Discover the essential leadership behaviours that distinguish exceptional leaders, with practical frameworks and evidence-based strategies for developing effective leadership conduct.
Written by Laura Bouttell • Thu 20th November 2025
Leadership behaviours are the observable actions, reactions, and conduct that leaders exhibit in their daily interactions—the tangible patterns that others see when you show up as a leader. Whilst leadership styles represent broad approaches and leadership skills reflect underlying competencies, leadership behaviours constitute what you actually do moment to moment. For business leaders seeking to enhance their effectiveness, understanding and deliberately cultivating the right behaviours isn't optional—it's foundational.
Consider this striking reality: research reveals that 70% of learning and development professionals rate mastering a wider range of effective leadership behaviours as important or very important, yet only 58% of managers receive necessary training to be effective in their role. The gap between recognised importance and actual development creates enormous opportunity—and enormous risk. The leaders who consciously develop positive behaviours gain competitive advantage, whilst those who neglect behavioural development often undermine their potential regardless of technical competence or strategic insight.
Leadership behaviours are the specific, observable actions and patterns of conduct that leaders demonstrate when directing, motivating, and managing their teams. These behaviours represent the visible manifestation of your leadership approach—what team members experience when they interact with you, observe your decisions, or witness your responses to challenges.
Unlike personality traits, which remain relatively stable throughout your career, or leadership styles, which represent broader philosophical approaches, leadership behaviours are discrete actions you can consciously choose and modify. When a hotel manager quickly evacuates guests upon learning of a gas leak, they're demonstrating decisive behaviour prioritising safety. When a UX team leader hosts regular brainstorming sessions that welcome unconventional ideas in a psychologically safe environment, they're exhibiting collaborative and innovative behaviours.
Leadership behaviours encompass multiple dimensions:
Leadership behaviours profoundly influence organisational climate, employee motivation, and business outcomes. Research demonstrates that positive leadership behaviours create ripple effects throughout organisations—boosting morale, strengthening teamwork, enhancing workplace culture, and driving impressive gains in productivity and effectiveness.
The impact manifests in measurable ways. Positive leadership behaviours reduce absenteeism, decrease staff attrition, and lower the risk of employee burnout. Conversely, negative or toxic behaviours undermine organisational learning and performance. Given that investments in leadership training exceeded $370 billion globally, with over $169 billion from North America alone, organisations clearly recognise leadership behaviours as critical business assets.
Perhaps most encouragingly, leadership behaviours are available to anyone. Unlike innate traits or deep-seated personality characteristics, you can consciously choose one behaviour over another. This accessibility makes behavioural development one of the highest-return investments leaders can make.
Research and practice have identified several foundational leadership behaviours that consistently correlate with effectiveness across contexts. Understanding these patterns provides clarity about which actions to cultivate deliberately.
1. Authenticity and Integrity
Authentic behaviour involves aligning your actions with your stated values, communicating honestly even when difficult, and maintaining consistency between private convictions and public conduct. When leaders demonstrate authenticity consistently, they build the trust required for genuine collaboration and discretionary effort.
Integrity manifests through behaviours such as keeping commitments, acknowledging mistakes promptly, treating all stakeholders fairly, and refusing to compromise ethical standards even when expedient alternatives exist. Research indicates these foundational behaviours influence success across all other leadership dimensions.
2. Accountability
Accountable behaviour extends beyond accepting responsibility for your own actions to creating systems where responsibility is clear and consequences are equitable. It includes acknowledging when results fall short, identifying systemic issues rather than merely blaming individuals, and personally owning solutions to problems within your sphere of influence.
When leaders demonstrate accountability visibly, they establish norms throughout the organisation. Team members observe these patterns and adjust their own behaviours accordingly, creating cultures where responsibility is claimed rather than deflected.
3. Transparency
Transparent behaviour involves sharing information openly, explaining the reasoning behind decisions, admitting uncertainty when it exists, and making processes visible to those affected by them. Whilst some information must remain confidential, transparent leaders err toward disclosure rather than secrecy, recognising that information asymmetry often breeds mistrust.
4. Humility
Humble behaviour includes soliciting diverse perspectives genuinely, acknowledging the limits of your knowledge, celebrating others' contributions generously, and demonstrating willingness to change your mind when presented with better information. Paradoxically, leaders who display humility often command more respect than those who project infallibility.
