When Discovery acquired Warner Bros. and formed Warner Bros. Discovery, the new company did what new companies do: it tried to define its culture. Someone at the C-level drafted a set of leadership principles that looked generally good on paper, similar to principles I’d seen at Amazon and even in the Army. Clear, well-structured, and aspirational in the right ways.
But principles are style-layer artifacts. They describe what leaders should do. They say nothing about what leaders need to radiate in order to enable the best outcomes. And that energy, what leaders put out into the world, is where cultures really take shape.
In the months and years that followed the acquisition, I watched my peer VPs implement the stated leadership principles in completely different ways. I sat through some meetings where the leaders brought the principles to life in the room, and many others where they were simply decorations on the wall.
Two specific meetings stay with me years later, both run by VPs who led large technical organizations. If asked, both VPs would describe their leadership the same way: collaborative, empowering, results-oriented. Both were operating under the same published principles.
But their meeting rooms felt completely different.
The first VP asked good questions, listened to the answers, and let the team arrive at decisions together. The pace was unhurried, and people leaned in to the discussion. When someone disagreed, the room absorbed it without tension. You left the meeting feeling like you’d been part of something that mattered.
The second VP also asked questions, listened, and let the team weigh in, but there was an undercurrent. A tightness. The questions all felt like tests, and the listening felt like an evaluation. When someone disagreed, there was a tiny pause... just long enough for the room to register that the disagreement had been noted, and then the discussion moved on. People contributed, but carefully. You left the meeting feeling like you’d been managed.
Same principles. Same style description. Entirely different experience.
I once heard a VP say, in front of peers and in reference to the leadership principles, “I know that’s what’s written down, but we have to be practical and get the work done.” That sentence tells you everything about the gap between style and energy. The principles were acknowledged, but the energy dismissed them. And everyone in the room understood which one was the real determining factor for the culture.
What a leader radiates as they approach the work is what I’ve come to think of as leadership energy, and I believe it’s the most undertrained dimension of leadership development today.
Most of what we teach leaders falls into the category of “style”—how to delegate, how to coach, how to give feedback, how to run a meeting, etc. When to be directive and when to be participative, you get the point. These are behavioral patterns, and they matter. They are the visible layer.
Beneath them, however, is something harder to name and harder to change: the emotional and relational presence you bring into a room. The pace at which you operate, the way you hold tension, the quality of your attention. Whether people feel expanded or contracted in your presence.
That’s energy, and it shapes the experience of your leadership far more than your chosen methodology does.
The key difference is that you can borrow a style. You can read about servant leadership on a flight and try it in your next one-on-one, or learn coaching frameworks and apply them in skip-levels. Style is transferable.
But you can’t fake energy for long. A leader who adopts a coaching style but carries anxious energy will ask questions that feel like interrogation. A leader who practices servant leadership but carries controlling energy will create dependence rather than empowerment. The style says one thing, but the energy says another. And people always, always believe the energy.
I’ve been developing a framework around this idea, and I want to share the core of it here. It isn’t a finished system, but it is a way of thinking that I’ve found useful for myself and the leaders I coach.
The framework starts with a distinction that sounds simple but has real implications: leadership operates on three layers, not one.
The first layer is values. This is why you lead. Your sense of purpose, your ethical commitments, and the things you’d protect even at personal cost. Values are deep and relatively stable. They’re the foundation.
The second layer is energy. This is how you show up. Your natural tempo, your emotional register, and the way you hold space under pressure. Energy is rooted in temperament and self-regulation. It can be developed, but it can’t be manufactured or pretended. It’s the layer that people experience most viscerally.
The third layer is style. This is what you do. The behavioral patterns, decision-making approaches, and communication methods you use to translate your values and energy into action. Style is the most visible layer and also the most adaptable.
Most leadership development lives entirely at the style layer. It almost always teaches people what to do differently, but it rarely helps them understand the way they make people feel or why the same technique works beautifully for one leader and falls flat for another.
The answer, almost always, is energy.
To make this concrete, I’ve identified ten energy archetypes that describe the different ways leaders naturally show up. These aren’t personality types, and they’re not fixed categories. They’re patterns of presence, each with its own strengths and its own shadow.
