Unleashed

How can you measure your success as a leader when it’s not about you? In Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that real leadership isn’t about charisma, power, or personal brilliance. It’s about your ability to unleash greatness in others—consistently, sustainably, and unapologetically. Leadership, they insist, is about making people better as a result of your presence and ensuring that your impact continues in your absence.

Frei and Morriss challenge traditional “heroic” leadership models that spotlight singular, vision-driven leaders. They propose what they call empowerment leadership—a model centered on enabling others to reach their highest potential. Drawing from their work with global organizations such as Uber, Riot Games, and Harvard Business School, the authors offer both philosophical depth and practical tools to help you build trust, lead with love, and create inclusive cultures where people thrive.

Why Leadership as We Know It Fails

The authors open by acknowledging that many modern leadership paradigms are still obsessed with the individual leader—the “vision-having, troops-rallying hero.” Yet in today’s fast-moving, complex world, this model is insufficient. We don’t need more celebrated figureheads; we need enablers. Frei and Morriss reshape the narrative around leaders as servants, architects, and accelerators of others’ success. They pose a radical question worth your reflection: Are people better off because you’re their leader?

They show that many leaders only “sometimes” empower those around them. Even experienced executives often make progress episodically—energizing others in the good times but falling into self-focused habits when under stress. To break this pattern, Frei and Morriss call for a conscious leadership pivot: turn your energy outward. Instead of asking “How did I perform?” you should ask “How did they perform?”

The Definition That Changes Everything

Their definition of leadership is deceptively simple but deeply disruptive: Leadership is empowering other people as a result of your presence—and ensuring that impact continues in your absence. This definition implies that your influence must outlast your time and physical proximity. Leadership, then, becomes about how much better others perform when you’re not in the room.

The authors visualize this through a leadership performance curve—a tool that encourages you to ask: What happens to the performance of your team after you arrive? Does their effectiveness rise, plateau, or decline? The goal is to create a positive slope that continues even when you’re gone. It’s an elegant test of real leadership impact: do people grow stronger in your absence, or do they falter without you?

The Five Rings of Empowerment

To operationalize empowerment leadership, Frei and Morriss introduce a model of five concentric rings that move outward from the self to the entire organization. The innermost ring, Trust, is the foundational capability. It’s built through authenticity, logic, and empathy. Next comes Love, defined as setting high standards while demonstrating deep devotion—a form of “tough love” that motivates excellence. The third ring, Belonging, involves fostering inclusion and ensuring everyone can contribute their unique strengths. Beyond that are Strategy and Culture—the forces that extend your influence in your absence, shaping how people act and decide when you’re not there.

This framework mirrors the evolution of leadership maturity: starting with personal credibility (trust), building relationships (love), expanding toward community (belonging), and culminating in systems that sustain empowerment at scale (strategy and culture). The outer rings determine whether your influence endures.

From Self-Focus to Empowerment

Throughout, Frei and Morriss warn of “ten signs it might be all about you”—patterns of self-distraction that drain leaders’ energy and obstruct empowerment. These include focusing excessively on others’ opinions, feeling threatened by their strengths, or being the “star of your own show.” They argue that genuine leadership requires radical responsibility—not for your own success, but for the success of others.

Examples like TaskRabbit’s CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman demonstrate how to shift orientation. Brown-Philpot moved from pushing her personal agenda to focusing on how her team could succeed. Hoffman, meanwhile, described leadership as “shutting off your own reel and watching all the movies playing around you.” It’s about noticing and amplifying others, not narrating your own script. (This principle echoes John Maxwell’s idea that leadership is influence, but Frei and Morriss extend it by insisting that the measure of influence is the growth of others, not followers’ admiration.)

Why It Matters Now

The authors situate this philosophy in a global context of eroding trust and rising complexity. Institutions, workplaces, and nations need leaders who distribute power rather than hoard it. They highlight modern movements—from the #MeToo campaign to Black Lives Matter—as collective demonstrations of people unleashing themselves and others. Empowerment leadership isn’t just a business strategy; it’s a social imperative.

