About the Book

The Leadership Competency Playbook began as an effort to make leadership more observable and more widely distributed across an organization, rather than treated as a trait reserved for the top of the chart. The second edition keeps that ambition intact while correcting a real limitation: a competency model, on its own, can still be flattened into a checklist or a training taxonomy detached from the actual complexity of work.

The book is organized around the DOES cycle: Design, Organize, Execute, and Sustain. Twenty-four competencies are grouped across these four dimensions, each one placed where it does distinct work in shaping, building, delivering, and renewing organizational direction. No competency is presented in isolation from the part of the cycle it serves.

What makes this edition different is that every competency is now read through Levels of Work, so its meaning is shown changing as horizon, complexity, and consequence expand across five levels, from Quality through Strategic Intent. The Triad of Direction — Management, Leadership, and Stewardship — runs alongside that progression, clarifying which discipline of direction is most visible at each turn.

The chapters are written as continuous narrative rather than reference-style entries, because the material is too interdependent to be carried by headings and bullet points alone. Each one begins in a lived tension leaders will recognize, introduces enough structure to make the distinction usable, and shows how the competency's demands shift as the level of work rises.

The book serves frontline leaders, functional managers, senior executives, and board members alike, not because they read the same chapter the same way, but because the underlying architecture — DOES, Levels of Work, and the Triad — travels across every level of an organization where judgment about direction actually happens.