5. Strategic Vision and Communication
Visionary behaviour involves consistently connecting daily decisions to long-term objectives, helping others understand how their work contributes to broader goals, and making resource allocation choices that sometimes sacrifice short-term gains for strategic positioning. Crucially, vision means little without the behavioural discipline to communicate it repeatedly through multiple channels.
6. Adaptability and Flexibility
Adaptive behaviour includes demonstrating openness when circumstances change, experimenting with new approaches rather than defaulting to established patterns, and responding constructively to unexpected challenges. In rapidly changing business environments, behavioural flexibility often determines which leaders thrive and which become obsolete.
7. Decisiveness
Decisive behaviour involves making timely, clear decisions with confidence even when information remains incomplete, communicating decisions unambiguously, and committing resources definitively rather than hedging indefinitely. Whilst decisiveness must be balanced with thoughtfulness, the behaviour of making and executing decisions maintains organisational momentum.
8. Active Listening
Listening behaviour—genuine, disciplined attention to others—remains among the most impactful yet underdeveloped leadership actions. Active listening involves focusing entirely on speakers, asking clarifying questions, acknowledging emotions, suspending judgment during conversations, and demonstrating through subsequent actions that you've genuinely heard what was said.
Many leaders claim to listen whilst actually waiting for their turn to speak. The behavioural difference between performative and genuine listening profoundly affects team dynamics and decision quality.
9. Providing Developmental Support
Developmental behaviour includes coaching team members regularly, offering constructive feedback promptly, creating opportunities for growth deliberately, encouraging calculated risk-taking, and intellectually stimulating those around you. Leaders who consistently demonstrate developmental behaviours build capability throughout their organisations rather than merely extracting effort from existing capability.
10. Recognition and Appreciation
Recognition behaviour involves acknowledging contributions publicly, celebrating successes genuinely, expressing gratitude specifically rather than generically, and ensuring that appreciation reaches all levels of the organisation. Research consistently demonstrates that recognition behaviours significantly influence engagement, retention, and discretionary effort.
11. Inclusive Decision-Making
Inclusive behaviour includes seeking input before making decisions that affect others, acknowledging diverse perspectives openly, explaining how feedback influenced final decisions, and creating forums where quieter voices can be heard. Inclusion isn't merely philosophical commitment—it's a pattern of observable actions that signal who matters in the organisation.
12. Delegation and Empowerment
Empowering behaviour involves assigning meaningful responsibility, providing necessary resources and authority, resisting the urge to micromanage, and allowing people to approach challenges differently than you would. Leaders who consistently delegate effectively multiply their impact by developing others' capability whilst focusing their own attention on uniquely valuable contributions.
13. Collaboration and Connection
Collaborative behaviour includes actively connecting people who could benefit from knowing each other, sharing credit generously, acknowledging others' expertise publicly, and working across boundaries rather than protecting territories. In increasingly matrixed organisations, collaborative behaviours often determine which initiatives succeed and which stall despite technical merit.
Several research-based frameworks organise leadership behaviours into coherent models, providing structure for assessment and development. Understanding these frameworks helps you evaluate your current behavioural patterns and identify development priorities systematically.
This framework, mirroring the "Big Five" personality model, describes five fundamental categories of leader behaviour:
Behavioural leadership theory traditionally categorises leadership actions as task-oriented or people-oriented—a distinction with practical implications for how you allocate attention and energy.
| Dimension | Task-Oriented Behaviours | People-Oriented Behaviours |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Goals, processes, outcomes | Relationships, development, well-being |
| Examples | Setting clear objectives, monitoring progress, ensuring accountability | Showing interest in team members' needs, providing support, building psychological safety |
| Strengths | Drives execution and results | Builds engagement and capability |
| Risks | Can neglect human needs | May sacrifice necessary urgency |
| Best Contexts | Crisis situations, turnarounds, operational roles | Innovation environments, knowledge work, cultural transformation |
Both types of behaviours prove effective in appropriate scenarios and contribute to well-rounded leadership. The most capable leaders develop proficiency across both dimensions, flexibly emphasising different behaviours as contexts require.
This comprehensive framework identifies 49 components of leadership grouped into five dimensions, based on extensive research into the knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviours, and values of successful leaders. Whilst detailed exploration exceeds this article's scope, the framework's breadth illustrates how many behavioural patterns contribute to leadership effectiveness.