Ultimately, Unleashed asks you to choose: will your legacy be the power you accumulated or the power you released? The authors invite you to become an unapologetic leader—one who recognizes that humanity’s progress depends on our willingness to see and believe in the potential of others. The rest of the book shows exactly how: first mastering trust, then love, belonging, strategy, and culture, until the act of unleashing becomes second nature.

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss start their deep dive into leadership mechanics with trust—the bedrock upon which everything else rests. Without trust, empowerment collapses. They define trust as what enables others to grant you the privilege of influence: “I’m willing to be led by you because I trust you.” Trust, they explain, is built when people experience three signals from you—authenticity (being the real you), logic (showing sound judgment and competence), and empathy (demonstrating genuine care).

The Trust Triangle

Borrowing from Aristotle’s ethos‑pathos‑logos triad, the authors visualize trust as a triangle. Every wobble in trust, they claim, originates from instability in one of its corners. Empathy falters when others think you’re self‑absorbed. Logic fails when your ideas appear weak or poorly communicated. Authenticity breaks when people sense you’re hiding the real you. Everyone has a typical “trust wobble”—the corner that shakes under pressure—and an “anchor,” the one that remains steady regardless of stress.

To identify your wobble, they suggest reflecting on times you weren’t trusted as much as you wanted. Did others think you cared too little, reasoned too sloppily, or acted too strategically? Owning that pattern is the first step toward repair.

Empathy: The Power of Presence

Empathy wobbles are common among high achievers. Overly analytical leaders, Frei notes, often see boredom as an enemy—checking their phones or multitasking when conversation slows. The authors humorously call this “the agony of the super smart.” The fix? Stop optimizing for your learning and start optimizing for everyone else’s. In meetings, trade self‑focus for shared focus: bring everyone along and ensure understanding. Radical presence—and of course, putting your phone away—instantly signals that others, not you, matter most.

On an organizational scale, they argue, the American economy has an empathy wobble. Many employees distrust corporations that appear motivated only by shareholder profit. Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard and CEO Rose Marcario exemplify the opposite: they build radical trust by prioritizing employees, customers, and the planet ahead of short‑term gain. Investing in people, write Frei and Morriss, may be the fastest route to rebuilding collective trust and competitiveness.

Logic: Clarity Over Complexity

Sometimes your reasoning is sound but buried beneath poor communication. Logic wobblers tend to take audiences on winding journeys before delivering a point. The authors recommend flipping the triangle: start with your conclusion, then add supporting evidence. This ensures clarity even if you’re interrupted. The remedy mirrors Larry Bird’s philosophy on the basketball court—take only the shots you know you can make. Strengthen rigor, edit ego, and play within your competence.

Authenticity: The Courage to Be Yourself

An authenticity wobble emerges when your professional persona feels disconnected from your real self. Many leaders, especially those in marginalized groups, mask parts of their identity to fit corporate norms. Yet inauthenticity caps trust and perpetuates exclusion. Using their own experiences as gay women, Frei and Morriss show how concealing difference reduces influence. Instead, authenticity—especially when paired with care—fosters connection and unleashes diversity’s full advantage. The more you bring your whole self to work, the more others will trust you to lead.

The authors offer practical advice for revealing authenticity in a digital age: drop the script, share your “why,” learn in public, and surround yourself with a trusted “Team” who keeps you real. Most of all, stop obsessing over self‑protection and focus on unleashing others’ potential—the surest way for your genuine self to shine.

Rebuilding Institutional Trust

Uber’s comeback story illustrates trust restoration at scale. When Frances Frei joined the company in 2017, Uber’s culture was infamous for ethical lapses. Together with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, she helped rewrite Uber’s values (“Do the right thing. Period.”), retrain thousands of managers, and ban toxic habits like texting in meetings. The result was a cultural stabilization that allowed talent and morale to recover. Trust, Frei concludes, can always be rebuilt—but only when leaders take radical responsibility for sincerity, competence, and care.

