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I Studied ELITE Performers For 5+ Years. Here's What I Found... | Dr. Don Barden

  • 8 hours ago
  • 10 min read


What separates elite leaders from everyone else? For Dr. Don Barden, the question started as an observation. After years working with Wall Street-based firms and traveling internationally on complex deals, he began noticing that many of the highest-performing leaders seemed to operate in remarkably similar ways. The industries changed. The countries and cultures changed. The people often had no connection to one another. But the patterns kept showing up.

In a recent episode of The Leadership Crucible Podcast, Chief Randy Bruegman sat down with Dr. Barden to discuss what eventually became a five-year research study into elite performance. Their conversation explores the habits Barden found among high-performing leaders, the progression from servant leadership to what he calls steward leadership, the importance of employee empowerment, his more recent research on women in leadership, and why he believes the next era of leadership will place a greater premium on collaboration than competition.

Barden’s work is ultimately less interested in identifying a list of habits than in understanding why those habits produce results. As he told Bruegman, “It’s more important for you to understand something than it is for you to know something.” That distinction became central to his research. Knowing what successful leaders do may provide a model to imitate. Understanding why it works gives leaders something they can actually apply.

Elite Performance Follows a Pattern

Dr. Barden spent 25 years working for Wall Street and Wall Street-based firms, often on complicated international transactions. His work took him around the world and put him in rooms with senior leaders across a wide range of industries. Over time, he began seeing the same behaviors repeated among people he considered elite performers.

It became difficult to dismiss as coincidence. Barden remembers going to his CEO and telling him there appeared to be a “secret sauce” behind the way these leaders approached leadership, sales, relationships, and organizational performance. His CEO agreed that it was worth investigating and funded the research that eventually became The Perfect Plan.

The study lasted approximately five years and followed a formal research process. Barden wanted more than anecdotal observations or another collection of leadership advice. He wanted to put structure around what he had been seeing and understand why those patterns appeared so consistently across industries and cultures.

One of the clearest patterns was gratitude. The leaders Dr. Barden studied tended to be genuinely present with people. They made eye contact, listened carefully, and expressed appreciation in a way that felt substantive rather than transactional. From there, they communicated with unusual clarity. Instead of overwhelming people with dozens of ideas or priorities, they generally kept the conversation focused on three things or fewer.

The third part of the pattern was practical: they tried to make life easier for the people they worked with. That observation led Barden to challenge a familiar phrase in business. Rather than pursuing a “win-win,” he argues that leaders should pursue what he calls “fair-fair.” If an agreement is genuinely fair to both sides, built on gratitude, clear communication, and a desire to create value for one another, the relationship has a stronger foundation for the long term.

The Research Eventually Became About Service

One of the most important findings emerged only after Barden believed the original research was nearly finished. His CEO challenged him over a small gap in the study, which forced Barden to go back and question an assumption he had made about the people he was studying.

He had identified them according to their professions. A dairy farmer was a dairy farmer. A tortilla manufacturer was a tortilla manufacturer. An executive was an executive. From a scientific standpoint, however, Barden realized he had never actually asked them how they identified their own work.

When he went back and asked, the answers surprised him. Again and again, these leaders described their work primarily in terms of service. They talked about serving customers, employees, families and communities. The product or industry often came afterward.

That discovery changed Barden’s understanding of the entire project. What initially looked like a study of elite performance was also a study of servant leadership. The tools and behaviors mattered, but underneath them was a consistent orientation toward other people.

That does not mean the leaders were passive. Barden is careful to separate genuine servant leadership from the softer caricature the term sometimes receives. The leaders he studied were often highly driven, demanding and successful. Their distinction was not a lack of ambition. It was what their ambition was directed toward.

From Servant Leadership to Steward Leadership

Bruegman and Barden spent part of the conversation discussing Robert Greenleaf’s work on servant leadership, which Bruegman described as decades ahead of its time. Barden agrees, but believes the concept has continued to evolve.

