People become leaders for different reasons. Some people believe it is their destiny, that somehow they were born to lead and aspire to elevate their position, enhance their visibility, manage the impressions of others and prepare themselves to assume control, take responsibility, and wield great power. Others default into the role of a leader because no one else will and assume the duty purely out of necessity despite their reluctance. Still, others rise into their position because they have endured longer than anyone else – and the last person standing is handed the mantle. How did you become a leader?
There are no absolute qualifications or even standards when it comes to being a leader. It is more an abstract mosaic of characteristics that define you. The most elemental characteristic is having authority over other people. Command and control environments require a hierarchy of authority, and someone resides at the top of the chain. This is positional leadership.
Positional leadership is defined by a title. You might be president, general, commander, admiral, czar, chairman, empress, chief, king, overlord, or queen. Titles are designations that might be earned, given as an entitlement, bought, or even stolen.
Your title may mean a lot or may mean nothing at all. While some titles represent recognized positions of prestige and seemingly protected power and authority, it is not the title that matters: it is the person holding the title – and moreover, how you are perceived by those you have power over. Positional leadership is a function of being an imagined reality. It doesn’t exist in nature. Positional leadership is entirely conditional. It is purely a product of human imagination, empowered by agreement as to its scope and meaning, and exists because those who are in agreement are willing to enforce that meaning. And that power can be usurped by anyone with the strength to take it away.
Whether installed by a monarchy, a democratic republic, or a military dictatorship, public or governmental power is fragile and holds intact only as long as it is enforceable. Throughout history, empires have been destroyed; governments toppled; leaders deposed, exiled, or executed at the hands of invaders or internal insurrection or coups. The leader’s power is conditional on the strength and resilience of those who commit to defending it. And within those lines of defense lies the risk of a new source of power emerging that might swoop in and take command.
Public leadership is inherently dangerous. Even the most beloved and magnanimous of leaders attract murderous enemies who either want to take their power or simply eliminate their foes. Generations of business leaders have viewed their role through the lens of absolute, ruthless power and the tactics needed to survive by defeating your enemy. It is the typically Machiavellian view people take of leadership and the attraction missives like Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.”
Most business leaders face far more limited threats, largely because they wield far more limited power. There are command and control leaders in business who rely on threats, intimidation, and manipulation to accomplish their desires. Even the most earnest, deeply humanistic leaders with good hearts and noble intentions believed that weakness is the enemy of good and gives forbearance to evil. If not an iron fist, leading with a firm hand was considered necessary, but it is no longer so.
Nearly everyone knows the parable concerning the willow and the mighty oak tree. Standing against a stiff wind, the willow’s flexibility enables it to withstand gusts that will fall the oak tree. But from this story, we can only infer that at times we need to be flexible. It turns out that flexibility is part of a larger system of leadership thinking that informs more than just resilience. Being flexible is a result of employing creative leadership tendencies that enhance and even multiply an organization’s force and effectiveness in terms of meeting threats and cultivating opportunities.
The role of leadership in any organization is to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage. This cannot be accomplished by only operating in a defensive mode. You need ingenuity, collaboration, innovation, and discernment to identify, prioritize and solve problems. Threats and opportunities are both problems that you must solve.
Command and control is reactive leadership and requires that the direction, answers, and decisions move from the top down. It is a cumbersome model that fails in the face of conditions that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Reactive leadership is rigidly disciplined and lacks the flexibility necessary to adapt to rapid change and unpredictable circumstances.
The role of leadership in any organization is to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage.
The benefits and power of distributed leadership are described in the book “The Starfish and the Spider,” written by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. While the approach is somewhat dated, the business cases they cited spoke more to the resilience of what they called “leaderless” organizations. The metaphor is that spiders have a central, single point of control; if you remove the head, you kill the spider. If you dissect a starfish, the removed parts will regenerate into new starfish. It is an interesting theory but misses a critical understanding about leadership: it is not the leader but the influence of the leader that drives the organization’s sustainable success. Creative leadership is what survives in the starfish: it literally re-creates itself because it can and because it has to in order to survive.
