Readers and L&D buyers
Is The Leadership Star for new managers or experienced leaders?
Both — for different reasons. New managers use it as a map: it gives them a clear set of behaviours to build from the start, before habits and patterns get fixed. Experienced leaders use it as an audit: it surfaces the gap between how they think they’re leading and how their teams experience being led by them.
The five practices — Care, Context, Clarity, Clear the Way, Celebrate — are simple enough for a first-time manager to apply in their first week. They’re also sufficiently demanding that a 20-year leadership veteran will find at least one they’re not doing as well as they thought.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: All five practices
For new managers
The value is structure. Most people step into management with good intentions and very little guidance about what the job actually involves. The five practices give them something concrete: here is what I need to be doing in my one-on-ones, my team meetings, my performance conversations. That clarity, early, prevents the habits that are hardest to change later.
For experienced leaders
The value is the mirror. Experienced leaders often have strong self-images of themselves as managers. The five practices, applied honestly — ideally with upward feedback from their teams — surface the discrepancy. Clear the Way is consistently the practice that experienced leaders rate themselves most highly on and their teams rate them most differently. Celebrate is the one where the gap between intent and practice is most common.
See also: What are the five practices in The Leadership Star? · How should we measure whether a leadership programme is helping?
If you asked your direct reports to rate you on each of the five practices, which one do you think would show the biggest gap between your self-assessment and theirs?
Start with the book
The Leadership Star sets out all five practices in full, with the reasoning behind each one.