The nature of day-to-day leadership in public health and health organizations has a significant impact on stress levels, job satisfaction, motivation and other psychological outcomes that are likely to significantly affect organizational performance in various settings. In this context, the success of cancer prevention interventions appears to be directly related to health leaders' ability to make changes through constantly inspiring employees to translate vision and goals into reality. The main objective of the present paper is to identify the major constructs of transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire leadership theories. It briefly delves into their relevance to topics connecting nutrition with lung cancer risk and effects, if any, of leadership style on individuals' willingness to exert extra efforts. This paper argues that successful public health leaders need to be more transformational (and less transactional) to be able to achieve an acceptable level of effectiveness. It suggests that the development and delivery of well-targeted and efficient nutritional interventions in lung cancer prevention are likely to require (1) an effective, ethical, and dynamic leadership that is capable of providing clear directions and priorities in terms of future viability and financial stability; (2) the adoption of integrated approaches from public health and other relevant specialties and disciplines; (3) the implementation of innovative and empirically-based strategies that move beyond the range of typical healthcare services to encompass the socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental determinants of dietary practices that may increase the risk of lung cancer; and (4) the development of a set of lessons learned from previous projects, scientific studies, and/or from examining the complexities inherent in conducting long-term or large-scale nutritional intervention studies.