Written by: David Weston on May 1, 2025

I must start with a confession:  I had reservations about Dr. Eve Poole’s book, Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership, [1] from the beginning. I stand on the other side of my reading with a significant modification to my initial, unexamined view. I admit that I had several biases in my understanding of how leaders develop. My biases began to break through the fog of my opinions pretty quickly, especially in the Theory section.

I began to look deeper into my own understanding of leadership, primarily as I practiced it. These biases are difficult to see, especially when they work. After half a century of being in leadership roles in just about every kind of environment imaginable, I realized that just because it worked for me does not necessarily mean that it will work for everybody, or that it even should. Character and temperamental distinctives, life experiences, equipping, and what Dr. Poole calls critical incidents.[2] All contribute to a distinctive leadership style of both the leader and the follower. This was researched rather thoroughly by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey and published in 1969.[3] As a theory of leadership Hersey and Blanchard’s research has served me well as a practitioner of multi-environmental leadership. Their theory has not been without its detractors, such as C. P. Johansen[4] who counter-theorized that though Blanchard and Hersey’s theory had some merit, it was pretty elementary to be taken seriously. Though, I did not dig down too deep into Johansen’s researcgm it just feels flawed to me in his interpretation of the data.

Though I am certain that leadership, as Poole postulates it, there is a strong need to emphasize the capacity and character of a follower, but it cannot be fully separated from the mission. The mission accentuates both competency and character in each of us. As a leader, I have been influenced by numerous writers globally. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw influenced me greatly in helping me to understand, not only how to get a vision, but how to keep the vision alive. Few things kill a vision faster than when the leader continuously allows it to drift one way or another. In the military that is called mission creep. I have seen it a lot. It ruins morale and it de-motivates followers from taking ownership of the vision. Mazumdar-shaw uses several case studies of critical events that wound up going off the rails because of a lack of ability by leaders to keep everybody focused on the vision. This is a critical leader quality.

Another leader who has influenced me greatly in my understanding of leadersmithing is the founder of Seal Team Six, Richard Marchinko. He, very much like Poole, in his Rogue Warrior Series, takes a practical secrets of the trade approach. Several of them have served me well: “Leaders Lead from the Front.” In business, this means setting the pace. Whether it’s staying late to close a deal, rolling up your sleeves on a critical task, or being transparent during crises—people follow leaders who are in the trenches with them. Another is, Train hard-Fight Easy. I heard him say once, “The more we bleed in training, the less we bleed in battle.” Prepare your team for worst-case scenarios—tough negotiations, system failures, public backlash, etc. Marcinko’s version of training means never being caught off guard. Build Elite Teams, Not Just Elite Individuals → Culture Eats Talent for Breakfast. Hire for attitude and values, not just skillset. Build teams that thrive under pressure together. For me, this has been a significant rule of leadership. I have seen so many teams filled with competent people, but they had little character that bound them together. I can teach competency in a short period. Building character takes years.

I think Poole’s book reflects many of the lessons I learned by reading Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince,  Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, and one of my favorites, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders –L. David Marquet

I especially enjoyed reading the Theory section of this book. It set the stage for many practical leadership skills I have learned, mostly intuitively, over the years. She does a great job of synthesizing a broad spectrum of lessons learned by many accomplished leaders over the years, and it provides an excellent forum for helping junior leaders develop into great leaders.

[1] Eve Poole, Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership. London: Bloomsbury Business, 2017.

[2]  ibid. pgs. 9-12

[3] Paul Hersey, and Ken Blanchard. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources. 1st ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.

[4]  Johansen, C. P. (1990). Situational leadership: A review of the research. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 1(1), 73-85. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.3920010109

[5]  Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Leaders See Things First (New Delhi: Penguin Random House India, 2023).

[6] Richard Marcinko and John Weisman, Rogue Warrior (New York: Pocket Books, 1992).

[7]  Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self (New York: Rodale Books, 2021).

[8]. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

[9] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Peter E. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[10] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

[11]. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013).

About the Author

David Weston