The chapter closes with a personal challenge: do you trust yourself? Self‑empathy, self‑logic, and self‑authenticity matter too. Until you stabilize your own internal triangle, others will sense your wobble. Trust, after all, begins within.

Love, argue Frei and Morriss, is the next leap after trust—a surprising but essential force in leadership. In their framework, love isn’t sentimental; it’s operational. It means creating a context in which people can reliably excel—by setting high standards and expressing deep devotion at the same time. This is what they call “justice.” When you can demand greatness while demonstrating unshakable care, people soar.

Ancient Lessons from Valerius Maximus

To explain the origins of tough love, the authors summon an unlikely source: Valerius Maximus, the Roman historian who wrote about leadership balance two millennia ago. ValMax, as they nickname him, distinguished between leaders who are severe, indulgent, neglectful, and just. His ideal leader—embodying “justice”—combined firmness with compassion. Modern leaders must emulate that balance: unafraid to “drop the hammer” when needed yet fiercely devoted to those they lead.

Finding Your Quadrant

Frei and Morriss map leadership tendencies on a two‑axis matrix: standards (high or low) and devotion (high or low). High standards + low devotion equals severity; low standards + high devotion equals fidelity; low on both equals neglect; high on both equals justice. Your job is to live in the upper right quadrant. Using this matrix, leaders can identify their default mode and intentionally pivot when necessary—whether from tough to kind or from indulgent to demanding.

Consider tech leader “John,” who realized his severity made him seem cold. When he coupled his exacting expectations with visible commitment to his people’s growth, performance skyrocketed. Similarly, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, blends clarity and compassion through her “5 percent rule”—constant incremental progress without intimidation. Her balanced leadership turned a failing company into an innovation powerhouse.

High Standards: Raising the Bar

High standards stretch potential. But many well‑meaning leaders lower the bar for those they care about, a mistake Carol Dweck would classify as “preparing the path for the child rather than the child for the path.” The authors counsel leaders to catch people doing things right and praise them specifically. Use positive reinforcement at least five times for every piece of constructive criticism. That ratio—backed by psychology—accelerates learning and ignites motivation. (As Marcus Buckingham also notes, people grow most from attention to their strengths, not weakness correction.)

Deep Devotion: Showing People You Care

Devotion, meanwhile, is about genuine human connection. It’s demonstrated through small acts—putting down your phone, asking curious questions, feeding people (literally, with snack boxes or doughnuts), showing gratitude, protecting rest time. These gestures prove that those you lead are not means to an end but ends in themselves. They also build psychological safety, the “invisible armor” that lets people risk more and grow faster.

Carlos Rodriguez‑Pastor of Peru’s Intercorp exemplifies justice in motion. A billionaire entrepreneur who built a network of schools and companies, CRP pairs audacious standards with fierce devotion to developing Peruvians. He rewards grit, invests in education, and demands improvement while celebrating humanity. Employees call his feedback style strict but loving—a modern echo of ValMax’s justice ideal.

The Price and Power of Love

Leadership love isn’t free. It costs emotional labor and sometimes discomfort. You may have to fire someone compassionately or challenge a complacent star. But as Frei and Morriss insist, “The gift of helping someone reach a better future is among the purest forms of love.” Justice—tough love practiced with consistency—is the leadership state where others do their best work and where you fulfill your highest purpose: unleashing greatness in them.

Ultimately, leading with love dismantles the false trade‑off between compassion and performance. When devotion and discipline intertwine, excellence becomes a shared act of care. Tough love is no longer tough; it’s transformative.

After trust and love, Frei and Morriss expand leadership’s circle to teams—and the power of belonging. Their research shows that teams achieve superior results not despite differences, but because of them. Inclusion, they argue, is an urgent, achievable goal that fuels innovation, engagement, and collective intelligence.

From Diversity to Belonging

The authors make a key distinction: diversity is who’s in the room; belonging is how those people feel when they’re there. You create belonging by ensuring everyone—especially those who differ by gender, race, sexuality, or worldview—feels safe, welcome, celebrated, and cherished. These four levels form their “inclusion dial,” from basic psychological safety to complete cultural embrace.

