While I appreciate the effort that went into this post, it strikes me as mostly the same old bromides for leadership. Most leaders I deal with know all of these things, but few do them and when they do, not much actually changes. For example, be a great "delegator" only works if the leader has built a strong sense of direction in the organization and trusts that people are good at their jobs. Otherwise, delegation is bogus and doesn’t work.

In over 15 years of working with organizational performance improvement, we have been able to develop and implement leadership programs that actually develop leaders because they are based on leadership in the messy real world conditions of uncertainty, limited information, conflicting agendas, insufficient resources and many other challenges. The core of these leadership programs is what we call the 4 "positives:"

- Positive deviance -- leverage your best people
- Positive images -- focus on the greater purpose the organization is trying to achieve
- Positive practice -- consciously take the time to practice doing everything in the organization right the first time
- Positive reflection -- take the time to think about what happened when you tried to do something right the first time

If a leader does just these 4 things, she will do everything on listed in the post and a lot more, and it will take much less time.