It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader, say the authors. The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization—and to let those qualities shine. The authors’ study of leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership that consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, "visioning," and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. It’s critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths.

It’s a shocking statistic: In about 85% of companies, employee morale declines sharply after just the first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. The fault, according to the authors, who surveyed about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies, lies squarely with management, which often unwittingly demotivates employees and diminishes, if not outright destroys, their enthusiasm. The first step is to understand the three sets of goals that a majority of workers seek from their work—equity, achievement, and camaraderie—and then work to satisfy all three. Read about eight practices, spanning these goals, that can help individual managers to have a profound influence on employee motivation.