At Salesforce, Chief Equality Officer Tony Prophet embodies these stages. He redefined the goal beyond representation: not just diversity but “equality,” a workplace where every identity is valued like unique tiles in a mosaic. When difference is normalized and celebrated, teamwork accelerates. (Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety underpins this model—when people feel safe being authentic, teams innovate faster.)

The Mechanics of Inclusion

Frei and Morriss tackle inclusion through the HR life cycle: recruiting, developing, promoting, and retaining talent. In recruitment, leaders must fish in new ponds. Cammie Dunaway at Duolingo refused to hire from universities with fewer than 18% women in computer science, eventually achieving a 50:50 gender ratio among engineers. At WeWork, leaders learned to go beyond “women we know,” building pipelines that reached overlooked talent pools. Inclusion starts at the sourcing stage, not at the diversity report.

Selection also needs rigor and fairness. Replace subjective notions like “cultural fit” with transparent performance criteria. Anonymous evaluations, blind résumé reviews, and deliberate outreach widen opportunity. Samantha Bee’s late‑night show used blind submissions to diversify her writing team, proving inclusion is compatible with excellence.

Development and Advancement

Once hired, everyone needs equal opportunities to thrive. Informal development—mentoring, stretch assignments, corridor coaching—often favors insiders. Leaders must make development intentional and inclusive. Formal training programs, like those implemented at Uber under Frei, can rapidly upskill underprepared managers and level playing fields. Microsoft’s Kathleen Hogan added inclusive leadership behavior to performance evaluations, tying empathy to advancement. Transparency in promotion criteria removes the guesswork that often disadvantages women and minorities.

Retention and Belonging

Retention depends on daily acts of equity: fair pay, recognition, and visible advocacy. Frei and Morriss highlight representation taxes—when marginalized employees are overburdened with “diversity work” without credit. Leaders must actively remove these hidden costs. They describe WeWork’s approach of recruiting women “in context”—supporting their whole lives, from providing child‑care solutions to career flexibility. True belonging acknowledges people’s humanity beyond the office.

Riot Games’ cultural transformation after sexism allegations exemplifies inclusive leadership at scale. By listening, reforming values, and promoting women to senior roles, Riot created a blueprint for organizations seeking redemption through belonging. Inclusion, Frei and Morriss conclude, unleashes not only individuals but entire companies. It’s what allows teams to move from chaos to harmony, from mere diversity to empowered unity.

If you can create a workplace where even a Black working mom has the same chance to thrive as anyone else, the authors write, you’re getting everything else right. Inclusion is love in action across systems—a leadership practice that turns difference into your organization’s superpower.

When your team operates without you, what guides their choices? For Frei and Morriss, the answer is strategy—a clearly communicated logic for how the organization wins. Strategy, they argue, is the first frontier of “absence leadership,” empowering people to act independently yet in alignment with shared priorities. If trust, love, and belonging empower through presence, strategy empowers through clarity.

Value-Based Strategy

Strategy begins with a deceptively simple question: where and how do we create and capture value? Drawing from their earlier work Uncommon Service, the authors present a “value stick” framework that measures delight among customers, surplus among suppliers, and margins for firms. Great leaders, they say, align all three, refusing to win at others’ expense.

Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines mastered this. By being intentionally bad at what mattered least—assigned seating and luxury—but great at what mattered most—low prices and friendly service—Kelleher created a sustainable competitive advantage. This “dare‑to‑be‑bad” principle applies to leaders too: focus energy on what matters most even if that means neglecting less important things. As Patty Azzarello put it, “Don’t be famous for working hard; be famous for doing what adds value.”

Creating More Value Than You Capture

The heart of strategy, Frei and Morriss argue, is generosity: create more value than you capture. Borrowing Tim O’Reilly’s credo, they link ethical leadership with good economics. Companies like Zappos, which treat suppliers as partners rather than cost centers, or QuikTrip, which pays generous wages to frontline employees, prove that shared surplus drives long‑term success. Culture, ethics, and profit aren’t opposing forces—they reinforce each other.