Developed through NHS Leadership Academy research, this framework identifies four overarching themes for leaders working across complex systems:
Each theme encompasses specific observable behaviours that leaders can develop deliberately. The framework particularly suits executives operating in matrixed organisations or multi-stakeholder environments where formal authority alone proves insufficient.
Understanding the distinction between leadership behaviours and leadership styles clarifies what you can change quickly versus what requires deeper reorientation. Many leaders conflate these concepts, undermining their development efforts.
Leadership styles represent the broader patterns or frameworks that guide how you approach your role—your overall philosophy and preferred methods when directing, motivating, and managing. Common leadership styles include transformational, transactional, democratic, authoritarian, and laissez-faire approaches. Your leadership style reflects your beliefs about human motivation, organisational effectiveness, and the leader's role.
Leadership behaviours, conversely, are the specific observable actions you take within your chosen style. Behaviours are discrete and situational—you can modify them relatively quickly in response to feedback or changing circumstances.
Consider this practical illustration: you might adopt a democratic leadership style, characterised by participative decision-making and egalitarian values. Within that style, however, you might demonstrate either transparent or opaque behaviours, either humble or self-promotional patterns, either collaborative or territorial actions. It's entirely possible to maintain a democratic style whilst behaving poorly toward colleagues, just as one can adopt an authoritarian style whilst treating people respectfully.
This distinction matters because behavioural change typically occurs more readily than style transformation. If feedback reveals that your listening behaviours need improvement, you can begin practicing active listening immediately. Fundamentally changing your leadership style—say, from autocratic to servant leadership—requires deeper work on beliefs, values, and identity.
Leadership behaviours can be learned, refined, and strengthened throughout your career. Several development approaches demonstrate particular effectiveness, especially when combined systematically.
Begin by identifying specific behaviours you want to develop, using the S.M.A.R.T. approach to provide clarity and focus. Rather than vague aspirations like "be a better communicator," target specific actions: "Conduct one-on-one check-ins with each direct report weekly" or "Ask at least three questions before offering solutions in problem-solving conversations."
Clear behavioural goals create accountability and allow you to track progress objectively. They also make it easier for others to provide useful feedback about whether they're observing the changes you're attempting.
Feedback reveals blind spots, confirms strengths, and guides improvement. Regularly asking for feedback demonstrates humility and genuine commitment to growth—itself an important leadership behaviour.
Structure your feedback requests around specific behaviours: "When I provided feedback in yesterday's meeting, did my approach seem constructive or defensive?" This specificity yields more actionable insights than generic questions about your overall leadership effectiveness.
Consider implementing 360-degree assessment processes that systematically gather feedback from superiors, peers, and subordinates. Quantitative ratings combined with qualitative comments provide comprehensive perspectives on how others experience your behaviours.
Active listening—making yourself fully available to understand what others are communicating—underpins nearly all effective leadership behaviours. Practice reflective listening by reformulating what you've heard to confirm understanding. Create the behavioural habit of asking at least three questions before offering your own perspective.
Many leaders dramatically underestimate how often they interrupt, redirect conversations to their own experiences, or formulate responses whilst others are still speaking. Video recording yourself in meetings can provide sobering evidence about listening patterns you might not consciously recognise.
If something needs doing, be the first to step in and do it. Strong leadership begins with personal discipline and accountability, including keeping your commitments without exception. Team members observe your behaviours constantly, taking cues about organisational values and expectations from what you do rather than what you say.
This principle of behavioural consistency explains why integrity and authenticity form foundational leadership behaviours. When your actions contradict your stated values, team members learn to discount your words and rely on your behaviours as the true signal of priorities.
Behavioural development requires deliberate discomfort. If delegation makes you anxious, practice assigning increasingly important tasks to capable team members. If providing critical feedback feels uncomfortable, commit to offering constructive feedback within 24 hours of observing issues worth addressing.
It's through discomfort that you'll learn the most about yourself and expand your behavioural repertoire. Each situation requiring you to adopt unfamiliar behaviours builds capability for future challenges.
Look for chances to lead, and whenever you can step into a leadership role—even in modest capacity—take it and work to grow your leadership behaviours within that context. Leading cross-functional task forces, chairing working groups, or mentoring junior colleagues all provide practice opportunities.
