What my father taught me about leadership without trying
My father was twenty-five when he first found himself in charge of other people.
Looking back, he’s surprisingly candid about why he wanted it.
“Searching for responsibility and being in charge is the role that I think I was originally striving for. That’s more of a status thing than it was a leadership thing. I didn’t realize at the time that there was a distinction in the two.”
Status. Not authority, not management, not a title. Status. And notice he isn’t describing a bad boss he once worked for. He’s describing himself.
He became a branch manager in Kansas City at twenty-five or twenty-six, responsible for a dozen or so people who hadn’t known him long and thought he was too young for the job.
“There was a lot of animosity in those early couple years.”
I asked what that felt like.
“For the most part, I didn’t care. I was so focused on what I thought I was doing that I really didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. I knew it was there. I could feel it and sense it. I just didn’t care about it.”
I asked whether it cost him anything.
“By not dealing with it, it took us longer to get where we needed to go. Because humility and empathy are important elements of a good leader, and I’m not sure I employed those in those early years. I was focused on being in charge, not focused on leading this group to where they needed to go.”
Then, after a pause:
“We could have done more faster.”
His lack of humility didn’t just affect his relationships with people. It affected what they accomplished and how fast they accomplished it.
What changed
His understanding of leadership changed over time, and he’s clear about where that change began.
“My experience came about through my Christian walk. I didn’t really understand what leadership was until I went in that journey of my spiritual journey.”
That’s where he found it. It’s part of his story, and leaving it out would make the story less true.
But he also saw that kind of leadership modeled by Jim Plant, an early boss at a company called Simplex. My father remembers Jim as one of the first people who showed him what real leadership looked like
“He had the ability to put confidence into people that didn’t have it.”
And what did that look like in practice?
“He was able to [say] here’s what you’re responsible for. I know you’re probably not ready for it, but do it anyway. Just do the best you can. Put your best foot forward. I have confidence things are going to be fine. And he just had a way of helping define the goal, and then letting me loose on it.”
So what did my father learn from Jim about leadership?
“Being in charge is all wrapped up in telling people what they’re supposed to do and correcting them when they make mistakes and documenting things as they develop and as they happen. Contrast that to: okay, here’s where you need to get. Now go do it. You’re capable. Just go out, make your mistakes, learn from them, plod forward. Let me know if you need help. Having a boss that was good at telling me what I did wrong and what I did right was okay. I didn’t accomplish nearly as much in that environment as I did in the other environment.”
That was the difference he had learned. Being in charge didn’t necessarily mean you were leading. A title could give you authority, but leadership required something more.
Letting Go Isn’t Looking Away
But giving people freedom to lead came with its own lesson: letting go wasn’t the same as looking away.
In Indiana my father had a salesman he’d released to operate independently — exactly the model he’d taken from Jim Plant. The man began accepting orders he wasn’t permitted to accept under company policy. My father knew, and didn’t stop him.
“In a way I probably encouraged it by not stopping it.”
Nothing illegal happened, but again, it violated company policy. And when it came to light, my father was ultimately responsible.
“Since I’m the one in charge, I carried that consequence, not the salesman.”
The salesman kept his job. My father didn’t. Looking back, he sees the mistake pretty clearly.
“Humility, it was something I lacked at that time. And so I put myself above the company. I thought my decisions should overshadow… That’s my fault. I didn’t have that authority to make those calls.”
This is the part of the conversation I keep returning to, because it’s where the tidy version breaks. Being in charge is not leadership. But neither is stepping back and calling it trust. Releasing people is not the same as declining to think about what you’ve released them into. The distance between those two is judgment — and judgment is the one thing nobody hands you along with the title.
Who Taught Him?
Near the end of our conversation, I asked my father who had taught him about leadership.
He mentioned Jim Plant. He mentioned a pastor, Mark Beeson. But when he thought about his younger years, he struggled to name anyone he had really looked to as a model:
“I didn’t really have anybody that I was following. I think that was part of my lack of humility, lack of empathy. I was just headstrong, plodding forward, and didn’t have that person.”
That’s when I told him something I don’t think I’d ever said quite this way before.
Despite the mistakes he could see looking back — the things he wished he’d done differently, the people he might have learned from — that wasn’t what I saw growing up.
When someone asks me who taught me about leadership, he’s the first person I think of.
I told him I’d spent my life watching someone I wanted to emulate.
He thanked me. And then, almost immediately, he went back to the people he hadn’t been watching.
“There probably were some people around me that I needed to learn from and look up to. I just didn’t. And that’s a failure on my part.”
Then he said something I haven’t been able to shake.
“I was driving ahead. I was driving forward. And my head was down, and it should have been up.”
Who Was Watching?
His head had been down. Mine hadn’t. I was watching him.
That’s the part of leadership that’s easy to miss. We tend to think of it as something taught intentionally — a lesson, a framework, a conversation like the one I was now having with my father.
But much of what he taught me wasn’t taught that way at all.
I watched how he treated people. I watched what he took responsibility for. I watched his faith shape the way he thought about humility, empathy, integrity and kindness. And I watched him change.
He wasn’t teaching a curriculum. He was living a life in front of me.
And I was learning from it.
That’s also why character isn’t the soft part of leadership. It’s the first part. Long before anyone sees what your leadership produces, the people around you experience the person producing it.
My father’s understanding of leadership changed over the course of his career. Early on, he wanted the status that came with being in charge. Over time, leadership became something very different: helping people understand where they were going, giving them confidence to get there, and accepting responsibility along the way.
He’d probably tell you that change is the whole story.
One More Thing…
I’d add one thing. He made that change with someone watching him, and neither of us knew it was happening at the time.
Someone is watching you the same way.
What are they learning?
Robert Laughter is a Strategic Growth Partner at Leadercast and Co-Founder of D-Three. Over the past 18 years, he has worked across product, marketing, strategy and customer experience, helping organizations turn complex ideas into products and stories people value.
At Leadercast, Robert is helping shape what comes next — and exploring what leadership looks like through the people who live it.