Everyone Wants to Be Led

After 30 years inside EO — from Forum Moderator to Chapter President to the Global Board of Directors — my single greatest takeaway about leadership is this: everyone wants to be led. They are waiting for someone with the courage to step forward, own the room, and bring them somewhere better than where they currently sit. The question is whether that person will be you.

This article is for two groups of people. The first is anyone — inside EO or outside it — who wants to grow as a leader. Who knows they have more capacity than they are currently using. Who is willing to be honest about the gaps between the leader they are and the leader they want to be. The second is every EO member sitting inside what I genuinely believe is the world's finest entrepreneurial leadership development program — who has not yet fully claimed what is available to them. Both groups need the same thing: the decision to step forward, the intention to grow, and an environment worthy of both.

Best Practice in Leadership Delivers Results — Always

Leadership is not a mystery. The research is clear, the evidence is consistent across industries and cultures, and the practitioners who have done it at the highest levels — from corporate CEOs to community leaders to military commanders to the thousands of chapter presidents who have led EO chapters around the world — all point at the same principles. Clarity of vision. Consistency of behaviour. Genuine care for the people in your charge. The courage to make decisions under uncertainty and to own the consequences. The humility to listen before you speak and to change course when the evidence demands it. The discipline to build alignment — to bring people along rather than dragging them — so that the direction you choose becomes the direction the whole room chooses.

Leading peers, specifically, is an exercise in alignment above all else. In your own business, you have formal authority. You can direct, incentivise, and hold people accountable through the structures of employment. In EO — in Forum, in chapter leadership, in regional and global roles — none of that exists. The only tool available to you is the quality of your leadership itself: the clarity of your reasoning, the genuineness of your care, the consistency of your character, and your ability to build alignment among people who are as capable, as independent, and as opinionated as you are. When you learn to lead in that environment — to align a room of founders around a shared direction, a shared culture, a shared commitment to something bigger than any individual — you have learned something that transfers directly into every other leadership context you will ever occupy.

"The single biggest way to impact an organisation is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organisation that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them."

— John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

Reach Out to the xLeaders — They Are One of Your Greatest Assets

Here is a resource that most EO members never fully use: the thousands of experienced past leaders who have already done what you are about to do, who carry 35 years of accumulated wisdom about what works and what does not, and who are — almost universally — willing to share it. EO is not just a current community. It is an extraordinary archive of lived leadership experience, embodied in the xLeaders, past presidents, past regional directors, past global board members, and long-tenured Forum moderators who have navigated every challenge you will face, often multiple times.

Before your leadership year begins — and ideally before you even accept the role — identify the two or three xLeaders in your chapter or region whose judgment you respect. Reach out directly. Ask specifically: what do you wish you had known in month one? Where did you get it wrong? What did you develop that surprised you? What would you do differently? These conversations, done with genuine curiosity and specific questions, can compress years of learning into a few hours. You do not have to discover every lesson the hard way. The people who learned it the hard way are sitting right there, and most of them would consider a conversation about their EO journey a privilege, not an imposition.

What Are You Going to Focus On? That Is Always the Question.

When EO gives you a leadership opportunity, the instinct for most entrepreneurs is to ask: what does this role need from me? That is the wrong starting question. The right question — the one that separates development from mere performance — is this: what do I need from this role? Think honestly about your daily world. Your team meetings. Your presentations. Your conversations with your board. Your family dinner when everyone is distracted and you are trying to be present. Where are you genuinely not yet the leader you want to be? That is your list. Write it before the year begins. Be honest about it. And then treat every interaction in your leadership year as deliberate practice of exactly the skill you decided to build.

The mantra is not a slogan. It is a structural truth. The chapter cannot grow beyond the collective leadership capacity of the board leading it. And each board member cannot grow into their full potential without the challenge and support of the chapter they are serving. The two are the same development arc, running in parallel. When you invest in yourself as a leader — when you show up to your Strategy Summit with genuine intention, use the board year to practise the skills you decided to build, and reach out to the xLeaders and mentors who can fast-track your learning — the chapter grows because you are growing. That is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism.