Remember that leadership is shaped by small, ordinary situations experienced daily. Each day brings moments where you can practice specific behaviours: listening more attentively, delegating more effectively, recognising contributions more genuinely.
Consider finding a mentor—a trusted advisor who provides guidance and support regarding professional development. Alternatively, engage an executive coach focused on behavioural development. Both relationships provide personalized feedback, accountability, and wisdom that accelerates behavioural change.
Research demonstrates that 85% of managers who receive coaching outperform their peers in critical capabilities such as resilience and agility. Coaching proves particularly valuable for senior leaders whose development needs are highly individual and who benefit from confidential partnerships focused on specific behavioural challenges.
Well-designed professional development programmes, action learning projects, workshops, feedback loops, and stretch assignments provide opportunities to develop leadership behaviours in structured environments. Research indicates that participants in corporate leadership training improved their learning capacity by 25% and their performance by 20%.
However, select programmes carefully. Less than 20% of organisations claim their leadership programmes are effective at building good leaders, and only 18% rate their leaders "very effective" at meeting organisational goals. This performance gap suggests that programme quality varies enormously.
Emotional intelligence—understanding and managing your own emotions whilst recognising and influencing others' emotions—underpins many critical leadership behaviours. Research confirms that emotionally intelligent leaders improve behaviours, business results, team performance, and team members' attitudes.
You can enhance emotional intelligence through regular self-reflection, genuinely seeking feedback from team members, and actively listening to understand others' perspectives. These practices strengthen the behavioural patterns that distinguish exceptional leaders from merely adequate ones.
Leadership behaviours develop through consistent practice rather than occasional intensive effort. Commit to practicing target behaviours daily, even in small ways. If you're developing collaborative behaviours, look for one opportunity each day to connect colleagues who could benefit from knowing each other. If transparency is your focus, find one instance daily to share information you might normally withhold.
This daily discipline transforms abstract intentions into concrete behavioural patterns. Over time, conscious practice becomes unconscious habit, and new behaviours feel increasingly natural rather than effortful.
Leadership behaviours create measurable impacts on organisational outcomes, influencing everything from employee engagement to financial performance. Understanding these connections helps justify investment in behavioural development and clarifies which behaviours deserve prioritisation.
Positive leadership behaviours nurture working environments that facilitate meaning-making, where employees feel safe and enjoy greater work dedication. Research spanning 118 articles published between 2004 and 2022 comprehensively demonstrates that positive leadership substantially influences worker well-being.
Leaders who consistently demonstrate positive behaviours create ripple effects—boosting morale, strengthening teamwork, and enhancing workplace culture. These cultural improvements translate into engagement gains, which in turn drive productivity and retention.
Research documents impressive gains in productivity and effectiveness resulting from positive leadership behaviours. The mechanisms are straightforward: when leaders demonstrate behaviours that build trust, provide clarity, develop capability, and maintain focus, teams perform better.
Conversely, negative behaviours create drag on organisational performance. Time spent managing political dynamics, repairing damaged relationships, or compensating for unclear direction represents pure waste that competitors without such handicaps can exploit.
Leadership behaviours profoundly affect whether talented people stay, leave, or join your organisation. The truism that "people leave managers, not companies" reflects the reality that immediate leaders' behaviours shape employee experience more than abstract organisational attributes.
Positive behaviours—recognition, development support, authentic interest in team members' growth—significantly reduce staff attrition. Given that the average cost of hiring an employee approaches $4,000, and replacement costs for skilled professionals often exceed one year's salary, retention impacts from leadership behaviours carry substantial financial implications.
Leadership behaviours signal which values actually matter in organisations, regardless of stated values or aspirational cultural descriptions. When leaders consistently demonstrate collaborative behaviours, collaboration becomes culturally valued. When leaders model accountability, accountability norms strengthen throughout the organisation.
Research confirms that cultural alignment—driven largely by consistent leadership behaviours—directly affects morale, productivity, and retention. For organisations attempting cultural transformation, leadership behavioural change typically represents the critical path.
Ultimately, leadership behaviours influence bottom-line business outcomes. When leaders maintain high engagement through positive behaviours, organisations see improvements in customer service, operational performance, and productivity, all carrying financial implications.
