A conversation with Mark Miller, co-author of The Secret, on why character outweighs skill, what 1,200 leadership behaviors have in common, and why the best test of a leader happens when they leave the room.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
More than 700,000 copies sold. Translated into 32 languages. Now in its fourth edition. For a book built around a single question, The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do has had remarkable staying power. The question at its center is one that Debbie, the book’s protagonist, asks her mentor on the first day of their relationship: what is the secret of great leaders?
Mark Miller, who co-authored the book with Ken Blanchard while working at Chick-fil-A, has a clear theory about why that question keeps resonating. “I think leaders are looking for the secret for a couple of reasons,” he told me on the podcast. “Leaders love to get things done. We love to accomplish things, to see progress.” The word secret implies a shortcut, and Miller is quick to say he’s not offering one. What he is offering is something rarer: a framework built on what is actually, demonstrably, universally true about great leadership, regardless of industry, culture, or context.
That framework took years to develop, and it started with a room full of flip chart paper and a team of people at Chick-fil-A who were, by Miller’s own description, somewhat overwhelmed.
The Iceberg Most Leaders Ignore
Early in the book, Jeff, Debbie’s mentor, describes leadership using the image of an iceberg. About 10% sits above the waterline: skills, tactics, execution. The other 90% is below: character, heart, the kind of leader you actually are when no one is watching or when things get hard.
Most leadership books, Miller argues, spend almost all of their time on the 10%. And that’s a problem, because the 90% is where leadership either holds together or quietly falls apart.
He makes the case simply. Think of someone you’ve known in your career who had all the leadership skills and yet nobody wanted to follow them. “Why didn’t people want to follow them?” Miller asks. “Because people didn’t trust their heart. They felt like they were self-serving. They felt like they could be thrown under the bus if it would serve the leader.” Skills without character produce a leader people tolerate, not one they choose to follow.
Miller quotes Peter Drucker, who he considers one of the greatest leadership thinkers of our time, to sharpen the point: “The quality of character does not make the leader, but the absence flaws the entire process.” It’s not character or skills. It’s both. And the fourth edition of The Secret was partly born from Miller’s desire to bring those two ideas together after years of writing about them separately.
How 1,200 Behaviors Became Five
The SERVE framework at the heart of the book emerged from a multi-year research project at Chick-fil-A. It was during a period when the organization had more problems and opportunities than it had leaders ready to handle them. Miller was tasked with figuring out how to accelerate leadership development, and he assembled a team to work on it.
They read hundreds of books. They studied best practices. They catalogued everything they could find about what leaders actually do. And they wallpapered an entire room with flip chart paper trying to capture it all. The list eventually reached somewhere around 1,200 items. “Can you imagine going back to the executive committee and saying, ‘We’ve identified the 1,234 things that leaders do, and now we’re gonna build the curriculum’?” Miller said.
The breakthrough came when someone asked a different question: is there a short list? Not everything leaders do, but the things that have always been true and will remain true into the future. That question led to five fundamentals, which Miller organized around the acronym SERVE: See the future. Engage and develop others. Reinvent continuously. Value results and relationships. Embody the heart of a leader.
See the Future
The S in SERVE is the starting point, and Miller calls it first among equals. “Leadership always begins with a picture of the future,” he said. “If we’re not trying to accomplish something, achieve something, help people move from here to there, then by definition you’re actually not leading.”
But having a vision and doing something with it are two different things, and most organizations are much better at the first than the second. Miller’s research found that 72% of US leaders identify culture as the number one driver of performance. Yet many of those same leaders have a vision and values that exist entirely on a wall.
The missing ingredient is what Miller calls amplification. Once you have an aspiration, you have to make it real through repetition, storytelling, and role modeling. He recalled a conversation with a senior leader at Netflix who looked slightly baffled when asked how often he talked about culture. “Every day, of course,” the leader said. “Why wouldn’t you? It’s what’s most important.”
Storytelling is a particularly underused tool here. Miller cites research suggesting that people retain about 5% of statistics and about 63% of stories. “Are you telling stories about the men and women who are helping you pursue your aspiration?” he asked. “As you make heroes of them, you’ll see more of that behavior going forward.” His advice for leaders who feel like they’re not natural storytellers: lower the bar. Start by talking about the people around you who are doing things aligned with where you’re trying to go. The aspiration has to be clear before the stories can do their work.
Engage and Develop Others
The E in SERVE covers how leaders bring people onto their teams and what they do with them once they arrive. Miller leans on Drucker again here: when asked what the most important decision a leader makes is, Drucker’s answer was simply, “Who does what.”
