I’ve got a dirty little secret to share with you today.

Buried deep inside the guts of far too many popular books on leadership, lies a seductive premise. It’s a premise that sells a lot of books, and it goes something like this:

“This books contains Ingredient X, the secret to success as a leader in all circumstances and settings. If only you master the art of X, and perform it rigorously in all situations you face as a leader, then you will succeed.”

So X is whatever the author claims to be the secret of success as a leader. Just master that key perspective or skill and make sure that you rigorously apply it to every situation. Be consistent in practicing these enumerated habits or those leadership secrets of Abraham Lincoln/ Jesus Christ/ Attila the Hun and you will be the effective leader you aspire to become.

Very compelling. I know I’ve bought more than one bestseller in search of good old Ingredient X. But here’s the dirty little secret: There are no bumper-sticker one-size-fits-all solutions for the challenges leaders face today. In an increasingly complex world, there is only one guiding principle that holds true in all circumstances: “It depends.”

You knew that, right? But tell me the truth: Despite yourself some part of you still yearns for the simple promise of X, doesn’t it?

Faced with unrelenting challenges and organizational quandaries, who doesn’t yearn for simple cookbook answers? The reassuring prospect of simple guidelines and principles has powered many an author to the top of the bestseller list. Sadly, here is the bottom line: Bumper-sticker solutions often do more harm than good. Who cares what works in general if it doesn’t work for you and your organization in particular? It’s tempting to say “The devil is in the details”– except I happen to believe that paying careful attention to context is not devilish. It’s liberating.

I am a clinical and consulting psychologist, and my colleagues who also contribute to this blog are evaluation professionals from disciplines as diverse as sociology, law, public policy and education. When it comes to observing what makes powerful leaders and what goes into transformative, effective decisions, we’ve noticed some patterns that do not easily fit into those Seven Habits or Thirteen Secrets that purport to fit all situations at all times.

As evaluators, we have a front row seat to watch the best and worst practices in management. And here’s a core lesson we’ve learned.

Let’s use an analogy. You are an eccentric billionaire with a furniture fetish and you want to build an amazing, world-class chair. You’d want to find a master carpenter, of course, and you would want to think long and hard about what makes a carpenter truly great before hiring one. But even a master carpenter can’t make a chair with her bare hands, so what else is required? Of course, well-designed tools are essential, forged for precisely the task at hand. Those precision tools might not be able to produce an excellent chair in my shaky hands, but their potential for greatness is never closer than when you place them in the hands of your master carpenter.

Master carpenter, check. Precision tools, check. Finally of course, you must select the material out of which to craft your chair. Some materials are definitely better than others. A balsa chair, for instance is not likely to qualify as a world-class chair, no matter how elegant the design- at least not for long. Knowing this, your master carpenter might choose cherry or oak instead.

The point here is that the interaction of carpenter+tool+wood is greater than the sum of its parts.

The chair’s design, the quality of the workshop, the skills of your carpenter’s assistants, the choice of wood, nails, glue– they all interact. Even the ambient temperature can play a role in determining just how amazing your chair will be in the end. It is impossible to gain a deep understanding of what it took to make that world-class chair only by focusing on any one of the ingredients, no matter how dominant that ingredient might appear.

So, what is the core lesson we evaluators have learned after watching some leaders soar and others crash? Well, we’ve learned to ask a more subtle question about effective leadership. The question we ask is not “what are the characteristics of a great leader?” or even “what is the most effective approach to decision-making?” No, the question we ask in our work goes more like this:

“What kind of leader…

in combination with what kind of staff and resources…

committed to what kind of organizational vision and mission…

while facing what kind of challenge…

can best make use of what set of decision-making and action techniques…

to arrive at what intentionally-selected outcome?”

Now that’s a heck of a question! To focus only on one element of that equation is to miss the essence of effective leadership and decision-making: the interaction among leader and staff characteristics, organizational vision and mission, specific objectives and strategies for change. All of these ingredients are essential to decision-making. And decision-making is the fundamental task facing all leaders in all settings.

And that’s why we say: “Context is King.”