2 What Is Leadership?

Danielle realized almost immediately upon taking over the executive director’s role that leadership wasn’t what she had thought that it was. When Danielle had been a team lead under the former director, leadership had looked clear and relatively simple. The former director had done well enough communicating the organization’s expectations that Danielle was able to lead her team effectively, indeed so effectively that the organization had made Danielle its next executive director. But as soon as Danielle took over, she realized that she wasn’t really at the organization’s control. It wasn’t as if Danielle was in the pilot’s seat, pushing buttons, pulling levers, and steering the plane. Danielle could see that leadership was instead something very less concrete, firm, and clear. 

Definition

If you want to be a leader, you should probably know what leadership is. The prior chapter already hinted that followers define leadership as much or more than leaders define leadership. If a leader cannot attract and hold followers, then you’re not witnessing leadership. In plain terms, leadership is the ability to influence others toward the group’s goals. Leadership is that set of attributes that make followers willing to run through brick walls in pursuit of the objectives that the leader sets. A leader’s role in a group or organization is to guide and influence others toward pursuing the group or organization mission and achieving the group or organization goals. Several things may need to happen for a group, team, or organization to succeed, including having achievable goals and having the resources and skills to achieve those goals. But the team also generally needs to work in a coordinated and committed fashion. And that’s where leadership comes in, coordinating and inspiring the team.

Influence

A leader is thus one who influences an organization’s direction. Leadership is in the influence, not the attributes, even if the attributes of leadership have their influence. The definition of leadership just given, as the ability to motivate followers toward the goal, places the measure of leadership on influence over followers, not on the leader’s own attributes. The leader may be a giant of a figure, with vast education, furnace-refined skills, and the judgment of Solomon. But if the leader can’t cajole others into following, the leader isn’t exhibiting leadership. Call it influence, or call it inspiration, command, motivation, direction, or control. Yet one way or another, an effective leader must be able to demonstrate some form of sway over the team’s members. That the sway that leaders seek is so elusive is why deeply effective leaders are so rare. We are not automatons. A leader can’t just push our buttons. We each tend to have our own interests, and we each tend to see ourselves as relatively autonomous and in control, if nothing else, at least of our own will and direction. That’s the leader’s challenge, to get others to give up just enough of their autonomy to seek the group goal. 

Teams

A leader is essentially the one who influences the team. To identify effective leadership, you don’t even have to look toward the leader. Instead, look toward the team. In some of the best forms of leadership, the leader is relatively invisible, even deliberately so. Invisibility may promote the required sense of team investment. The leader whose team confronts a chasm between it and the goal may, for example, remark to the team how deep the chasm looks and ask the team what it’s going to do to get across. Team members may look to one another, wondering together why the leader hasn’t told them what to do and deciding that the leader must not know. The leader may then observe that if they can’t cross the chasm, everything is lost. Team members may again look to one another in despair, frantically brainstorming for solutions. When the team proposes a solution, the leader may shrug, replying only that the leader hopes it works because it’ll be their only chance. If, then, the whole team springs into desperate action, throwing everything they have into the effort, believing themselves to be leaderless and that success is entirely up to them, the leader will have achieved the hardest part of leadership, which is to unite the team around concerted action. The leader could have told the team the solution and to get to work on it. But doing so might not have produced the necessary commitment. That approach wouldn’t work for every team, but for some teams, it might be the only approach that would.

Context

A leader is also one who adapts to the context. To put the leadership challenge another way, context is everything in leadership. One team differs from another team. Leadership demands, referring to the things that you must do or not do, change as the teams change. One team project also differs from another team project. Leadership demands change with the projects. And change the goal, and you’ll probably need to lead in a different style or fashion, even if you are leading the same team in the same work. Leadership is contextual. Some teams must complete some projects in command-and-control terms. Other teams must complete other projects with much greater discretion, creatively and intuitively, entirely without command and with very little control. The team leader must understand the nature of the project requirements, the skills the team must exercise, and the degree of discipline, hierarchy, and supervision, or the contrary degree of independence and delegation, that the team should follow. And the team leader must then discern how to exercise that leadership within the norms and customs of the team’s expectations. Leadership must continually discern multiple variables and adjust accordingly. 

