I’m a huge fan of the Dune books and movies. Recently during a rewatch of the first film, a line from Duke Leto Atreides struck me as particularly personal.
Just before Leto and his son Paul leave their home planet of Caladan for Arrakis, the desert planet that harbors spice, the universe’s most valuable resource, he describes his path to leadership.
“A great man doesn’t seek to lead. He’s called to it. And he answers…I found my own way to it. Maybe you’ll find yours.”
This encapsulates much of my own learned experience. When I was first asked to take on a leadership role, I resisted. I was comfortable living in my own world, being an individual contributor and staying (mostly) inside my swim lanes. It wasn’t until a respected leader approached me with a fairly basic question. “Why wouldn’t you pursue this opportunity?” It forced me to pause and reflect.
I had always thought of myself as a leader, having sat in multiple leadership positions throughout my life – captains of sports teams, manager of work projects, volunteer roles – these were great stepping stones to eventually leading people in their professional careers. But nothing can prepare you for when you actually step into the arena of people management.
I don’t mean to overly romanticize the role of a manager. Plenty of people who are less than competent have managed people over the history of our modern working era. You’ve probably encountered some of these folks throughout your professional journey. I know I have.
But I’ve also been blessed with a string of great managers in recent years. And the lessons I learned from them have stuck. This post outlines the main ones every leader should know, or experience, at some point in their leadership arc.
1.Get the facts.
Andy Grove writes about this in High Output Management — middle managers are uniquely positioned to act as information hubs, but only if they actually do the work of gathering information rather than reacting to whoever spoke last or loudest. You can’t make good decisions without a complete picture, and rarely is one person’s version of events the whole truth. The truth generally resides somewhere in the messy middle.
Think of it like the Atreides arriving on Arrakis. Leto doesn’t take the Harkonnens’ word for the state of spice production, nor does he trust the Emperor’s framing of the gift. He sends his people out. He asks questions. He reads the terrain for himself. That instinct — to verify, to synthesize, to see the full picture before acting — is the difference between a leader and a reactor.
Jocko Willink describes it similarly in The Dichotomy of Leadership: you need to see the battlefield from above, not just the patch of ground in front of you. Whether it’s a comp dispute, a workload imbalance, or something touching someone’s personal life, your job is to gather, not guess. Even then, you’ll still make mistakes — but at least they’ll be grounded in something real.
A great leader and mentor of mine has burned this into my head when times get tough, and signals are coming in from all directions. “Get the facts, Tim.” You should too.
2. Managing is the job. Doing the job of your team is not.
This is one of the hardest transitions for anyone moving from individual contributor to leader. The skills that got you promoted — the deep expertise, the ability to execute, the instinct to just fix the thing yourself — are precisely the skills you have to learn to set aside.
In Dune, Paul is a gifted fighter, strategist, and thinker. But Leto doesn’t ask him to win every battle personally. He’s preparing Paul to lead others who will. The Atreides house doesn’t rise on the strength of one person’s ability to do everything — it rises on the quality of the people Leto has cultivated around him, and his ability to put them in positions to succeed.
The same principle applies in management. If you’re doing the work instead of enabling your team to do it, you don’t scale — and neither do they. You become a bottleneck dressed up as a contributor, and you never develop the higher-order decision-making muscles that real leadership demands. The shift from “super-doer” to leader isn’t just a change in job description. It’s a change in identity.
Tony Faddell said it best in his book, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. “Managing is the job. And managing is hard.”
3. Stay aligned with your peer leaders.
No leader operates alone. In any organization, you’re constantly navigating relationships with peers who have their own teams, their own priorities, and their own blind spots. You won’t always agree. That’s fine — in fact, productive disagreement among peers often produces better outcomes than easy consensus. But you have to do the work of alignment, and you have to do it proactively. A little saying of mine I’ve come to believe is so paramount in partnership development — friction moves you forward.
The Fremen in Dune understand this. Stilgar doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with every faction leader, but the desert demands cooperation. You don’t let a dispute fester when survival depends on coordinated action. The same logic applies in an organization — the stakes may be lower than surviving Arrakis, but the cost of misalignment quietly compounds: mixed messages to teams, duplicated work, missed opportunities, and a slow erosion of trust.
Don’t let things fester in Slack or email. Pick up the phone. Find the middle ground, even if the seesaw ends up a little imbalanced. The leaders who earn the most respect aren’t the ones who win every disagreement — they’re the ones who keep the organization moving forward together.
I never imagined management to be as hard as it is — but it is also incredibly rewarding when you watch your team win and elevate themselves before your eyes. It gets easier over time, but there’s no room for complacency either.
Leto tells Paul he found his own way to leadership. That’s the thing about this work: no two paths look alike. The frameworks and lessons above can orient you, but you’ll still have to navigate the rugged terrain yourself — the hard conversations, the judgment calls made with incomplete information, the moments where you have to choose between what’s easy and what’s right.
That’s how you find your way to it.
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