Generative Leadership Part III: Stewardship and Self-Interest; Two Vectors of Leadership

Throughout my career in engineering, manufacturing, operations, and continuous improvement, I have worked with leaders across every level of the organizational hierarchy. Some created stronger systems, stronger people, and stronger companies. Others built stronger careers. Sometimes those were the same people, but often they were not.

This observation led me to a question:
What kind of leadership creates the strongest teams, strongest cultures, and strongest organizations over time?

What follows are two competing philosophies of leadership. The first is what I believe leadership ought to be. The second is not an inversion of the first. It is something more subtle and more dangerous: a corruption of it.

Many of the principles in the second philosophy are not inherently wrong. In fact, they are often taught as legitimate leadership fundamentals. Strategic relationships matter. Reputation matters. Narrative matters. Political capital matters. The difference lies in the direction of optimization.

Stewardship asks: "How can I use these tools to strengthen the organization?"

Self-interest asks: "How can I use these tools to strengthen my position?"

The distinction sounds small, but the outcomes are not. The principles that follow are drawn primarily from operational environments, where leadership decisions are eventually tested against reality.

Throughout the remainder of this essay, I will occasionally refer to these two philosophies by another set of names:

Leadership Heaven and Leadership Hell.

The metaphor is deliberate. Now, do I believe leaders are saints or villains? No, I believe nobody fully inhabits one philosophy or the other. Rather, because both concepts capture something that modern leadership discussions often miss:

The cumulative effect of countless small decisions made long before anyone else sees their consequences.

Many religious traditions describe virtue and vice not as isolated actions or destinations, but as trajectories: patterns of decisions repeated over time. Leadership works much the same way.

A leader does not suddenly become a steward nor do they suddenly become self-serving. They become those things through repetition, habits, incentives, and the small choices made when nobody is watching.

Just as faith traditions often describe Heaven and Hell in the context of paths that individuals gradually orient themselves toward, organizations are shaped by repeated decisions that gradually orient leaders toward stewardship or self-interest.

The question is not whether we occasionally drift toward one or the other- we all do. The question is: in which direction are we consistently moving?

Which vector exerts greater force on our decisions? Which philosophy gains a little more ground each time stewardship and self-interest diverge? That is the question this essay attempts to explore.

The reason Leadership Heaven contains eleven commandments while Leadership Hell contains only five is that stewardship is inherently more complicated than self-interest. Stewardship describes a collection of duties that are largely non-overlapping. Remove any one of them and something important is lost. Self-interest, by contrast, is simpler. Its tactics may vary, but they generally collapse toward a handful of recurring objectives: acquiring influence, preserving influence, converting influence into personal advantage, and avoiding the full cost of failure.

The following lists represent the first principles of each philosophy. They are intentionally presented in no particular order of importance, sequence, or dependency. Every item matters.

The 11 Commandments of Leadership Heaven

1. Create the Future

A leader must generate vision, strategy, capability, and opportunity rather than merely react to circumstances.

Test: What exists today that would not exist without this leader's influence?

2. Fight Organizational Entropy

A leader must actively prevent the decay of standards, accountability, processes, and culture. All systems drift when unattended.

Test: Are standards becoming stronger, weaker, or merely appearing unchanged?

3. Exercise Sound Judgment Under Uncertainty

A leader must make consequential decisions despite incomplete information by balancing evidence, risk, timing, and competing interests.

Test: Does this leader consistently improve outcomes despite uncertainty?

4. Define Success Clearly

A leader must establish clear, measurable, and adaptable expectations so individuals and teams understand what success looks like.

Test: Do people know what winning looks like?

5. Enable Success

A leader must remove obstacles, secure resources, provide support, and align the organization so capable people can perform at their highest level.

Test: Are barriers disappearing faster than they are being created?

6. Submit to Evidence

A leader must hold themselves to at least the same standard of evidence, rigor, and burden of proof expected from everyone else. Authority is not evidence.

Test: Is this leader willing to change their position when facts require it?

7. Exercise Restraint and Fairness

A leader must regulate emotion, apply standards consistently, and distribute rewards, consequences, and opportunities according to principle rather than impulse.

Test: Would reasonable observers describe this leader as composed, predictable, and fair under pressure?

8. Develop Successors

A leader must leave behind stronger people, stronger systems, and greater organizational capability than they inherited. Leadership that cannot reproduce itself is incomplete.

Test: Is the organization becoming less dependent on this leader over time?

9. Earn the Confidence of High Performers

A leader must inspire trust, confidence, and earned loyalty—especially among high-performing contributors and leaders—through competence, character, and consistent judgment. Compliance follows authority. Confidence follows credibility.

Test: Do the organization's strongest people voluntarily place their trust in this leader?

10. Demonstrate Courage and Integrity

A leader must act honestly and according to principle even when doing so carries personal, political, or professional cost. Integrity without courage is fragile. Courage without integrity is dangerous.

Test: Does this leader continue to do what they believe is right when it becomes expensive?