Goals

A leader’s influence must, though, be toward the team or organization goals. Leaders need a keen eye and ear for the team or organization goals. Leaders inevitably have influence, in one direction or another. A poorly equipped leader can quickly ruin a well-equipped team. You see it in organizational leadership change all the time. Teams that once ran excellently may quickly fall apart, if the new team leader doesn’t have a sense of what subtle incentives, insights, and stances knit the team together and pointed it toward the team goal. The point isn’t about leadership itself. The point is instead about the team or organization goal. New leaders naturally tend to focus on their own skills, command, and attributes, if anything out of insecurity alone. Yet new leaders, like veteran leaders, instead need to retain a focus on the team or organization goal. Leaders need to understand the goal, clarify the goal, and communicate the goal to the team while assessing the team’s progress toward the goal to adjust leadership activities. 

Followers

The above definition of leadership, referring to the ability to influence others toward the goal, focuses not just on the goal but also on followers. Leaders must influence followers. An interesting insight, though, is that leaders don’t necessarily have to get everyone to follow, in order to succeed in leadership. Oh, in some teams, such as in the medical operating-room suite or in a deadly military operation, the leader’s command must be complete and precise. In those rarer instances, every team member’s performance may be critical to the operational goal. But in most of the leadership roles one sees in communities and the workplace, leaders don’t need perfect command. They may instead need to recognize that some team members simply won’t follow. In those more-common settings, leadership may instead require identifying and empowering the capable followers, those who may actually strive toward team goals. Indeed, to be effective, a leader may have to divide and to a degree even ostracize non-strivers, in order to empower those who will truly pull for the team. Leadership doesn’t demand compliance from all followers, instead just enough followers to achieve the goal. 

Vision

A leader is also the one who sets the organization’s vision. Leadership involves articulating a vision for the organization. If leadership is the ability to influence others toward team goals, a leader may need to communicate a vision to both generate goals and give context to those goals. A vision explains to others, including the organization’s workforce or members, what the organization is trying to achieve and why the organization is trying to achieve it. A vision not only generates the goals but also inspires the organization’s members to achieve the goals and guides them in decisions on how to achieve goals. A vision is thus the organization’s foundation and framework, helping others align their activities toward achieving the vision. The leader may set the vision or, if the organization already has a clear vision from its founder or board, articulate and communicate the vision into more-specific missions, value statements, norms, and goals. A leader must usually be vision and mission driven. Leaders must constantly see and communicate the big picture in all the minutiae with which an organization must deal. 

Decisions

A leader is also the one who makes organizational decisions. Leadership requires exercising sound judgment in making major organizational decisions. If leadership is the ability to influence others to pursue organizational goals, then leaders may have to make frequent decisions about goals and the strategies, methods, resources, and personnel to pursue those goals. Leaders typically need to make sound, rational, and defensible decisions, following a reliable decision-making process. To make good organizational decisions, leaders may need to have keen predictive capacity, when predicting the future of anything can be difficult. In fields of substantial uncertainty, leaders may need to exercise an intuitive sense that helps them align organizational resources, personnel, and activities with emerging patterns in the field. Given the high uncertainty in many fields, a leader’s decision making may only project an illusion of control, without actually significantly affecting the organization’s course. Yet even if so, the leader’s ability to communicate sound reasons for the decisions, and to show how the decisions align with the organization’s vision and goals, can significantly aid the organization. Leaders make decisions. 

