I recently commented on a post about Eisenhower, and it sparked a thought I haven’t been able to shake. My observation was simple: Ike was the right guy for the job. No one else in that theater could have done what he did. And equally true, he couldn’t do what Patton or Montgomery or MacArthur did in the field.

That’s not a criticism of Eisenhower. It’s the highest compliment.

Most people think of leadership as a ladder. You get good at it, you climb, and eventually the best leaders end up at the top. Simple enough. Except that’s not how it works. That’s actually a description of the Peter Principle, the idea that people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. We’ve all seen it. The best salesperson becomes a mediocre sales manager. The brilliant engineer becomes a disorganized VP. The founder who built something from nothing slowly suffocates the company he created because he can’t let go of the controls.

Leadership is not one size fits all. Never has been.

I’ve spent 35 years observing leaders, in the Army, in corporate America, in businesses I’ve owned, and now as a business broker sitting across the table from owners who built something real. In that time I’ve been a student of leadership in the formal sense too. My friend Bob Adkinson, one of the best leaders I’ve ever known, put together what he called a Leadership Academy, an 8-attribute framework for what world-class leaders actually do. I was the only two-time attendee. I went back because the first time wasn’t enough.

The framework identifies 8 attributes: Point of View, Values, being a Change Agent, EDGE, Emotional Energy, Delivering Results, People Acumen, and being a Teacher. Good list. Hard to argue with any of it.

Here’s what the framework doesn’t say explicitly, but what Eisenhower proves: you don’t need all 8 at world-class level. You need the right ones for the role you’re in.

Patton had EDGE that bordered on reckless and Emotional Energy that could move an army through impossible terrain on willpower alone. World-class, both of them. Point of View about coalition politics? Values around diplomacy and restraint? Not his strong suit, and it almost ended his career more than once. Put Patton in charge of the Allied coalition and the war effort collapses inside six months. Not because he was a bad leader. Because he was the wrong leader for that particular job.

Eisenhower, on the other hand, had something rarer than battlefield brilliance. He had the ability to hold together an alliance of enormous egos, Churchill, de Gaulle, Montgomery, Patton, MacArthur hovering in the background, and keep them pointed in the same direction. His Point of View was strategic and political simultaneously. His Values were unimpeachable. His People Acumen was extraordinary. And critically, he could conduct honest conversations with people who didn’t want to hear honest things.

Bob’s framework notes that the inability to conduct honest conversations is one of the primary attributes of companies that fail. Ike’s coalition should have failed by that measure, the personalities involved were catastrophic. It didn’t fail because Ike insisted on honesty even when it cost him relationships. Montgomery despised him. Ike didn’t lose sleep over it. The night before D-Day, while 150,000 men were waiting to cross the Channel, Eisenhower sat down and wrote a letter accepting full personal responsibility in the event the invasion failed. Not after. Before. He folded it up and put it in his pocket. That’s not a PR move. That’s a man who understood exactly what leadership costs, and was willing to pay it in advance.

That’s EDGE. Not the dramatic, Patton-slapping-a-soldier kind. The quiet, I-see-reality-clearly-and-I’m-going-to-act-on-it kind.

So what does this mean for business?

The founder who scraped and clawed to build something from zero has a specific set of leadership attributes perfectly suited for that phase, Emotional Energy, EDGE, a Point of View sharp enough to see an opportunity nobody else saw. Those same attributes, left unchecked, can make that founder the wrong person to scale the company. And almost certainly the wrong person to sell it.

I see this regularly. An owner starts thinking about succession and immediately frames it wrong. “I can’t pay someone $80,000 to do what my $18-an-hour employee does.” That’s the wrong math entirely. You’re not replacing your employee. You’re replacing yourself. What is your time worth? What does it cost the business every day you remain the bottleneck? Find someone capable of stepping into your role, not your payroll, and compensate them accordingly.

And compensation isn’t always dollars. Equity, autonomy, title, flexibility, a path to ownership, the right person for that role may value things you haven’t thought to offer. Pay for the role you need filled, not the role you’re used to seeing.

Here’s what the math actually looks like. Roughly 85% of business buyers are looking for something that runs without them. Another 10% want something that will run while they learn. That leaves maybe 5% willing to buy a job, and that number is probably high. If your business only works because you’re in it every day, you’ve eliminated almost every buyer before the conversation starts. I’ve seen owners lose $150,000 to $400,000 in value, sometimes more, because they wouldn’t pay to replace themselves. I had one recently, great product, strong brand, real customers, who decided to close instead of sell. Gone. Because no one could see a path to running it without her.

Don’t force it. The hemorrhoids are real.

Eisenhower understood this about himself. He was famously hard on himself, constantly self-assessing, aware of both what he was capable of and what he wasn’t. That self-awareness is its own leadership attribute, maybe the most underrated one on the list. You can’t put the right person in the right role if you don’t know, clearly and without ego, what role you’re actually suited for.

Leadership is not management. A manager focuses on the outcome. A leader focuses on the people and the outcome. But even that distinction misses something. The best leaders know which version of leadership the moment demands, and they’re honest enough with themselves to recognize when that version isn’t them.

Ike knew. That’s why he won.

So here’s the question worth sitting with:

Which role are you actually in right now, and is it the right one for you?

Not the title. Not what you’ve always done. Not what you built. Where does your version of leadership create the most value today? And just as important, where is it getting in the way?

Ike asked himself that question his entire career. It’s why he was trusted with the biggest job in the world.

The leaders who can answer it honestly are the ones worth following.