Confidence in service of what? Resilience toward what end? Without a clear understanding of what leadership is actually for in a business, these traits become a checklist with no destination — a list of things to “be” with no connection to what you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s like cobbling together bricks, rope, and fan blades and expecting an elephant. You end up with parts that don’t add up to a whole.

In Craft: The Expedition of Business, I make an argument that reframes the entire conversation:

Business leadership is a means, not an end. It is a strategic choice in the service of business goals.

We can have a business without leadership. I don’t recommend it, but some current and many more failed businesses have unknowingly given it a try. The decision to instill effective leadership is a choice — a good one — but it’s an option in service of something larger. Once we see leadership that way, the question shifts from “what traits should I display?” to “what does my organization need me to provide?”

Business Leadership Is Its Own Thing

Most of what we think we know about leadership comes from contexts that don’t match the one we’re actually in. We mimic sports coaches, military commanders, historical figures — and then wonder why it doesn’t translate.

The reason is that business leadership operates in a specific quadrant defined by two variables: the complexity of the situation and the agency of the people being led.

A sports coach works in a world of defined rules, set playing fields, and clear win conditions — lower complexity. But they need their players to think and act independently — high agency.

A cult leader navigates high complexity — making sense of life’s biggest questions — but suppresses agency entirely. Obedience is the point.

Business leadership sits in the upper right: high complexity and high agency. The world is messy and uncertain, and you need your team making good decisions without you in the room.

Business leadership is specifically about leading individuals of high agency in a situation of high complexity.

That combination is what makes business leadership its own craft. And it tells us exactly what leadership needs to provide.

Clarity and Order

If leadership is a means in service of business goals, then the question becomes: what does it produce? The answer is two things.

Leadership provides clarity in the face of external confusion and order in the face of internal chaos.

Clarity means standing in the gap between your team and the uncertain world outside. Where are we going? Why? What’s the plan? A warehouse manager gathering their team during COVID-era supply chain chaos and saying “We can’t control the delays — here’s what we CAN control” is providing clarity. It doesn’t require a stage or a famous company. It requires a leader who knows what their organization needs to hear.

Order means creating the structure that allows people to do their work with confidence. Clear expectations, consistent standards, accessible information, and accountability when things go off the rails.

Think of it like setting gates along a ski course. Too many gates and you’re micromanaging — frustrating the high-agency people you depend on. Too few and it’s chaos — everyone skiing different lines to different endpoints.

Our job as leaders is to determine the finish line and figure out how many gates to put along the course. The ask of our teams is then clear: “Get to the finish line, make sure you go through these gates. But for the rest of the run, do as you see fit.”

That’s leadership rooted in purpose. Not a list of attributes to perform, but a clear function to fulfill.

Why Leaders Are Chosen

Clarity and order are the product. But before anyone experiences your leadership, they have to decide you’re worth following.

Research on social perception consistently shows that when we evaluate leaders, we’re asking two primal questions: Does this person have my best interests in mind? And are they capable of doing anything about it?

Charisma is displaying warmth first, then strength.

Without warmth, strength becomes threatening. Without strength, warmth is welcome but not reassuring. The leaders people choose to follow are the ones who check both boxes. And the most effective charisma is rooted in truth — you have to actually care, and you have to actually be capable.

Who Leaders Are

If leadership is a means, and its purpose is providing clarity and order, and it requires warmth and strength to attract followers — then what does the actual profile of a good leader look like?

Not what you’d expect. I once took an extensive executive coaching assessment that ranked 25 personal skills. My “leadership” ranking? Number 23 out of 25. And yet I had started, grown, and successfully exited a business with happy employees and anonymous reviews saying “I can’t imagine a better boss.”

There’s no single profile. Effective leadership is one mountain with many paths to the top. But there are traits common to effective leaders regardless of path — four pillars built on one shared foundation.

Communication — transmitting your reality to your team’s understanding. Not so little detail that they’re guessing, not so much that they’re overwhelmed.

Empathy — cognitive empathy specifically. The ability to see the world through someone else’s experience and use that insight to make better decisions.

Strength — not just one kind. Physical, intellectual, emotional, relational, volitional, and moral strength all play different roles at different times. The goal isn’t excellence in one but adequacy in all.

Executive mindset — the ability to zoom in and out across different scales of the business and act at the right level. Not stuck in the weeds, not floating above them, but moving fluidly between the two.