Trust

A leader is also one to whom others look to represent the organization. Leadership involves garnering and maintaining organizational trust and loyalty. Don’t underestimate trust as a core aspect of leadership. Others need to have confidence in an organization’s leader. Someone needs to represent the organization, group, unit, or team. That leader needs to be an individual of integrity on whom others can rely to deal with the organization, represent the organization, and answer for the organization. Some leaders are not especially skilled at directing teams or workforces, or even at making sound decisions and getting others to follow. Those leaders may rely on others for those skills and that judgment and influence. But if those leaders have the greatest integrity and represent the organization well both internally and externally, the confidence, trust, and loyalty they engender may alone make them effective leaders, even if others beneath them bear the brunt of the leadership work. One could nearly have an alternative definition that a leader is the one to whom others look to answer for an organization, unit, or team. If integrity is your gift, that gift may alone make you an effective leader.

Designation

A leader may simply refer to the one whom the organization designates to lead, whether or not the individual reflects any of the above several definitions of leadership. The leader may lack the ability to influence the team, articulate a vision and goals, make sound decisions, or gain others’ trust. But if the organization designates the individual as its leader, then for at least some purposes that individual is the leader, whether others respect and appreciate it or not. Titles and designations have significance in certain arenas, such as for public relations and legal accountability. When an organization needs to present a public face for advertising, convening annual meetings, or other public relations, the organization needs a designated leader. Likewise, when public agencies or private entities or individuals seek to hold an organization accountable, by law someone must be officially available to respond, if not in practice and fact then at least by title and designation. Leadership can mean designation and title, with or without the skills and attributes to lead. Some of us prefer the skills and attributes over the title, while others prefer the title whether or not they have the skills and attributes to lead. Leadership can involve either the actual ability to influence, the title of leader without the ability to lead, or both.

De Facto

As you seek to lead, or as leadership seeks you, keep in mind the prior paragraph’s insight that leadership may refer either to the title or to the actual influence on others. Organizations can have both kinds of leaders at once, one leader with the title but another leader in practice. You don’t have to have the title in order to lead. In any team setting, team members may pay due deference to the designated leader. But team members will generally follow the individual who exhibits the leadership skills and attributes, whether or not that individual has the title of leader. And in those cases, both the designated leader and the actual leader in practice will likely know of their relationship to one another and to their team. When that relatively common situation happens, the team’s success depends on the grace of both individuals. The designated leader must respect the practical leader, or the practical leader will withdraw and refuse to lead. But the practical leader must also respect rather than undermine the designated leader, while not stewing over the absent title and compensation, or the team will fracture. Be aware of the difference between designated leadership and de facto leadership, and the tensions it can cause.

Reflection

How would you define leadership? Would you focus on the leader’s attributes or the team’s response, to judge a leader effective or not? How would you describe your preferred or natural leadership style? Which of the following words resonate with your preferred leadership style: inspirational, insightful, caring, understanding, resourceful, collegial, team building, respectful, deferential, empowering, delegating, hierarchical, directive, authoritative, or commanding? What one word would you want your team members to use to describe you as a leader? In what field are you pursuing or exercising leadership? How does leadership in your field differ from leadership in other fields? Does your field need you, as a leader, to get absolutely everyone on board? Or does your field instead depend more on leaders identifying and empowering key team members to execute critical functions? Are you able to discern and convincingly communicate a vision for the organization you hope to lead or are leading? Do you have keen judgment and predictive capacity for making sound decisions? Do others generally trust you? Are others generally loyal to you? 

Key Points

• Leadership is the ability to influence others toward the team goal.

• Influence may take forms from inspiration to command or cajoling.

• The proof of leadership is in the team’s response, not leader attributes.

• Leadership contexts vary widely, affecting leadership demands.

• The leader’s influence must be toward an achievable team goal.

• A leader needs only to influence enough followers to achieve the goal.

• Organizations call on leaders to establish organizational vision.

• Organizations also depend on leaders to make critical decisions.

• Organizations need leaders to develop high trust and loyalty.

• An organization may designate a leader without leadership skills.

• An organization may also rely on a leader not designated as such.

Read Chapter 3.