Beyond the Playbook: Leadership as Choices and Moves

About a decade ago, someone I was working with asked me for my leadership “playbook.” I’d been getting versions of that question for years, but this one landed differently.

She was smart, capable, and under real pressure. What she wanted made sense: the model, the rules, the right moves in the right order. But what she was really asking was how to make better decisions when the stakes are real and outcomes are uncertain. That question, not the playbook, is where leadership development actually begins.

Leadership isn’t a trait, a title, or a framework. It shows up in moments, when something matters, other people are involved, and a choice has to be made. In every leadership situation there are options. Some feel safe. Some feel risky. Some carry social cost. Others avoid the real issue entirely. Over time, the pattern of choices a person makes in those moments becomes their leadership.

So, leadership development isn’t about learning better language for leadership. It’s about expanding the range of choices a person can make and making those choices more reliable under pressure.

The DOER² Path

In real work, leadership tends to move through the same simple sequence, one that I call DOER²™:

Define → Own → Enlist → Resolve → Reinforce

Whether they name them or not, leaders move through these stages. And breakdowns usually aren’t about intelligence or intent. They happen because at predictable moments people revert to familiar choices, especially when the stakes rise or the politics get real.

That’s also why a lot of leadership development fails quietly: it improves understanding, but it doesn’t reliably change what people do when it counts.

Why I Use the Word “Move”

I use the word move on purpose. Behavior is descriptive and tells you what happened. A move is agentic and makes choice visible. It answers a different question “What did I choose to do here?”

Moves aren’t personality traits or fixed strengths. They’re repeatable patterns of action. And the same move can be expressed in any stage of DOER² depending on timing, context, and relationship.

I work with a defined set of 10 leadership moves that I chose deliberately. Each move meets a clear set of criteria: it has to be meaningfully distinct, observable in live interaction, usable across all DOER² stages, and only fully optimizable human-to-human.

Together, these moves form a representative working set, broad enough to cover the leadership moments that actually matter, and specific enough to be practiced, evaluated, and refined over time.

The 10 leadership moves are:

Presence, Empathy, Integrity, Boldness, Commitment, Empowering, Authenticity, Humility, Discernment, Openness

One example: Boldness may be needed to define a hard truth, own a decision publicly, enlist others honestly, resolve conflict directly, or reinforce a new norm. That portability is the point.

Range Beats Labels

A common misunderstanding, especially among strong leaders, is thinking development means “adding new moves.” But usually the moves aren’t the problem. The range is.

Range shows up in three forms:

- how many ways you can express a move,

- how reliably you can access it when pressure rises,

- how precisely you can calibrate it across different people and situations.

Two leaders may both be empathetic. One can show empathy only in low-stakes conversations. The other can show empathy while holding a hard line, delivering bad news, or managing political risk. Same move, different range.

This is also why it’s not enough to say “it depends on context.” The more useful question is “What choices does this leader reliably make, in which situations, and where does their range collapse when pressure rises?” When you can answer that, development stops being vague and becomes specific, observable, and improvable, without turning into surveillance.

Why There Is No Playbook

This is often the point where capable executives ask me for the full model or the definitive playbook. That instinct makes sense, and it’s also where development stalls.

A playbook collapses judgment. Leadership doesn’t improve because people memorize better rules. It improves when people learn to make better choices, repeatedly, in live situations where outcomes and relationships are on the line.

Moves can’t be fully codified because their effectiveness depends on timing, delivery, and human response. The only way to build real capability is through practice, consequence, and adjustment, until it becomes something like muscle memory.

The Design Point

The goal isn’t better description, it’s better design. Leadership improves when people repeatedly choose different moves in real situations, and can see the impact of those choices over time.

That requires a behavioral choice architecture: a way of structuring development around real decisions, real interaction, and real consequences, while keeping agency with the leader and accountability inside the relationship.

LeaderBridge® is the system we built to operationalize that architecture in practice.

This is the design problem we’re solving. Not to produce a playbook leaders can follow, but to build a system where they learn how to choose differently when it matters. Through real choices, with real people, in real moments.

Which is why the answer to “what’s the playbook?” is simple: there isn’t one. There’s practice, organized around DOER² and moves.”

If this article maps to a real situation you’re in right now, the next step isn’t more reading, it’s choosing how to engage.

If you’re navigating a high-stakes leadership transition and want a grounded outside perspective, start here: Talk with John​

If you want to see how DOER²™ and leadership moves become a lived practice—not a framework—start here: LeaderBridge® demo / early access