More contemporary views of creative leadership, and the characteristics of the increasingly VUCA world we live in, suggest that the way leadership influences people is the power of leadership. Control is a struggle of raw strength, but influence is fluid and seeps into people in ways that inform their behavior at its core. Where placing fear in people’s hearts may muscle them to act, influence will inform them how to act. The power is in the results, not in the movement. All actions have consequences, but not always the consequences you want.
Influence wins over control. An army of soldiers impressed into service will never outperform a militia of missionaries defending their way of life. It was the case in the Vietnam war, where guerilla warfare outmatched the armed forces of two world powers, France and then the United States. It isn’t just that the Viet-Cong were more flexible in their approach; they were relentlessly committed and disciplined to be a VUCA force that confounded the might of traditional military forces set out to control them.
Influence wins over control. An army of soldiers impressed into service will never outperform a militia of missionaries defending their way of life.
To be a better leader, you need to be able to increase your influence.
You can learn how to have influence, but you cannot go out and demand or acquire it. Influence is granted to you by those who are willing to. There is never any guarantee that anything you do will produce the kind of influence you need or desire. But you can learn to be persuasive and improve the likelihood that people will be receptive to your invitations.
Leaders approach influence from one of two angles. You either endeavor to manipulate people in the hope of having them follow you, or you can cultivate the conditions necessary for people to become inspired to follow. Either will get people to take action, but the approaches lead to very different consequences. Manipulation is control, where you create the illusion that others are freely making choices. It is your creation or fabrication. But inspiration is their creation. You can inspire people; you only help or cause them to be inspired. It is entirely up to them to choose to be inspired or not.
Great leaders inspire exceptional performance in those they influence.
Leadership is agnostic. It is neither good nor bad. A bad leader is still a leader. If you are a leader in title only, it doesn’t matter to you how well you lead. If leadership is an end to itself, once you have achieved the status and station in life, you have accomplished all that is necessary to you. Your focus shifts to protecting what you have gained. It is a defensive game.
Where leadership matters is to those, you lead. A good leader is not a measure of self-worth. Leaders are judged by what they accomplish or not. It is not a matter of how good they are at what they do– it is all about the good they do.
What you accomplish is a factor of many considerations. How well prepared you are to achieve your aims may be important but is far from sufficient. The conditions in which you perform, the nature or preparation of the forces you are up against, and the significance of what you need to accomplish are all part of the calculus. And then there is the matter of luck. There are times when you are better off being lucky than being brilliantly prepared.
Success is always a matter of perspective.
Does winning every battle matter if you lose the war? Generally not, but there are often great things accomplished in what may appear to be an abject failure. Learning to lose gracefully can be more important than learning how to win. Great discoveries have been borne out of a series of dismal failures where the initially rejected results were repurposed into solutions to problems that had not been imagined at the start of the effort. It takes creativity to turn an apparent failure into a meaningful success. And it takes creative leadership to influence how people think and behave and give fresh meaning to things that others may not notice.
We are not just talking about post-it notes coming from a failed adhesive project; it is also seeing potential in flawed human beings. Great leaders often imagine a person’s potential before and beyond what that person might realize. And it is the performance of those you influence that will determine your actual success. As Dr. Lee Thayer suggested, it is not the leader that makes the organization successful; it is always the other way around.
If you wish to endeavor to be a better leader, you have to let go of control and learn to embrace uncertainty. Doing so takes humility and courage. You will be risking failure. You will have your assumptions and beliefs challenged. You will make decisions that will prove wrong. And you will at times fail despite doing everything right and to the best of your ability. This is why you must learn to lean into your fears. And you must learn to value what you can and must learn over what you think you know and must know.
If you wish to endeavor to be a better leader, you have to let go of control and learn to embrace uncertainty. Doing so takes humility and courage.
How you came to be a leader doesn’t matter much. What matters is what you choose to be now that you are one. What you do is always a product of who you are and how you think. You must allow yourself to be insatiably curious. And if your curiosity is guided by the belief that what you must accomplish serves something greater than your personal needs and interests, if you are lucky, you might discover that you are the leader you need to be. And even if not, you will discover that leadership is a journey with no destination point. Who you become as you grow is the reward for serving your cause in life – and the joy that only comes from accomplishing things that matter.
