leader who won't carry what comes with it, and they're usually right to do so.
Holding your own counsel doesn't mean being made of granite. It means knowing which room you're standing in. Problems go up and sideways — to peers, mentors, a board, an inner circle built for exactly that — not down, to the people you're carrying. And there's a harder filter still: vulnerability names a struggle without asking the room to take a side; grievance is a bill you're presenting. Say you're struggling and people lean in. Say you were wronged and they step back.
My father was a master of this. I never once heard him complain, and he had plenty to complain about. He wasn't hiding anything — he just refused to trade in it. When someone started down that road, he'd head them off: "Everybody wants to talk about their problems. So I say, alright — you tell me your problems, and then I'll tell you MY problems, and you'll be sorry you opened your big fat mouth." He never pretended the load was light. He just never handed you a piece of it.
I spent my early career as a maintenance officer on F-15 and F-16 flight lines. Rank on a flight line wasn't about deference. It was about who signed, who answered, and who stayed until the aircraft was right. Privilege and responsibility were the same fact viewed from two sides.
You carry the weight. So wear the crown.
Who's watching
There's one more thing to say about the crown, and it isn't a caveat.
Your people look at the outward appearance. That's not a flaw in them — it's how humans are built, and it's exactly why the crown matters. But the Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
Two audiences, and you're standing in front of both. One is reading your bearing, your clarity, whether you look like you can carry it. The other already knows.
So wear it. Just remember it was given and remember who gave it.