“Servant leadership is not the pinnacle anymore,” he said. “It’s actually steward leadership.”

Barden summarizes the distinction with a simple phrase: all stewards are servants, but not all servants are stewards. A servant leader focuses on serving the people around them. A steward goes a step further by recognizing that the organization, position or responsibility they have been given is temporary. Eventually, someone else will carry it.

That changes the way a leader views succession and development. A steward is not merely trying to perform well while occupying the position. The leader is trying to strengthen the organization, develop the people inside it and prepare someone else to carry the work forward.

“Great leaders make great leaders,” Barden said.

That idea challenges one of the more persistent temptations in leadership: becoming indispensable. A steward does not measure success by how dependent an organization becomes on one person. The better measure may be whether the people who come next are equipped to take the organization further.

Stop Solving Every Problem for Your People

Barden’s more recent research offers an especially practical lesson for leaders who built their careers by being good problem-solvers. When an employee brings a problem to a leader, the instinct is often to fix it. Barden argues that this response can unintentionally weaken the very people leaders are supposed to develop.

In discussing his research, he said that 94 percent of people who bring a leader a problem already know how to solve it. When the leader immediately takes over, the employee can hear a different message than the one intended: you brought me the problem because I am more capable of solving it than you are.

Repeated often enough, that becomes an organizational habit. Employees learn to move problems upward while senior leaders spend more and more of their time resolving issues that people closer to the work may have been capable of handling themselves.

Barden observed a different pattern among many of the female leaders in his research. They tended first to acknowledge the problem without attaching it to the person, then show empathy toward the employee dealing with it. Only after that would they ask a deceptively simple question: “What would you do?”

Most of the time, Barden said, the employee had an answer. The leader could then respond, “Great, go do it.”

The significance is larger than one problem being solved. The employee leaves with responsibility and authority instead of dependency. The leader has communicated that the person is seen, heard, understood and trusted. Over time, that can change the way an entire organization functions.

Empowered People Give Leaders Room to Lead

The organizational payoff of empowerment is easy to overlook. When every difficult decision rises to the top, leaders can become trapped in reaction mode. Their days fill with troubleshooting, approvals and problems that other people might be capable of handling.

That leaves less time for the work only senior leaders can do: thinking strategically, developing relationships, anticipating what is coming, improving the organization and creating new opportunities.

Barden argues that empowered employees gradually change that equation. Once people have been trusted to solve problems, they become more likely to handle the next one without escalating it. Instead of bringing the leader the same kind of issue again, they may simply report that the problem occurred and has already been addressed.

That creates capacity throughout the organization. Employees grow more confident, decision-making moves closer to the work, and the leader gets back the time necessary to actually lead.

For Barden, this is closely connected to retention and performance. People respond differently when they feel valued, and organizations perform differently when capable employees have permission to act.

What Women in Leadership May Be Teaching Organizations

Barden’s more recent study, Here Come the Girls, grew out of another pattern he began noticing over several decades: more women were moving into senior leadership positions, and many of the women-led organizations he encountered were producing impressive results.

Rather than simply observing the demographic change, Barden wanted to understand what was happening inside those organizations. His research focused on senior leaders, business owners and government officials, with particular attention to the leadership behaviors that seemed to contribute to performance and retention.

What interested him most was not the conclusion that women could lead effectively. His larger question was whether the behaviors producing those results could be identified and taught.

“It’s not a girl thing,” Barden said. “It’s just something girls do.”

His point is that the leadership practices he observed are transferable. Men can learn them too. Among the recurring themes were empathy, empowerment, collaboration and the ability to create an environment where people feel seen, heard and understood.

For Barden, that last point is especially important. Leadership practices that were once dismissed as “soft skills” can have very hard organizational consequences. When people feel trusted and valued, they stay longer, solve more problems themselves and contribute more fully to the organization.