And beneath all four: self-awareness. Without it, none of the others improve. You can’t fix your communication if you don’t know how you’re coming across. You can’t develop empathy if you assume others think like you. You can’t assess your strength honestly if you only see where you’re confident.

The path isn’t a straight line. Most leaders improve quickly early on, hit the false summit of Mount Stupid, tumble into the Valley of Realization, and only then begin the real climb toward mastery.

Traits Without Infrastructure Is How Good Leaders Fail

I’ve met business owners who had every trait on the list. Empathetic, strong, self-aware, great communicators. And their businesses were still struggling — because the leader was the only thing holding it all together. Every decision ran through them. Every fire got put out by them personally. Every new employee learned how things worked by asking them directly.

They had the traits. They didn’t have the systems. And when they burned out, got sick, or simply couldn’t be in three places at once, the organization stalled.

Because if leadership is a means in service of business goals, then personal traits are only half of what’s required. The other half is what you build. Sound decision-making frameworks so your judgment scales beyond your personal bandwidth. A deep understanding of what actually drives the people on your team. And the organizational systems and structures that keep things running when you’re not in the room.

Teams can only perform at the level of competence their leaders are able to provide.

The traits tell you who a good leader is. The frameworks, people insights, and systems tell you what a good leader builds. Without both, leadership stays personal — and personal doesn’t scale.

Raising the lid of your leadership is a lifelong pursuit. But the alternative is a business that plateaus at the limits of the person at the top. And good people don’t stay long in organizations that can’t grow past their leader.

This article draws from Part 3 of Craft: The Expedition of Business. The rest of the book covers the decision-making frameworks, people insights, and organizational systems that make good leadership sustainable. You can learn more about the book at: https://TheExpeditionofBusiness.com

You already use them, whether you’ve named them or not. Supply and demand is a mental model. So is the 80/20 rule. So is thinking about your business as a funnel, a flywheel, or a machine. Each one gives you a shortcut for interpreting what’s happening and deciding what to do next.

First principles thinking is a specific type of mental model. Instead of reasoning by analogy — “what did someone else do in this situation?” — you break a problem down to its most fundamental truths and build your reasoning up from there.

The term gets thrown around a lot, usually in the same breath as Elon Musk or Aristotle. But at its core, first principles thinking is just asking: what do I know to be true, independent of what anyone else has told me? And what can I build from there?

Strategic thinking ties both together. It’s the ability to step back from the day-to-day, see the bigger picture, and make decisions that move your business in a deliberate direction rather than just reacting to whatever lands on your desk.

All three — mental models, first principles, and strategic thinking — are ways of making better decisions. And for business owners, that’s the whole game. Every day is a series of decisions, and the quality of those decisions determines the trajectory of the business.

So far, so good. But here’s where most business owners run into trouble.

The Problem with How We Actually Make Decisions

Most of us think we’re making strategic, principled decisions. In practice, we’re usually doing something much simpler.

We’re copying. We heard a peer describe how they structured their sales team, and we did the same. We read a book about a company that scaled with a particular operating system, and we implemented it. We saw a competitor run a certain type of promotion, and we followed suit.

There’s nothing wrong with learning from others. It’s how we all start. But if we’re honest, a lot of the decisions running our businesses weren’t made from deep thinking — they were inherited, borrowed, or defaulted into.

Why do you have a 40-hour work week? Why do you do annual reviews? Why is your pricing structured the way it is? If the honest answer to any of those is “because that’s how it’s done,” then the decision wasn’t really made at all. It was absorbed.

In my experience running a business for twelve years, and now working with other business leaders, I’ve found that most decision-making falls on a spectrum. In Craft: The Expedition of Business, I call it the Mountain of Why — five levels that describe how deeply we’re actually thinking when we make a choice.

• Level 1 — Mimicry. We do something because someone else did it. It’s the default when we don’t have enough information or experience to decide differently.

• Level 2 — Heuristics. Rules of thumb from our own past experience. “It worked last time.” Useful, but inconsistent — we’re often missing key variables.

• Level 3 — Frameworks. Structured models for thinking about a problem. EOS, Scaling Up, SPIN Selling, Porter’s Five Forces — these all live here. They help break complex decisions into manageable pieces.

• Level 4 — Synthesized Strategies. Taking a framework and adapting it to your specific business, market, and team. Not following a playbook, but bending one.

