Leadership becomes more demanding as responsibility expands. The problems get more complex, the number of stakeholders grows, and leaders start shaping the conditions in which other people are expected to perform. In other words, there are more elements along the path; some of them are necessary and helpful, and others get in the way.
Reinforce Your Foundation, the first of the LEAP Six Pillars of Leadership, asks leaders to understand themselves: their values, purpose, instincts, and the behaviors that flow from them. Understand the Landscape, the second pillar, turns that attention outward, asking leaders to understand the people, culture, systems, and dynamics around them. Clear the Path, the third pillar, is where that understanding starts translating into action.
Clearing the path refers to a leader’s responsibility to identify and remove the barriers that prevent people and organizations from moving forward. Those barriers can take many forms, from bureaucracy and competing priorities to unresolved conflict, unclear communication, fear, and relationships that have become strained.
Much of this work is naturally focused on others. Leaders create clarity, secure resources, resolve obstacles, and build conditions that allow their teams to succeed. Yet the leaders who teach and mentor through our LEAP programs reveal another dimension of the practice: they have learned to examine the obstacles they may be carrying or creating themselves.
For example, assumptions can interfere with listening; fear of the unknown and uncomfortable can delay a necessary conversation; a desire to protect the team can limit their ownership and growth; or leader’s urgency can make their communication less effective. Clearing the path requires leaders to look at the system around them while continuing the internal work that began with Pillar 1.
Kellyn Smith Kenny, Danielle Lee, Najoh Tita-Reid, Kory Marchisotto, and Nadine Dietz share their experiences clearing the path, which underscore how expansive and varied that work can be.
Leaders spend an enormous amount of time thinking about their priorities, which can make those priorities feel much more obvious than they are to everyone else. Kellyn Smith Kenny, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at AT&T, offers a useful reminder: your top priority isn’t necessarily everyone else’s, be it the CEO, your leadership peers, or your direct reports.
A leader may have spent months developing a strategy or working through a transformation before introducing it to the broader organization. The people hearing it are encountering that thinking much later, often alongside a long list of responsibilities and competing messages. Kellyn’s emphasis on transparent, repeated communication recognizes that people need time and repetition to understand a change, make sense of what it means for them, and begin acting differently.
This makes communication itself an important form of path-clearing. Ambiguity slows decisions, and competing interpretations of a strategy create friction across an organization. Leaders can reduce that friction by creating a consistent drumbeat around the priorities that matter most and resisting the urge to move on simply because the message has become familiar to them.
Kellyn’s perspective also asks leaders to examine their own assumptions about communication. The gap between saying something and creating shared understanding can be significant, and leaders have a responsibility to close it.
Learn more from Kellyn Smith Kenny on her 3-5-7-9 approach to clear communication, a Virtuosi League community favorite.
Some barriers persist because the conversation required to address them feels difficult. Danielle Lee, whose leadership experience includes executive roles at Warner Music Group and the NBA, approaches courage as a leadership practice that allows teams to confront issues around expectations, performance, behavior, and relationships before those issues grow.
Unresolved tension has a way of spreading. A conversation delayed can create uncertainty for one person, frustration for another, and eventually a larger problem for the team. Leaders help clear the path when they are willing to surface what they observe people experiencing and create the conditions for a candid conversation about it.
Doing that well requires self-awareness. A leader may hesitate because they are concerned about damaging a relationship, being disliked, saying the wrong thing, or discovering that their own behavior contributed to the problem. Examining those reactions without judgement, but with curiosity becomes part of the leadership work. Unchecked reactivity impacts whether important issues get addressed.
Danielle’s perspective connects courage with care. She acknowledges feeling scared in these moments to take these steps. But, as Danielle advises: do it scared. Clear communication about difficult subjects gives people information they can use, while thoughtful listening creates space for perspectives the leader may not yet understand. The conversation itself can become the mechanism that allows both the relationship and the work to move forward.
Read more about Danielle Lee and her use of courage to clear the path for herself and others.
Najoh Tita-Reid, former Global Chief Growth Officer at Mars Petcare, describes an evolution in how she thought about responsibility for her teams. Earlier in her career, she associated strong leadership with carrying everyone else's responsibilities and projecting strength. Feedback helped her see that taking too much onto herself could limit the opportunities other people had to develop their own capacity. Furthermore, that doesn't leave time for the leader to continue developing themselves.
Her leadership philosophy evolved into a powerful take on clearing the path: make it safe for the team to be great. Create conditions for vulnerability, shared accountability, honest conversations about barriers, and enough room for people to take thoughtful risks. Najoh began acknowledging what she did not know, asking more questions, coaching in real time, and creating a mutual sense of responsibility for the work.
Her experience adds important nuance to the idea of clearing obstacles. Teams need leaders who can remove unnecessary friction while preserving the challenges through which people develop judgment, confidence, and ownership.
For leaders, that can require an internal shift, too. Stepping back, sharing responsibility, and allowing someone else to struggle productively all demand trust in the team and comfort with a degree of uncertainty. Sometimes creating a clearer path means giving other people more room to navigate it themselves.
Hear more from Najoh Tita-Reid on the emotional safety required for great work and great teams.
Kory Marchisotto, President of e.l.f. Brands, approaches leadership through the idea of radical generosity. This philosophy asks leaders to create conditions that help other people move faster and farther, which begins with understanding what may be slowing them down.
Those obstacles are often less visible than a broken process or an unnecessary approval in the chain. Confusion, hesitation, self-doubt, lack of trust, and insufficient clarity all consume energy that might otherwise go toward the work. A leader who listens carefully can begin to understand which form of support will make the greatest difference.
Kory’s approach expresses that generosity in several ways. Clarity helps people understand what they are doing and why it matters. Belief can provide confidence at moments when someone’s own confidence wavers. Trust gives people room to rise to a challenge. Time and attention allow leaders to hear what is being said while noticing what may remain beneath the surface.
This broadens the leader’s responsibility for clearing the path. Creating the conditions for performance requires attention to both organizational systems and human experience. Leaders need to understand what people require to move forward and then decide where their involvement will create the most useful runway.
Dig deeper into the four ways in which Kory Marchisotto approaches this concept of generosity.
Virtuosi League Cofounder and CEO Nadine Dietz sees clearing the path as making space. Much of Nadine’s work as a leader herself is anticipating needs of other C-suite leaders, and making space for them to talk about issues just like these and more. Leaders don’t develop in a vacuum, and hearing different perspectives from peers is an essential component of that practice.
Read more from Nadine Dietz on making space for leaders to thrive.
Taken together, these perspectives reveal a common thread. Kellyn asks leaders to examine whether their communication has actually created understanding. Danielle asks them to work through the discomfort that can keep an important conversation from happening. Najoh challenges the instinct to carry too much for the team. Kory encourages leaders to listen closely enough to recognize the less visible barriers holding people back. Nadine elevates the need for safe spaces to develop self-awareness and mastery of self.
Each begins with a challenge in the environment and turns the leader’s attention back inward. That connection is essential to the sequence of the LEAP Six Pillars of Leadership.
A leader who has reinforced their foundation has greater awareness of the values, strengths, fears, and tendencies they bring into the room. A leader who understands the landscape has developed the situational awareness to see what is shaping the people and organization around them. Clearing the path draws on both capabilities, helping leaders recognize what is impeding progress and understand their own role in addressing it.
That may call for changing a process, clarifying a priority, resolving a conflict, or securing a resource. It can also require the leader to listen differently, communicate more deliberately, release control, question an assumption, or move through their own discomfort.
Clear the Path is ultimately about creating conditions in which people, the leader included, can do their best work. That requires leaders to distinguish among the different forms of friction they encounter and understand which ones are consuming energy without creating value.
The leaders who do this well pay attention to what is slowing their teams down. They create clarity where ambiguity has taken hold, surface conversations that need to happen, give people meaningful ownership, and build trust through attention and consistency. Just as importantly, they continue examining the ways their own habits can influence those conditions.
The Six Pillars are designed to build on one another because leadership itself develops that way. We begin by understanding ourselves. We learn to read the environment around us. Then we use both forms of awareness to make it easier for people and organizations to move toward what matters.
From there, leaders are better prepared for the next pillar, Strengthen Your Teams, where the focus turns toward cultivating the capability, trust, accountability, and shared commitment that allow people to thrive together.