How we choose to use words has a profound impact on those around us, especially those we are supposed to lead. For evidence, look no further than your nearest blowhard or sphinx.

You know them well. The blowhard is the foremost expert on everything and sucks the air out of the room with their filibuster delivery of word after word. Just when you think you have the opportunity to offer an opinion, they either talk right over you or move on to their next area of expert enlightenment.

The sphinx sits in stoney silence carefully assessing whether they have anything to add to the conversation or whether it merits their involvement. Mostly, the answer is no. If you find yourself in a one-on-one conversation with a sphinx, you cannot help but become something of a mini-blowhard, just to make the conversation work.

Mostly, the blowhard and sphinx constitute a minor annoyance. Unless they are your boss, at which point they become something more insidious. I call them minimizers.

All leaders need followers. Followers need to be guided, motivated and inspired by their leaders. It is the raison d’etre of leadership. But if the leader is a blowhard who never listens, they can never really understand the state of play because they are unavailable to any thoughts that are not their own. As a result, their people get minimized. Likewise, if the sphinx is leading in absolute silence, their people are left to their own ideas, inclinations and self-imposed direction. Because they do not enjoy the vantage point of the leader, they often get it wrong and also get, you guessed it, minimized.

If you are a blowhard or a sphinx, and lucky enough to be aware of it, the implications are obvious. You need to change your relationship to the spoken word, starting right now. Find yourself a honest and courageous feedback provider who can tell you when you are straying off course. Listen to them. Make the adjustments necessary to engage your people in an ongoing and robust two-way dialogue. If you do not, you run the risk of  minimizing yourself out of a job.

It is commonly and wisely stated that the most important element of leadership is to have followers. True enough. But every bit as important is action. There are not many situations where effective leadership occurs without action. After all, to lead is to lead somewhere. Prerequisite to action is the all-important call to action. These calls are framed by well chosen and spoken words.

So there you have it. I have distilled years of study on leadership to a simple sentence. The essence of leadership is to motivate followers to action with words. Oh, but this is so much easier said than done. For evidence, look no further than our last two Presidents.

No one will argue that George W. lacked bias for action. With rare exception, he was the embodiment of action driven by ideology and ethic. He pushed his political agenda with the same vigor that he tackled brush clearing on his ranch in Crawford. Words, however, were not his strong suit. His inarticulate manner of speaking was not up to the task of setting the stage for his actions, leaving his underlying motivation subject to the interpretation of others. Never a good thing for a leader.

Then there is Barack Obama. A veritable master of the spoken word. Arguably the most articulate President since FDR. He sets the stage for action with stirring speech and inspiring rhetoric, audaciously raising our hopes. Then we get the same old, same old political morass and dysfunctionality. So just as we get excited to be lead, we go absolutely nowhere.

To all of the current leaders out there and those who aspire to such, let these men be a cautionary tale. Know that to lead others begins with finding the right words to help them imagine what they can not on their own. To enable them to see possibilities. Then to orchestrate a series of actions that make the possibilities a reality, course-correcting as situations require, all while keeping the vision alive.