• Level 5 — First Principles. Identifying what you believe to be fundamentally true and building your decisions from that foundation.

Most business owners operate between Levels 1 and 3. And for a while, that’s enough. Level 3 frameworks in particular feel sophisticated — they come with diagrams, workshops, and certified coaches. They give your team a shared language and they beat operating on gut instinct.

But as I wrote in the book:

All are general in their approach. Their design is for the average business, not necessarily your business. To find better tailored solutions, we need to climb yet higher on The Mountain of Why.

A framework designed for the average business is optimized for nobody in particular. Your industry, your team, your customers, your competitive landscape — none of that is baked in. The framework is a starting point, not a destination.

What First Principles Thinking Actually Looks Like in Business

Before the Wright brothers, everyone trying to build a flying machine started from the same mental model: birds fly, so we should build things that look like birds. They sewed feathers onto wings. They strapped on contraptions that flapped. They jumped off cliffs.

They all failed.

The Wright brothers asked a different question. Not “How can we fly like birds?” but “What are the fundamental requirements for controlled flight?”

The answers — more power without control is useless, three axes of control is the minimum, marine propellers don’t work in air — had nothing to do with birds. Once they identified what was actually true, the design that followed looked nothing like what had come before.

Business decisions work the same way. The question isn’t “What did the successful companies do?” It’s “What do I believe is fundamentally true about my customers, my employees, my market, and what makes a business work?”

Jeff Bezos decided customers always wanted low prices, fast delivery, and lots of choices. Amazon was the extrapolation of those core beliefs. Netflix decided convenience trumped everything else in entertainment. A client of mine planted their flag on the belief that people want to feel included and hate uncertainty. They added one simple meeting in the middle of their process. It cured both problems and resulted in a measurable difference in engagement, morale, and project quality.

None of these came from a framework someone bought at a conference. They came from leaders who did the harder work of identifying what they believed to be true — and then building from there.

How to Start Climbing

This isn’t about throwing out every business book and starting from scratch. That would be its own kind of hubris. The frameworks at Level 3 are valuable — but they’re raw material, not finished product.

When you encounter the next “proven” system, try treating it as a Level 3 input rather than a Level 5 answer:

• What specifically is this designed to do? Does that match what my business actually needs right now?

• What assumptions is it making about the industry, the team, or the customer? Do those hold for me?

• What would this look like if I adapted it to my situation rather than adopting it wholesale?

And the most important question: what do I already believe to be true about my business that this either reinforces or contradicts?

If you can’t answer that last one, no framework will save you. It’ll just become the next thing that didn’t work.

Why This Is a Competitive Advantage

Here’s what most business advice leaves out. Your competitors are Googling the same best practices. They’re reading the same bestsellers. They’re implementing the same frameworks.

If you do what they do, at best you get what they get. And most of them are camped at Levels 1, 2, and 3 on the Mountain of Why. They have the same mental models, the same borrowed strategies, the same playbooks.

The advantage goes to the leaders willing to climb higher. To do the harder, less comfortable work of figuring out what they actually believe, testing those beliefs against reality, and letting those principles — not someone else’s system — shape the decisions that run their business.

That’s not a program you can buy. It’s a way of thinking. And it’s the difference between a business that looks like everyone else’s and one that actually becomes what you set out to build.

This article is adapted from Craft: The Expedition of Business by Zack Tomlin — a guide for leaders of small and mid-sized businesses who are done borrowing answers and ready to build their own.

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“Business is hard enough even if we assume everyone is operating in the same reality. When everyone perceives the same information in different ways, it gets that much more difficult. Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate how often we’re on the same page.”

The below is an excerpt from Part 2 - Chapter 6 of “Craft: The Expedition of Business”:

“Mr. Tomlin, I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. I’m out of patience and am turning this issue over to my attorney.”

It wasn’t the voicemail I wanted to find when I returned from lunch, nor was it a message that I could make much sense of. I knew the number and the voice. He was a client, and two or three weeks prior we had met to resolve an issue on a project. A meeting that I thought had put matters to rest. I had not heard from him since. I was as much perplexed as concerned.

My return call keyed me in on a few pieces of information. He had my email address wrong, those messages I had “ignored” never made it to me. His phone calls that I “didn’t return”—until that day they never ended with a voicemail. I did not know that he had called.