Research on transformational leadership—characterised by specific behaviours including idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualised consideration—demonstrates significant positive impacts on organisational performance and financial results.
Even experienced executives fall into predictable traps regarding leadership behaviours. Recognising these patterns helps you avoid costly errors that undermine effectiveness.
Perhaps the most damaging mistake involves behavioural inconsistency—demonstrating admirable behaviours in some circumstances but abandoning them under pressure or when inconvenient. When you show transparency in favourable circumstances but obscure information when results disappoint, or demonstrate accountability one week but deflect responsibility the next, you undermine trust regardless of your intentions.
Research on leadership presence emphasises that others form judgments based on patterns they observe over time. Inconsistent behaviours create confusion about your actual values and priorities, making it difficult for teams to align their own behaviours accordingly.
Many leaders believe their positive intentions automatically translate into positive behaviours. Yet your internal experience—what you meant, what you were trying to accomplish—matters far less than what team members actually observe and experience.
You might intend to be supportive whilst your actual behaviours (failing to provide resources, not removing obstacles, rarely acknowledging challenges) communicate indifference. The gap between intention and behaviour represents one of the largest opportunities for leadership improvement.
Leadership behaviours that prove effective in one context may underperform or even backfire in another. Directive, decisive behaviours might serve brilliantly during genuine crises but stifle innovation in research environments. Participative, consensus-building behaviours might enable successful change management but create dangerous delays during emergencies.
The skill of reading context accurately—understanding what specific situations require—enables you to adapt your behavioural repertoire appropriately rather than defaulting to comfortable patterns regardless of circumstances.
Some leaders overinvest in task-oriented behaviours—setting objectives, monitoring progress, ensuring accountability—whilst neglecting people-oriented patterns. Others do the reverse, emphasising relationships and development whilst failing to drive necessary execution and results.
Exceptional leaders develop proficiency across both dimensions, flexibly emphasising different behaviours as situations demand. The behavioural flexibility to pivot between task and people focus, recognising when each deserves priority, distinguishes versatile leaders from those trapped in rigid patterns.
Many leaders assume they understand how their behaviours affect others, rarely testing those assumptions through systematic feedback. This blindness to your own behavioural impact represents perhaps the most preventable leadership failure.
Regular feedback—particularly from those you lead—provides indispensable insights about gaps between your self-perception and others' experience. Leaders who consistently seek and act on behavioural feedback demonstrate both humility and commitment to improvement, reinforcing the very behaviours that enable ongoing development.
Leadership behaviours never occur in a cultural vacuum. British business culture brings particular characteristics that shape which behaviours prove effective and how actions are interpreted.
British culture traditionally values understatement over self-promotion and measured restraint over overt enthusiasm. Leadership behaviours that might seem appropriately confident in American contexts can read as arrogant within British organisations. Conversely, the self-deprecating humour and modest self-assessment common among British leaders might be misinterpreted as lack of confidence in more assertive cultures.
Understanding these norms allows you to calibrate behaviours appropriately. Humble behaviours—acknowledging others' contributions, admitting uncertainty, soliciting diverse perspectives—often resonate particularly well within British organisational contexts.
British culture places considerable emphasis on fairness, due process, and procedural justice. Leadership behaviours that shortcut established processes or favour certain individuals transparently often encounter stronger resistance in British contexts than in cultures more comfortable with informal arrangements or relationship-based decision-making.
Transparent behaviours—explaining reasoning, following consistent processes, treating people equitably—align well with these cultural values and therefore tend to be received positively.
British communication styles often favour indirection over bluntness, with criticism frequently wrapped in politeness and disagreement expressed through understatement. Leadership communication behaviours must account for these patterns both in how you deliver messages and how you interpret feedback.
What an American colleague might state directly—"This approach won't work"—a British colleague might express as "That's an interesting idea, though I wonder if we've fully considered the implementation challenges." Leaders who miss these subtleties often misread stakeholder sentiment.
The British literary tradition—from Shakespeare's examinations of power and responsibility to contemporary explorations of institutional dynamics—provides rich metaphors for understanding leadership. Just as Churchill combined strategic vision with extraordinary communication to demonstrate transformational leadership during Britain's gravest hour, modern British executives often aspire to leadership that balances resolve with restraint, ambition with humility.