Most leaders, Miller argues, dramatically underinvest in selection. They treat hiring as something to get through rather than something to get right, often with a quiet assumption underneath that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll just replace the person. But that mindset misses the full cost of such an approach, not just financially, but culturally and emotionally.
One practice Miller recommends is leaders sharing their own references with candidates, not just asking for references from them. He used to offer ten, split evenly between personal and professional, with an open offer to provide ten more. The underlying message: this is a mutual decision, and both parties deserve to make it with real information.
There’s a moment in the book where Debbie has a breakthrough. She realizes she’s spent her career trying to fix people when she should have been finding the right fit for them. The Drucker quote Miller uses to anchor it is direct: “The leader’s objective is to leverage the strengths of people and make their weaknesses become irrelevant.” When someone genuinely isn’t in the right seat, Miller’s belief is that releasing them is often the most generous thing a leader can do. “Everyone can be wildly successful,” he said, “but not necessarily on your team or even in your organization.”
Reinvent Continuously
The R in SERVE may be the one most leaders resist most. “Change is the price of progress,” Miller said. “Your current beliefs, systems, and structure are perfectly aligned for the outcomes you’re now getting. If you want different outcomes, you have to be willing to change something.”
He’s spent nearly 50 years working with leaders around the world, and he’s observed a consistent pattern: the leaders who treat change as a burden or an enemy tend to fundamentally misunderstand their own role. At the core of leadership is the willingness to move people and organizations from where they are to somewhere better. That requires change by definition.
Miller organizes reinvention into three domains: self, systems, and structure. He doesn’t expect leaders to be working on all three simultaneously, but he does believe every leader should always be reinventing something about themselves. He practices what he preaches. Despite having written 13 books, he enrolled in a 14-week writing course last year, meeting twice a week, and still works with a coach on his craft. “I’m still trying to become a writer,” he said, with no trace of false modesty.
Value Results and Relationships
The V in SERVE pushes back against one of business culture’s most stubborn assumptions: that results and relationships are competing priorities and you have to choose. Miller’s argument is that sustained high performance over time requires both, and leaders who treat it as an either/or question will eventually find out the hard way.
He refers to what Jim Collins called the genius of the “and,” the idea that embracing two things that appear to be in tension with each other releases the power resident in that tension rather than surrendering it.
For leaders who are wired primarily toward results, Miller’s coaching is direct. First, own the bias. “Quit pretending, quit denying, quit hiding,” he said. Then, compensate. He uses the analogy of glasses: wearing them doesn’t make you a lesser person. It means you identified something you couldn’t do as well naturally and found the right prescription to compensate. For a results-oriented leader, that might mean putting more relationship-oriented people in the inner circle, or it might mean something more deliberate, like writing a specific number of personal notes of appreciation into the annual development plan. “The relationship people go, ‘Oh, that sounds so disingenuous,'” Miller acknowledged. “No. You still have to mean it. But the fact that it’s now in my plan means I’m going to do more of it.”
Embody the Heart of a Leader
The final letter in SERVE brings the framework back to the 90% below the waterline. And there’s a moment in the book that illustrates it better than any framework could.
Jeff, Debbie’s mentor, is heading to a coworker’s mother’s funeral. Debbie assumes that because of his role, he’ll probably say something. He corrects her: “No. I’m going to give her a hug.” That’s it. Miller calls it the ministry of presence. You don’t have to have the right words. You just have to show up.
He told a story that landed quietly but stayed with me. His son met a woman at a party who had been on Miller’s team 30 years earlier. When she talked about what she remembered from working with him, she didn’t mention his vision or his strategy. She mentioned that he visited her when she was in the hospital.
Among the heart habits Miller outlines in the book, he identifies one as first among equals: the ability to think others first. “That is not most human beings’ first reaction,” he said. “There’s something in us that makes us want to think about our own agenda and our own priorities.” His challenge to listeners is to run a 24-hour experiment: try to add value to every person you meet. Encourage them, thank them, challenge them, acknowledge them. “It’s the trying that transforms you,” he said. “Because if I’m thinking about you and how I can add value to you, who am I thinking about? I’m thinking about you.”
Don’t Wait
The book closes with a test. The real measure of a leader, Jeff tells Debbie, is what happens when you’re not in the room. By the end of their mentoring relationship, Debbie’s team has gone from worst to first without her. The plaque she receives quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Everyone can be great because everyone can serve.”
Miller’s parting message to anyone listening is uncomplicated and urgent. “Don’t wait on a new role. Don’t wait on a new assignment. Don’t wait on better circumstances. Don’t wait on more resources. Bloom where you’re planted.” The conditions will never be perfect. The team will never be ideal. The circumstances will always provide a reason to delay. But leaders who wait for perfect conditions, Miller says, tend to find that someone else ends up leading in the space they left open.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.