During a candid moment at lunch one day with the campus chaplain, I asked him the naive question about his experience in the confessional. How do you deal with hearing all that stuff – do you forget it all, or does any of it haunt you? He looked at me with kind exasperation and shared, “It’s so boring in there. It’s the same confession over and over and over, rinse and repeat.”

I’ve logged over 2000 hours of coaching leaders since going pro in 2020. I’ve spoken to several hundred leaders about their challenges bringing their ideas, plans, and strategies into being, especially when they’re working with teams to do so. And I’ve begun to understand what that priest meant.

I’m not anywhere near bored. Yet, the patterns keep repeating over and over. Minimizing, victimhood/blame, avoidance.

I encountered a pattern I didn’t expect, though: most leaders—the ones that are dedicated readers—almost 3 in 4 of them do not regularly read capital-L Literature.

On one hand, we can think of that as a winning strategy: modern leadership success gets by dismissing narrative and lyric, discarding diversion in favor of distilled data.

Or, and here’s where I’d like to stake my claim, we can think of that as putting oneself at great disadvantage in the enterprise of inspiring, motivating, correcting, and designing human communities to accomplish an outcome. Attempting the work of leadership without the grounding of literature is like fighting with one hand (your good hand) behind your back. You make yourself the tragi-comic supporting character in the not-very-good M. Night Shyamalan film, Lady in the Water, who only exercises one side of his body.

We are what we imitate. So I’ve come to learn from one of my favorite writers and contemporary conversationalists, Luke Burgis. He has done a great work for culture by pointing to the deep and architectural insights of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and how it is playing out in real time across culture. What I’ve learned from him is that models of desire aren’t simply important, they’re inescapable. We will pick models to imitate — it is important to pick well.

The repetition that I see over and over again seems to unfold unconsciously. Leaders desire success in market ventures, so they do what others have done to have the same success. Read the business classics.

Yet, those who have a habit of reading literature lead from a different level.

Human enterprises are made more intelligible through narrative than through instruction. We are made for storytelling. Not only do we retain information better when it’s presented narratively, but we also do better at personalizing it. More importantly, we’re better at personalizing others. That is, we more accurately and fully attribute what’s happening in human interactions. Literary leaders predict social attitudes and behaviors better than those who aren’t.

Good fiction, poetry, and drama don’t simply present us models — even the better-performing, “classic” business books know how to do that in narrative form.

Literature re-presents the most familiar personal and communal conflicts, not as fables, but as real life. Literature presents an entirely different conversation and answers to a wholly separate question than industry books do. Literature thickens our desire, and therefore our reality. Without it, we are skating on thin ice.

My hope is that leaders start putting more nutrient-dense fare at the center of their diet to do the important and necessary work of fully participating in the activity of their own lives and the lives of others.

I’ll be sharing some excerpts from the book I’m working on as a result of this conversation. Up until now, I’ve been having the conversation mostly with myself.

I’ve chosen passages from books and poems that I consider worth reading, re-reading, and paying very close attention to. We rarely tire of spending time with our dearest friends week after week. I think the same is true of the enduring works of literature: they’re ever new and inexhaustible.

The point of this exercise is not to crowbar utility out of something meant for itself. Rather, it is simply to pay attention to what is contained in the vast depths of these passages. And sure enough, some of what we find becomes resourceful for the person responsible for leading others in business enterprises.

You Come, Too: An Invitation

“The Pasture”nRobert Frost

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring.

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away.

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come, too.

nnI’m going to fetch the little calfnnThat’s standing by it’s mother. It’s so youngnnIt totters when she licks it with her tongue. nnI sha’n’t be gone long. — You come, too.

At the start of 2025, I took a three-week course with the poet and leadership consultant, David Whyte.

During that course, he articulated a distinction that helped clarify something that was unsettled in me. He described a posture of heart that is invitational, which all effective leaders (as well as friends and mentors) know how to access. And then, very succinctly, he quipped: “The opposite of invitational is coercive.”

Frost’s poem here does something slightly different. His tone is entirely invitational, and yet, it is also imperative. The invitation is formed from everything surrounding the commanding sentence. There is no tone of coercion, even though it concludes with a command.

Notice the pattern of the communication in this poem:

• Here is what I’m doing, and here’s what I expect to find.

• Here’s what it will cost.

• The invitation.

My mentor and friend once told me that Leadership is the art of mastering paradox. Wisdom doesn’t sit still; it dances between states. However difficult it may be to reconcile invitation and command conceptually, nevertheless, when someone is both, we are compelled by our own desire to submit and follow.

There is a way to command without coercion. There is a way to provoke the desire to follow the command.

You come, too.