Leadership behaviours are the specific, observable actions that leaders take—what you actually do in discrete situations. Leadership styles are the broader patterns or frameworks that guide your overall approach to leadership—your philosophical orientation. You might adopt a transformational leadership style whilst demonstrating either positive or negative specific behaviours within that style. Styles represent overarching approaches; behaviours represent individual actions.
Yes, leadership behaviours can absolutely be learned, modified, and strengthened throughout your career. Unlike personality traits, which remain relatively stable, behaviours represent conscious choices you can change deliberately. Research confirms that participants in well-designed leadership development programmes improved their performance by 20% and their learning capacity by 25%. Behavioural development requires conscious practice, regular feedback, and willingness to step outside your comfort zone, but it remains accessible regardless of your starting point.
Research consistently identifies several foundational behaviours that influence effectiveness across contexts: authenticity, integrity, accountability, transparency, and humility. Beyond these foundations, active listening, providing developmental support, adaptability, decisiveness, and inclusive decision-making demonstrate particular impact. However, behavioural importance varies based on organisational context and strategic priorities. Innovation-focused environments may particularly value behaviours encouraging experimentation, whilst turnaround situations might demand decisive, directive behaviours. Effective leaders develop broad behavioural repertoires rather than mastering only a narrow set.
Behavioural change timelines vary significantly based on complexity, current proficiency, practice frequency, and support systems. Simple behaviours practiced deliberately in supportive environments can show improvement within weeks. More complex behavioural patterns—particularly those requiring sophisticated underlying skills or contradicting deeply ingrained habits—may require months or years of sustained effort. Research on habit formation suggests that consistency matters more than duration; regular practice in real contexts accelerates development more effectively than sporadic intensive efforts. Most leaders observe meaningful progress within 90 days of deliberate practice on specific behaviours.
Leadership behaviours profoundly influence employee engagement, with research demonstrating that positive leadership behaviours create ripple effects that boost morale, strengthen teamwork, and enhance workplace culture. Specific behaviours like recognition, active listening, providing developmental support, and transparent communication directly increase engagement levels. Conversely, negative behaviours such as inconsistency, taking credit for others' work, or failing to provide clarity significantly decrease engagement. Given that leadership affects employee engagement more than any other organisational variable, investing in positive leadership behaviours represents one of the highest-return initiatives organisations can pursue.
Leadership behaviours both shape and are shaped by organisational culture. Leaders take behavioural cues from existing cultural norms, particularly from observed behaviours of more senior executives. Simultaneously, leadership behaviours—especially those of visible senior leaders—profoundly influence culture by signaling which values actually matter, which behaviours receive reward, and what constitutes acceptable conduct. Cultural alignment, driven largely by consistent leadership behaviours, directly affects morale, productivity, and retention. For organisations attempting cultural transformation, changing leadership behaviours typically represents the critical path, as team members take cues about cultural expectations primarily from what leaders do rather than what policies state.
Several approaches provide useful feedback on leadership behaviours. Implement regular 360-degree assessments that systematically gather perspectives from superiors, peers, and subordinates on specific behaviours. Ask for targeted feedback about discrete actions: "When I provided that feedback yesterday, did my approach seem constructive?" rather than vague questions about overall leadership. Create psychological safety that encourages candid feedback by responding non-defensively and demonstrating that you act on input received. Work with an executive coach who observes your behaviours and provides expert assessment. Finally, simply ask team members regularly, "What should I stop doing, start doing, or continue doing?" This simple question, asked genuinely and followed with visible behavioural adjustments, provides invaluable insights whilst demonstrating the very humility and openness that distinguish exceptional leaders.
Leadership behaviours—the observable actions and patterns you demonstrate daily—ultimately determine your leadership impact far more than your intentions, credentials, or strategic insights. Whilst leadership styles provide philosophical frameworks and leadership skills supply underlying capabilities, behaviours represent what team members actually experience and respond to. The encouraging reality is that behaviours remain accessible to conscious development regardless of your starting point. By identifying specific behaviours worth cultivating, practicing deliberately, seeking regular feedback, and maintaining consistency over time, you can dramatically enhance your leadership effectiveness. Remember that small, ordinary situations experienced daily provide the primary arena where leadership behaviours develop. Each interaction offers opportunity to practice the patterns that distinguish exceptional leaders from merely adequate ones.