11. Create Meaning and Alignment

A leader must establish and reinforce a shared understanding of purpose, identity, mission, and values that aligns decisions and sustains effort beyond compliance alone. People commit more deeply to a cause than to a task.

Test: Do people understand not only what they are doing and how success is measured, but why it matters?

The 5 Commandments of Leadership Hell

1. Accumulate Status

Cultivate relationships, visibility, credibility, and recognition that increase your influence.

Test: Is your reputation growing faster than your contribution?

2. Control Perception

Shape narratives, communications, and appearances to maximize advantage.

Test: Is perception improving faster than reality?

3. Protect Position

Accumulate political capital, preserve unique value, and avoid becoming replaceable.

Test: Are you creating organizational capability or personal leverage?

4. Manage Accountability

Claim ownership of success and distance yourself from failure.

Test: Does the accountability in question move toward success and away from failure?

5. Optimize for Self-Preservation

Pursue outcomes that maximize personal benefit while minimizing personal risk.

Test: If the organization's interests and your interests diverged, which would win?

The Corruption of Virtue

The most dangerous leadership failures rarely begin as selfish acts. They begin as reasonable principles optimized in the wrong direction.

The corruption is subtle. At first glance, many of these ideas sound nearly identical. The difference is whether the tool serves the mission or serves the leader. This is where Leadership Hell can masquerade as Leadership Heaven.

Some of the most effective disguises are built from legitimate leadership concepts. The danger is not that they are false, but that they can be bent toward self-interest while retaining the appearance of stewardship. If Leadership Hell announced itself honestly, few would follow it. Its strength lies in its ability to borrow the language of Leadership Heaven.

As an aside, readers should remain appropriately suspicious whenever leadership philosophies become impossible to distinguish from slogans.

Leadership Heaven (Stewardship)	Corruption
Create the Future	Create opportunities primarily for personal advancement and influence.
Fight Organizational Entropy	Maintain systems selectively when they enhance visibility, control, or personal standing.
Exercise Sound Judgment Under Uncertainty	Make decisions that maximize political safety and personal upside while minimizing personal risk.
Define Success Clearly	Define success in ways that are easy to claim, measure selectively, or take credit for.
Enable Success	Enable others only to the extent that it strengthens your position, reputation, or dependence upon you.
Submit to Evidence	Shape interpretation of evidence to support preferred narratives and desired outcomes.
Exercise Restraint and Fairness	Apply standards selectively to preserve alliances, status, and influence.
Develop Successors	Develop subordinates only to the point that they remain useful without becoming threatening.
Earn the Confidence of High Performers	Accumulate loyalty, status, and influence among top performers for personal leverage.
Demonstrate Courage and Integrity	Protect and assert credibility, reputation, and political capital before risking them for principle.
Create Meaning and Alignment	Shape perception, identity, and purpose primarily to strengthen personal influence and authority.

The left column builds organizational capability. The right column builds personal advantage. Both can produce successful careers. Only one reliably produces strong organizations. The uncomfortable reality is that almost no leaders fully embody one side or the other, but instead move between them at different crossroads.

Every leader develops relationships. Every leader manages perceptions. Every leader accumulates political capital. Every leader protects their reputation. The difference lies in the purpose.

The corruption occurs when a leadership tool stops being a means and becomes an end.

Stewardship and Self-Interest Are Not Destinations

I should clarify, none of these behaviors are inherently evil. In fact, many of them are adaptive or are used to overcome necessary barriers. These first principles emerge and survive because they work. The problem begins when those tools cease serving the mission and begin serving the individual. That is the moment stewardship begins to drift toward self-interest.

The Question That Matters

The purpose of this article is not to judge leaders based on these behaviors, I already wrote a blog that is more directly critical of leadership Hell’s more common and negative outcomes in the context of operations earlier in the Generative Leadership series. This article is simply meant to provide a mirror. Every leader experiences moments where stewardship and self-interest align and those are easy and ideal circumstantial decisions. The real test comes when they diverge.

When protecting the mission threatens your position, what is the next move?

When developing a successor threatens your influence, do you keep them right where you need them or put yourself at risk?

When evidence threatens a preferred narrative, do you chill the information flow, or do you embrace it with potential losses?

When integrity becomes expensive, the true character and priorities of leadership reveals itself.

Speeches, titles, quarterly results, LinkedIn posts are just different versions of narrative. The substance that determines the leadership Heaven and Hell is revealed by often quiet and invisible internal choice.

When stewardship and self-interest diverge, which do you choose?

Over the course of a career, the answer becomes your vector. And eventually, that average sum of your choices becomes the vector that determines whether you leave behind a stronger organization or merely a stronger version of yourself.

The most difficult leadership challenge for competent and ambitious managers with potential is determining how much self-interest can be tolerated in pursuit of stewardship before stewardship itself becomes corrupted, and conversely how much self-interest is necessary to secure and sustain stewardship in the first place.