Leaders must define reality is a maxim drawn from Max DePree's Leadership Is an Art, which opens by placing the accurate naming of an organization's situation ahead of every other duty of leadership.
"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." – Max DePree, Former CEO of Herman Miller
DePree led the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller and published Leadership Is an Art in 1989; it has since sold more than 800,000 copies. As printed, the passage runs "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor" — the shorter form above is the paraphrase that circulates most widely, and the omitted word, debtor, is the one that carries DePree's argument furthest.
The claim is an ordering claim. Vision, strategy, and motivation all presuppose an agreed account of where the organization actually stands, and a leader who skips that step is optimizing against a fiction that everyone else can already see through. Defining reality is therefore not a communications exercise but the act that makes the rest of the work legible — and it is unglamorous, because the reality most in need of definition is usually the one nobody wants stated aloud. The middle clause situates the maxim within servant leadership, the tradition named by Robert K. Greenleaf in his 1970 essay "The Servant as Leader," in which authority is held as an obligation owed rather than a position occupied. 📝How CEOs Define Reality treats the same first move as the opening step of an executive-coaching sequence.
I picked this up from 📝Teddy Tannenbaum's podcast, episode seven.