Now I had clarity on the “out of patience” part of his message, but “my attorney”? I thought this was resolved. It turns out he did too—until he talked with his boss. He had different ideas as to who bore responsibility.

The entire episode had started months prior when they contracted us to provide some design services. They presented “what they had budgeted” to my project manager, and my project manager saw his task as giving them the design “they asked for.”

I’m not sure the client disagreed until the piece of equipment didn’t work. “We should have raised our concerns” was my take on the situation, but I was still unclear on just what had happened.

There was much to understand. Why the voicemail? How did this design come to be? Why the change of heart? It took a while, but once I could understand everyone else, I could finally be understood, and a resolution could be reached.

Understanding is also the first step in getting people aligned within an organization. What is their starting point? What is their perception of reality? Those are the foundations needed to build a usable model. One that explains what someone might want and how they are likely to respond. Without that foundation, the world can be a strange, confusing, and frustrating place.

You’re probably familiar with the classic party game “Telephone.” Someone starts the game by whispering a message to the person next to them. That person does the same, and by the time you’ve reached the end you’re left with some altered version of the original message.

A more modern take on the game, and a better analogy for our struggles related to perception, is the game Telestrations®. In that game, players alternate between drawing a picture of the “secret word” and writing a description of the previous player’s drawing.

As you might imagine, hilarity often ensues. What started as “A rabbit wearing a top hat” turns into “Richard Nixon taking a bubble bath.” Unfortunately, with business and getting our teams aligned, we often get the confusion but rarely the comedy.

There is no “secret word” in business. Instead, we’re awash in information: calls, emails, tone, body language, and there’s more. At any moment we’re also processing our entire field of view: the sounds around us, the feeling of the air and objects we’re in contact with, and whatever smells our noses may be picking up.

In effect, all that incoming information is the world and our immediate place in it. To keep it from being overwhelming, our brains filter out nearly all of it. What we’re left with is the small slice we focus on: our attention. What we pay attention to gets filtered through our perception of the information we are aware of.

Without attention and perception, it would all be noise. With it, we create a mental model to approximate reality. We can’t absorb all of reality at once, so we develop a low-resolution view to make sense of that small slice of reality we pay attention to. And that perception becomes one’s reality.

Unfortunately, in business, this chain of approximations often becomes our own game of Telestrations®, and it’s not as much fun.

Like me, you receive an angry phone call from a customer. Now the words they say didn’t fall from heaven. They start as the customer’s perception, a product of the slice of reality they paid attention to. Maybe they’re right to be upset, maybe they’re not; but in the moment, their approximation of reality takes shape in their mind, and the resulting action is to give you an earful.

They then make yet another approximation. They can’t express 100% of what they’ve experienced, how they feel, and what they want you to do about it. That all exists in their head, but to convey it to you they’re left to approximate the best they can. They do so with words, their tone of voice, and maybe—if they still have a landline—slamming their phone down.

So now it’s your turn. You’ve paid attention to some slice of the information sent screaming at you. You’ve perceived it the best you could, constructed your own approximation of reality, and now you must do your best to approximate the situation to an employee who can fix it. An employee who is the next link in the chain of “world”, attention, perception, and action.

With each step, the picture, the “reality”, our communication, and expectations all drift further from the truth of the situation.

Business is hard enough even if we assume everyone is operating in the same reality. When everyone perceives the same information in different ways, it gets that much more difficult. Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate how often we’re on the same page.

Research has shown that nearly 60% of us overestimate how effectively we communicate. And it’s a problem in both directions. A person communicating with you is likely to assume they’ve delivered a clearer message than they have, and you’re likely to err in the same direction about your communication with someone further down the chain. It’s how we get from Peter Rabbit dressed for a night on the town to the 37th President taking a dip in the tub. And it’s how we find ourselves befuddled over what “made sense to us.”

There’s a long list of what makes getting others to share our version of reality difficult: our varied histories and past experiences, words and their multiple meanings, the non-verbal cues that can enforce but also derail our messages, our tendency to fill gaps in information with assumptions or our memories, and that we all are likely to focus our attention on different pieces of information.

Some people spend a career researching all the different factors that influence our specific perception of reality. But for a business leader, one question is essential: “What do I do about it?”

Thankfully, there’s a four-step process that can help us make sense of things.

R.E.A.R.

Relate to their perspective. Explore what they think is happening and why. Affirm your understanding by repeating back. And then, but only then, Respond....

