My favorite warm up for a leadership session is to ask participants to think of all the words they can that begin with the letter, ‘L’ that have anything to do with leadership. The usual response is a collective groan, suggesting this is a ‘dumb’ idea. However, within 10 minutes participants are surprised to discover how these words provide the perfect landscape to launch a leadership discussion. Here are a few special ‘L’ words. Listen, laughter, language, liberate, legacy, lesson, liaison, labor, limit, lonely and luck. The leaders we admire and aspire to be like are those that listen with presence, are able to laugh at themselves, use ‘we’ language as opposed to ‘I’, liberate those around them to experiment and grow, create a legacy beyond their own term of office, absorb and apply lessons learned, adapt to their role as liaison to a wide range of stakeholders, labor hard and with others, know their limits and seek out resources, can deal with the frequent lonely moments and burdens and bump into luck frequently. These are just a handful of ‘L’ words that capture the social, emotional and cognitive dimensions of leadership. There are more such as limbo, lucrative, logical, and love. What ‘L’ words define leadership for you?