Collaboration Is Beginning to Challenge Competition

Another distinction Barden sees in his research is a stronger inclination toward collaboration. He believes many leaders, particularly women in senior roles, are more interested in finding ways for organizations to grow together than simply acquiring competitors or treating every market relationship as a contest.

He is not arguing that competition has no role in an economy. Competition creates pressure, drives innovation and helps organizations improve. But he believes leaders can become too preoccupied with beating other people when the available opportunity is often much larger than any one organization can capture.

The more interesting question becomes how leaders might create something together that neither could create alone.

That mindset fits naturally with stewardship. If leadership is primarily about protecting status, competition becomes threatening. If leadership is about creating value, developing people and leaving something stronger behind, collaboration becomes an opportunity.

Barden believes that shift will become increasingly important in the years ahead. The leaders who stand out may not be the ones most obsessed with winning against everyone else, but those most capable of building relationships that allow multiple people and organizations to grow.

Experience Is Only Valuable If Leaders Share It

Near the end of the episode, Bruegman returned to one of the Leadership Crucible Foundation’s central ideas: experience is a great teacher only if it is shared. Leaders accumulate lessons through successes, failures, wrong turns and difficult seasons, but those lessons have limited value if they remain locked inside one person.

Dr. Barden agreed. In his research, he identified three beliefs that consistently appeared among elite leaders. They tended to be more creative than competitive, they worked to exceed expectations, and they gave forward without expecting something in return.

That willingness to give forward is central to Barden’s concept of stewardship. Most experienced leaders can identify people who helped them along the way. Someone shared advice, provided an opportunity, warned them about a mistake or helped them see something they could not yet see for themselves. Eventually, leadership creates the responsibility to do that for someone else.

The goal is not to give the next generation a rigid formula for avoiding every mistake. It is to give them enough wisdom to move through their own leadership journey with greater clarity.

Barden summed up that process with a phrase he frequently shares with leaders: “Slow is steady. Steady is fast.” Experience takes time, but wisdom shared well can help another person travel that road more effectively.

Elite Leadership Is Ultimately About What Leaders Give Away

For all of the research, data and organizational theory discussed during the conversation, Barden’s picture of elite leadership ultimately returns to a relatively simple set of ideas: gratitude, clarity, service, empathy, empowerment, collaboration and stewardship.

The strongest leaders do not need to personally solve every problem. They build people who can solve problems. They do not treat knowledge as something to protect. They share what they have learned. They do not view leadership as permanent possession of a position. They understand that they have been given responsibility for a period of time and will eventually hand it to someone else.

That may be one of the clearest differences between leadership that produces short-term results and leadership that leaves a lasting impact.

Elite performance is not simply about how much a leader can accomplish. It is also about how many people become more capable because that leader was there.

Key Leadership Lessons from Dr. Don Barden

  • Elite performance follows recognizable patterns. Barden’s research consistently found gratitude, clear communication and a desire to create value for others among high-performing leaders.

  • Understanding is more valuable than imitation. Knowing what successful leaders do is useful, but understanding why it works allows leaders to apply those principles in different situations.

  • Steward leadership looks beyond the current leader. Great leaders recognize that their responsibility is temporary and intentionally prepare people who can carry the organization forward.

  • Leaders should resist solving every problem themselves. Asking employees what they would do can create ownership, develop judgment and prevent unnecessary dependence on senior leadership.

  • People perform differently when they feel valued. Employees who feel seen, heard, understood and trusted are more likely to take responsibility and contribute at a higher level.

  • Collaboration can create opportunities competition cannot. Strong leaders do not have to view every other person or organization as something to defeat.

  • Experience matters most when it is passed forward. The lessons leaders earn through difficult seasons become more valuable when they help someone else move forward with greater wisdom.


LINKS & RESOURCES:

- Dr. Don Barden | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/donwbarden/)

- Dr. Don Barden | Web (https://donbarden.com/)


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