The Leadership Compote: Essential Ingredients for the Perfect Leadership Dish
Over the next few weeks, we’re taking a delightful detour from our in-depth writing to focus on our newest e-book, The Leadership Compote. Designed as a recipe book for leaders, this e-book offers simple, powerful, and fun “recipes” to inspire and guide great leadership.
While you can always download the full e-book, we invite you to follow along as we share a new recipe each week. And if you find this content helpful, the best way to support us is by sharing this post with another leader who might enjoy or benefit from it.
So, let’s grab our aprons, sharpen our knives, and prepare to make leadership delicious. Because great leadership, like great food, feeds the soul.
Essential Ingredients for the Perfect Leadership Dish
INGREDIENTS
Trust (The Stock): The base for any leader and team - simple but impossible to fake.
Mission, Values, and Vision (The Key Ingredients): This is the “mirepoix” of most leadership dishes.
Adaptability (The Secret Sauce): Keeps the recipe flexible—add more when things get spicy.
Resilience (The Slow Simmer): What holds everything together when times get tough.
Pro Tip: Don’t skimp on Trust. Without it, the dish falls flat.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Trust is the base of any leadership recipe—subtle yet impossible to fake. Trust is a mixture of character and competency. Character consists of the moral qualities and values distinctive to an individual, while competency is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Integrity and intent are at the core of character, and capabilities and results are at the core of competency. All four cores are necessary for trust to exist. Broken trust is always a failure of one or the other. Like a stock, it must be nurtured regularly, with each decision and conversation adding depth.
Mission, Values, and Vision form the “mirepoix”—the flavorful base of leadership. Just as onions, carrots, and celery provide depth to a stew, these three elements infuse purpose and clarity into every action and decision. A clear mission focuses the team on who we are, what we do, for whom we serve, and "why" we do what we do. Values are the heartbeat of our team and reflect our assumptions and beliefs, especially about our relationships, serve as a decision-making guide and a source of energy, and shape the behavior of the team. Vision requires creating dissatisfaction with the status quo, developing a clear and compelling image of where we are going, and growing support from leadership and followers. Collectively, they infuse purpose and alignment into every action. Without this trio, leadership feels hollow. When balanced, they ground the leader and team and give meaning to the work.
Adaptability, the secret sauce, keeps leadership flexible and responsive to opportunities and challenges. Resilience, the slow simmer, holds everything together, allowing teams to endure setbacks and grow stronger. Together, they create a dynamic, durable foundation, balancing creativity with staying power to weather any storm.
PREPARE TIME:
6 months to a year
COOK TIME:
Lifetime