Their discussion of TaskRabbit under CEO Stacy Brown‑Philpot shows value alignment in action. By overhauling the company’s auction system that was racing workers to the bottom, she raised supplier wages, simplified user experience, and grew fulfillment rates from 50% to 90%. Empowering suppliers turned out to delight customers and strengthen the whole ecosystem.

Communicating Strategy Simply

A strategy only works if everyone understands it. Frei and Morriss praise Jeff Bezos’s “six‑page memo” culture at Amazon—forcing rigorous, jargon‑free thinking—and Jan Carlzon’s “little red book” at Scandinavian Airlines, a cartoon guide that explained corporate change to every employee. The lesson: simplicity is sophistication. If your frontline can’t describe your strategy, you don’t have one.

They encourage leaders to write, speak, and act strategically until understanding saturates the organization. Even wardrobe choices can reinforce the message: one Vanguard CEO, famous for frugality, wore resoled shoes as a living symbol of low‑cost strategy. It wasn’t theater; it was embodiment. When culture and strategy unite so clearly that they speak through behavior, your absence won’t weaken alignment—it will amplify it.

Empowerment through strategy means ensuring everyone knows how to prioritize trade‑offs, delight stakeholders, and make ethical, value‑creating decisions without your direction. That’s what Frei and Morriss call unleashing an organization: when every person acts like a leader because they understand how the whole system wins.

If strategy guides decisions, culture determines behavior. In the final ring of empowerment leadership, Frei and Morriss return to the essence of leadership in absence: shaping how things are really done around here. Culture, they write, is the collective agreement about what’s true and important—and the most powerful channel of influence when you’re not in the room.

Understanding and Managing Culture

Drawing on Edgar Schein’s framework, they divide culture into three layers: artifacts (visible symbols like rituals or policies), behaviors (how people actually act), and shared assumptions (the deep beliefs that drive the other two). Real change, they argue, happens at the assumption level—when you shift what people collectively believe about success, power, or fairness. David Neeleman at JetBlue, for example, rewrote airline culture by personally serving coffee to passengers, reinforcing the assumption that “customers are people.”

Culture can also go wrong when values are “weaponized”—used to justify dysfunction. Uber’s internal mantra of “toe‑stepping,” meant to encourage candor, devolved into permission for arrogance. Fixing toxic culture, Frei advises, starts with listening hard, gathering “devastating data,” and restoring psychological safety so truth can surface.

The Culture Change Playbook

Frei and Morriss offer a four‑step playbook for cultural transformation:

• 1. Collect the data. Identify the real dysfunction—safety breaches, bias, complacency—and measure it.
• 2. Keep it small at first. Resist broadcasting problems before testing solutions to avoid paralysis.
• 3. Pilot optimistically. Run small‑scale experiments that demonstrate progress fast.
• 4. Involve everyone. Once success is visible, scale it and invite participation; let the system heal itself through shared ownership.

They used this playbook to help Harvard Business School close longstanding gender gaps. By overhauling case discussions and creating field‑based learning teams, the school achieved equal performance and satisfaction among male and female students within one year—a dramatic culture reset rooted in accountability and progress.

Culture Outlives You

Great leaders, Frei and Morriss write, act as chief culture officers regardless of title. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella exemplifies this by transforming a once‑toxic, competitive culture into a “growth‑mindset” organization focused on curiosity and collaboration. By re‑anchoring beliefs—from “know‑it‑all” to “learn‑it‑all”—Nadella ignited both human and financial performance, turning Microsoft into the world’s most valuable company.

Culture also means grace. At Riot Games, CEO Nicolo Laurent balanced accountability with forgiveness, keeping redeemed leaders who demonstrated humility and change. This blend of empathy and rigor created a model of sustainable inclusion. As Frei summarizes, culture change succeeds when leaders take radical responsibility for both the harm and the healing.

In the end, culture is leadership immortalized. Strategies fade; cultures endure. When you align assumptions with empowerment—trust, love, belonging, and purpose—you create a legacy that outlives you. That’s when leadership becomes truly unleashed.