When’s the last time you found others living in a different reality? With the right steps, you can likely bridge the gap.

Learn more about my new book at: TheExpeditionofBusiness.com

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“The question isn’t whether a business is pulling each of these levers, but how? There are limitless ways, and an equal number of suggestions of what’s best. Books, courses, podcasts, consultants, coaches, and gurus. There is a river of information, but it all flows towards pulling one of the four levers.”

The below is an excerpt from Part 1 - Chapter 4 of “Craft: The Expedition of Business”:

The Wright brothers, our friends from Chapter 2, spent decades tinkering and toiling with mechanisms, gadgets, and gizmos of all types before finally setting their sights on airplanes. A short five years later, they were ready to make history on a December morning at the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

It was cold, windy, and miserable; but it was also perfect conditions for flight. Wilbur had won a coin-toss to be first in the saddle, but his attempt to be “The First in Flight” had ended with a crash a few days prior. Orville would be at the controls.

The motor was humming, the wind was blowing, and once the restraining wire was cut, the plane started bouncing down the launch rail. Speed increased, wind rolled across the airfoil of the wings, wheels lifted off the rails, and there it was. Orville was in flight.

We can all relate to some version of toil and struggle before finally, success. I thought and schemed for some time before launching my first business. Landing those first clients, seeing the first checks roll in, hiring the first staff. No one is going to commemorate my story in a state motto or on a license plate, but the feeling seems parallel to Orville’s as things finally got off the ground.

I don’t know his specific reaction, but as he was soaring high above the ground in a contraption that made the flying car from “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” look like a Learjet, part of me suspects his reaction was just like mine and that of many business leaders new at the controls: “Oh shit, now what?”.

For Wilbur, that answer lay in the levers he had at his disposal. A lever for the speed of the engine. A lever for the angle of the wing. A lever for the pitch, roll, and yaw of the plane.

For me, the answer was in levers as well. Four of them. The four levers that any business is trying to control. Those that get (and keep) their organization soaring.

One for Energy. Hire it, grow it, buy it, cultivate it.

Another to Unify. Getting everyone aligned and moving in the same direction.

The third for Resistance. Lowering obstacles, working smarter, finding the best path.

And the last for Yield. Marketing and selling results for maximum return.

Keeping the plane in the air was about E.U.R.Y. and finding the right balance and tradeoffs between the four.

Every business has a form of the E.U.R.Y. model. They are all paid to do work. Something their customer or client can’t or would prefer not to do themselves. An opportunity they forgo because the resistance between them and the outcome they desire is too great.

The business exists because it can amass the energy needed to do the work. Unify it in a single direction. Lower the resistance to doing the work. And finally, maximize the yield they receive for a job well done.

These are the four variables of the infinite number of paths to success, and each business does (and should do) it differently.

A local plumbing company builds its…

Energy and their team by targeting recent high school graduates, partnering with a local community college to train them in the trade, and creating a profit-sharing plan to boost engagement.

Unity comes via their creed “treat every home like your own”, clear job descriptions, and documented SOPs. Everyone focused and aligned.

Resistance is lowered via larger trucks re-stocked daily with parts to avoid return trips. Customers being able to upload photos and videos of their plumbing issues, giving technicians the chance to prepare better before they arrive. It all makes the work easier.

Yield increases by offering preventative maintenance plans after a repair, asking for online reviews and testimonials, and by tracking the install dates of water heaters. That way they can contact customers when it’s time to be replaced. One customer, multiple benefits.

The question isn’t whether a business is pulling each of these levers, but how?

There are limitless ways, and an equal number of suggestions of what’s best. Books, courses, podcasts, consultants, coaches, and gurus. There is a river of information, but it all flows towards pulling one of the four levers.

“Hire slow, fire fast,” Energy

“Everyone rowing in the same direction,” Unify

“Work smarter, not harder,” Resistance

“Land and expand,” Yield

Best practices, effective strategies, common tactics, and even the clichés; they all find a home here. It’s our job as leaders to sift through all the information we come across. To figure out how it best serves us when sitting at the levers of control.

So, just how do we pull those levers?...

The next decision you make, stop an ask, what’s the intent here. Raise the energy? Unify it better? Lower the resistance? Or maximize the yield?

Learn more about my upcoming book at: TheExpeditionofBusiness.com

Learn more about Your Craft Your Climb, my business coaching and consulting practice at: YourCraftYourClimb.com