EO Has a Bench of Wisdom 35 Years Deep

One of the most underused assets in the entire EO ecosystem is its history. Thirty-five years of leadership experience across 221 chapters and 61 countries. Thousands of past Forum Moderators, past chapter officers, past Chapter Presidents, past Area Directors, past Regional Council members, and past Global Board members — each of them carrying specific hard-won knowledge about what the roles demand, where the traps are, and what the growth looks and feels like from the inside. That bench of wisdom is not locked away in a vault. It is sitting in your city, in your chapter's alumni community, in EO's global network — available to anyone willing to reach out with genuine curiosity and a specific question.

The fastest leaders I have seen develop inside EO are not the ones who figure everything out alone. They are the ones who seek out the people who have been there before. Who call the past president from three years ago and ask hard questions. Who treat the xLeaders in their community not as historical figures but as active mentors with relevant, applicable wisdom. The EO network does not expire when a member's leadership term ends. It deepens. And the members who tap that depth — who build deliberate mentoring relationships across the network — grow at a pace that no program alone can produce.

"It is time to reach out to the tenured members, the high-level xLeaders, the experts who have built something inside EO over decades. They have more to share than most members realise. A leadership mentor will always be needed — and seeking one out is one of the best moves you will ever make."

— Carlo Santoro, EO Melbourne Founding Member & Facilitator

In EO — Unlike Anywhere Else — You Are Allowed to Get It Wrong

Leading Entrepreneurs Is Hard. That Is Exactly the Point.

If you step into a leadership role in EO expecting people to follow you, you will be surprised — and that surprise is precisely the development you needed. The people in your Forum group, on your chapter board, in your regional cohort — they are founders. They have built businesses by trusting their own judgment. They have succeeded by challenging conventional wisdom. They have never been told what to do, and they are not about to start. When you lead them, they will push back, give unsolicited advice, offer opinions you did not ask for, and challenge decisions you thought were settled.

The Path — Five Stages, One Direction

Voices That Point at the Same Truth

"Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations."

— Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

"The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born."

— Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader, 1989

"The best leaders are the best followers. The leaders around us — our teams, our peers, our boards — are the ones doing the work. Our job as leaders is to create the conditions where they can do that work brilliantly."

— Warren Rustand · Past Dean of Learning, EO Global Leadership Academy · Author, The Leader Within Us

"Good leaders build products. Great leaders build cultures. Good leaders deliver results. Great leaders develop people. Good leaders are role models at work. Great leaders are role models in life."

— Adam Grant, organisational psychologist, Wharton School

And Then It Comes Home With You

You spend a year developing your voice, your facilitation, your presence, your delegation, your storytelling. You build these skills in EO — in a context where the stakes are real and the safety net is generous. And then you walk back into your own life and something has shifted. Not because you changed your business model. Because you changed as a leader. The business grows — whether to $5 million or $10 million or $500 million — because the ceiling was always your leadership capacity, and that capacity has expanded. The family life deepens because you learned to listen without agenda. The marriage strengthens because you practised being present with difficulty instead of solving it or disappearing. The children feel more connected because you now know how to ask the question that opens rather than the statement that closes.

Step Up. The World Needs You to Lead.

The invitation is already there. It is in every Forum meeting where someone needs a Moderator willing to hold the space properly. It is in every chapter that needs a President with the courage to lead a room of founders who will push back on everything. It is in every board that needs someone who will call the Strategy Summit, show up fully, and use the year to grow the chapter and grow themselves simultaneously. The invitation is everywhere. Most people wait for someone else to accept it.

Do not wait. Reach out to the xLeaders and find a mentor before the year begins. Decide what you want to develop — write the list, be honest, pick the skills that your real life actually needs. Use the EO community the way it is designed to be used: as a safe practice ground where getting it wrong is part of the curriculum, and where the peers around you are invested in your growth. Accept that the entrepreneurs in the room will fight you and advise you and judge you — and understand that every one of those interactions is the education.

And then lead. Not perfectly. Not with all the answers. Not with someone else's style or someone else's voice. Lead with your full self — your conviction, your creativity, your craziness. Lead with everything you have been building and everything you still want to become. Because the truth that 30 years of EO has taught me, in every role and every room and every Forum circle, is the simplest and most honest truth in all of leadership: