Follow the Leader by Rajeev Peshawaria — A Review

I have a somewhat contrarian view on leadership books. Most of them describe what great leaders do. Very few describe what makes people actually choose to follow someone. Follow the Leader by Rajeev Peshawaria is firmly in the second category, and that's why I found it more useful than most.

Peshawaria's central argument is that leadership isn't about position or authority — it's about creating energy in the people around you. He calls this 'leadership energy,' and he argues it comes from two sources: clear values and a bold purpose that others can connect to. Leaders who are clear on both create followership. Leaders who are vague on either create compliance at best.

The Values Clarification Exercise

The most practically useful section is the values clarification process. Peshawaria walks through a method for identifying your actual values — not the aspirational values you'd put on a wall, but the ones you actually behave from under pressure. The gap between stated values and demonstrated values is where most leadership credibility problems live.

I've used a simplified version of this with leadership teams and the conversations it generates are consistently uncomfortable and useful. People discover they've been operating from values they haven't consciously examined — and that some of those values are in conflict with the culture they're trying to build.

Leadership is not about what you do. It's about the energy you create — or destroy — in the people around you.

The AI Communication Problem

With AI tools that can draft leadership communications, write all-hands emails, and generate 'authentic-sounding' personal updates, the pressure to actually be authentic is higher than it's ever been. People can tell when a leader's communication was written by a language model. They can feel the absence of specificity, the generic sincerity.

In an environment where trust is already under pressure — because of uncertainty about AI, about economic conditions, about what the future looks like — that inauthenticity is more costly than ever. Peshawaria's framework for leadership energy is, among other things, a framework for staying genuinely yourself as a leader rather than performing leadership.

The Part That Stuck

His distinction between 'leaders who create leaders' and 'leaders who create followers' is the section I return to most. The first type builds organisations that can function without them. The second type builds organisations that are dependent on them. It's obvious which is more valuable. It's less obvious how to deliberately become the first type.

Follow the Leader gave me a cleaner framework for thinking about that question than most of the books I've read on the topic.