I won’t walk through all ten here. But three of them illustrate the concept well enough to be useful.
The Architect leads through structured clarity. Their energy is systematic, deliberate, and oriented toward building things that last. In a meeting, the Architect is the one who organizes the chaos into a framework before the group can move forward. They bring calm to ambiguity by imposing order on it.
The Architect’s strength is that they create systems people can rely on. Their shadow is rigidity. When the Architect’s energy goes unchecked, structure becomes control. Process becomes the point rather than the means, and the team starts optimizing for the system rather than the outcome.
The Anchor leads through steady, grounding presence. Their energy is calm, consistent, and deeply supportive. The Anchor is the leader people seek out when things get chaotic, not because they have the answers, but because their presence makes the problem feel manageable.
The Anchor’s strength is trust. Teams feel safe around them. Their shadow is passivity. When the Anchor’s energy goes unchecked, steadiness becomes inertia. The team feels supported but not challenged. Conflict gets absorbed rather than addressed. The Anchor holds the space so well that nothing inside it moves.
The Catalyst leads through adaptive momentum. Their energy is change-oriented, forward-leaning, and responsive to the environment. The Catalyst is the leader who senses when a team is stuck and introduces just enough disruption to get things moving again.
The Catalyst’s strength is that they keep organizations from stagnating. Their shadow is inconsistency. When the Catalyst’s energy goes unchecked, adaptability becomes instability. The team never feels settled. Direction shifts before the previous direction has been fully explored. People begin to wonder if there’s a steady hand on the wheel at all.
If you recognized yourself in one of those descriptions, that recognition is the point.
Most leaders, when they encounter these archetypes, have an immediate felt sense of which one fits. Not because someone told them, but because they’ve been living it. They know what their energy feels like from the inside. What they often lack is language for it, and awareness of how it lands on others.
That’s the gap this framework is designed to address.
Because here’s what I’ve observed over thirty years of leading and coaching: the leaders who struggle most are not the ones with the wrong style; they’re the ones whose energy is misaligned with their context, or whose energy is operating in its shadow without their awareness.
A natural Architect leading a team through a period of rapid experimentation will create friction, not because their instincts are wrong, but because their energy is pulling toward order in a moment that requires tolerance for mess. A natural Catalyst leading a team that needs stability and predictability will generate anxiety, not because they’re incompetent, but because their energy is introducing disruption where the team needs grounding.
Neither leader needs to abandon their energy. But both need to see it clearly enough to regulate it. They need to know when their natural posture is serving the moment and when it’s working against it.
This is where the three-layer model matters most.
If you change style without adjusting energy, you get friction. The words say “coaching” but the presence says “evaluation.” The principles say “collaborative” but the energy in the room says “I’ve already decided.” Or, as that VP at WBD put it plainly: I know that’s what’s written down, but we have to be practical. The style was a mask, and the energy never changed at all.
If you manage energy without clarity of values, you drift. You become adaptable but unprincipled—smooth but empty. People feel comfortable around you, but don’t know what you stand for.
If you align all three—values, energy, style—you get presence. This is the kind of leadership that people remember not because of what was said, but because of what it felt like to be in the room.
That level of alignment is rare because it requires a self-awareness that most leadership development never cultivates. We spend years teaching leaders what to do and almost no time helping them understand what they radiate.
I want to be honest about where this framework stands. It’s a work in progress. The ten archetypes need further refinement. The relationships between energy and style need more mapping. The practical applications for coaching and team development are still emerging.
But the core distinction, that energy and style are different layers and that energy is the more powerful of the two, is one I’m confident in. I’ve seen it explain dynamics that traditional leadership frameworks can’t account for. I’ve watched leaders who were “doing everything right” fail because their energy was undermining their behavior. And I’ve watched leaders with imperfect technique succeed because their energy created trust that compensated for tactical gaps.
Style is what you do; energy is what people feel, and when the two are misaligned, people always go with what they are feeling.
The question I’d leave with you:
If you set aside what you’ve been trained to do as a leader, and sat instead with how your presence actually lands on others... what would you discover?
And would your team’s description of your energy match the style you think you’re practicing?
