How I finally made sense of leadership: the VAA-framework

Leadership is one of the most talked-about topics in management literature. Thousands of books, articles, and blog posts offer advice on how leaders can improve their effectiveness. Reading them can be inspiring, insightful—and sometimes even transformative.

But after more than 25 years of practicing leadership, I’ve often found myself puzzled. Not because the ideas are wrong, but because they rarely help with the very real, often messy challenges leaders face every day.

Take the concept of the authentic leader as described by Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones in their excellent book Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? It’s convincing and inspiring. But how does it help when my actual problem is figuring out how to delegate more so I can reduce my stress levels?

Or take The Journey of Leadership by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan. Their framework of “leading from the inside out” is elegant and based on extensive conversations with CEOs across the globe. But it offers little help when I’m knee-deep in a major transformation and looking for practical ways to shift the culture.

Even more confusing: how do all these different concepts relate to each other? What would Herminia Ibarra, author of Working Identity, say about Kim Scott’s Radical Candor? Both are excellent books—but are they connected? Do I have to choose one and ignore the other? Clearly not. But how do I integrate them?

What’s missing is a simple, intuitive structure—a framework that helps leaders make sense of all these perspectives. A way to organize the many inputs we get from reading, reflecting, and discussing leadership, and to connect them with the practical challenges we face. A model that shows which part of leadership a particular idea addresses—and which it doesn’t.

Since I couldn’t find such a framework, I decided to create one myself. I call it the VAA Framework of Leadership. It’s still a work in progress—and maybe it always will be. But it has helped me enough in my own leadership journey that I feel ready to share it.

I welcome feedback, critique, and alternative models. I promise to consider them all. But for now, this is the framework I’m using. Here it is.

The key to making sense of the many valuable contributions to the field of leadership is to distinguish between three different levels—three distinct aspects of leadership.

The first level is the conceptual level. This is where we discuss what leadership actually is. How do we define it? What distinguishes good leadership from bad? What are the different styles, and how do they differ? Most books on leadership operate at this level. I call it the VISION level. Admittedly, vision may not be the perfect term—but I haven’t found a better one. It captures the idea that people hold different ideas—different “visions”—of what leadership is or should be. The key question for any leader from my perspective is how to become a transformational leader (I will write more about this at a later point).

The second level is the practical level. Leadership is not just theory—it’s also a craft. It’s about what leaders actually do. While it may never be an exact science, there is a fairly well-established set of best practices: how to give and receive feedback, how to delegate, how to run an effective meeting and many more.Few books focus on this, perhaps because it feels too basic or operational. But in my experience, even highly experienced leaders benefit from going back to these fundamentals. In fact, many of my coaching sessions begin here. That’s not surprising—after all, even elite athletes practice the basics of their discipline every single day. I call this the ACTION level of leadership.

The third level is the personal level. Leadership is also an emotional and psychological journey. It’s challenging, often intense, and at times deeply personal. It forces us to confront fears, insecurities, and blind spots. It stretches us. For me, this has always been the most demanding—and also the most rewarding—dimension of leadership: the opportunity to grow, to learn about oneself, and to keep evolving as a human being. I call this the AUTHENTICITY level.

So there it is: the VAA Framework of Leadership—VISION, ACTION, AUTHENTICITY.

It’s deliberately simple, but it’s helped me make sense of countless conversations about leadership.

Books often explore different visions of leadership—and that’s valuable. There’s inspiration to be found in competing philosophies, and there’s rarely a single right answer. But when I sit down with a CEO trying to align with their board, or with a founder struggling to bring their team along, we’re not talking about philosophy—we’re talking about action. The everyday craft of leadership.

And when a leader opens up about the anxiety before a tough conversation or the discomfort of showing vulnerability—that’s not about strategy or execution. That’s authenticity. The ability to show up as a whole person. To lead without hiding.

Going forward, I’ll explore each of these layers more deeply.  Leadership isn’t just an idea. It’s a practice. And the better we get at all three—the clearer our vision, the bolder our action, and the deeper our authenticity—the more real our leadership becomes.