Anyone new to the framework
What are the five practices in The Leadership Star?
Five practices. Each one is something you do — not a quality you claim to have. Care, Context, Clarity, Clear the Way, Celebrate. Together they describe what leading people actually looks like in practice, as opposed to how leaders tend to describe themselves.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: All five practices
The five practices
Care means demonstrating genuine investment in people — their development, their challenges, their growth — not only in what they deliver. It shows up in the questions you ask, the time you make when someone is struggling, and whether people believe you actually want them to succeed.
Context means helping people understand the “why.” Why the organisation exists, why their work connects to the mission, why the business is making the choices it is. Without context, people follow instructions. With it, they exercise judgement — which is what you’re actually paying them to do.
Clarity has three parts: role clarity (a genuine conversation about what the job is), goal clarity (defining what good and great look like, with people involved in setting targets), and behavioural clarity (expectations written in plain English, held to). Most managers think they’ve been clearer than they have. Their teams rarely agree.
Clear the Way means identifying and removing what stands between a person and their best work — physical, financial, political, invisible. The discipline is asking “what’s getting in your way?” — then actually going to fix it. Sympathising and moving on is not the same thing.
Celebrate means timely, specific recognition. Not once a year in a performance review. Weekly, and tailored to the individual. Leaders almost universally underdo this. The gap between how often people want to be recognised and how often they are is one of the most consistent findings in engagement work — and one of the easiest gaps to close.
Why five, not one
These practices work as a system. Care without Clarity produces warmth without direction. Clarity without Care produces compliance without commitment. Most engagement problems I’ve seen trace back to a gap in one specific practice — which means fixing engagement doesn’t require launching a new initiative. It requires identifying which of the five is missing and doing that thing consistently.
Where to start
Go through the five and ask yourself honestly: which one do I do least reliably? Start there. Not with the one you find easiest — with the gap your team would identify if you asked them.
Explore each practice: Care · Context · Clarity · Clear the Way · Celebrate
Which of the five practices would your team say you do most consistently — and which would they say you skip?
Start with the book
The Leadership Star sets out all five practices in full, with the reasoning behind each one.