Book excerpt: While Lean is all the buzz these days, Lean leadership is wanting. The pervasive focus on Lean tools distracts from from the important work of developing Lean leaders at all levels of organizations. Success with Lean requires change. All organizational change requires leadership. Growing leaders of all types can be a long process. Growing Lean leaders takes a bit more work. While it s easy to declare that an organization is adopting Lean as their operating strategy, in practice, Lean challenges so much about we hold to be true and we credit to our success. Lean leaders must replace their current automatic ways of engaging with people and work while helping others to do the same.