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Stanford professor of organizational behavior, Robert Sutton, says, “The gap between knowing and doing is larger than the gap between ignorance and knowledge.” I can’t verify Sutton’s observation empirically, but experience seems to bear this out.

At the heart of Serving Leadership is a non-negotiable premise: people are your organization’s greatest treasure. This point of view requires a change in leaders accustomed to thinking of people as a tool, function, or cost.

There’s a famous quote that is just, plain wrong. Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach. We’ve all had the misfortune of bumping into a couple of blowhards who can neither do nor teach. While they’re “teaching,” it’s apparent they don’t know what they’re talking about.

When I was a boy, I was a dreamer. Starting this blog with that sentence makes it sound like I’m not a dreamer anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth, so allow me to write that first sentence more to my point: When I was a boy, my mother worried that I was too much of a dreamer.

In our early study of and writing about Serving Leaders, I often swapped stories with my co-author, Ken Jennings, on a finding that we both seemed to encounter, time and again, in our various workplace engagements. The finding was simply this: The first evidence of a great leader in the making was a company or organization full of great leaders surrounding them.

While the cliché, “It’s lonely at the top,” is well known, many leaders are still surprised when they encounter the truth of this in their own leadership journey. In its 2013 report, Stepping Up to CEO, the School for CEOs reports that loneliness and isolation were some of the biggest challenges leaders face.