I was recently talking to a prospective clients about his goals for coaching.
“I want to work on my Leadership.”
Beautiful. The perfect client. And yet...
Something was amiss.
My intuition latched onto how he said it. Leadership. What did he mean by it? What do any of us mean by it?
This was a promising leader at an early stage company who was eager to become a manager and grow in the ranks. The way he said leadership, I suspected he specifically meant the tactical skills of management. He was unconsciously saying “I’m not here to work on me, I’m here to develop the concrete skills of managing others.”
Intuition being more of a compass than a GPS, I asked him: “What do you mean when you say leadership?”
“You know, managing a team, growing the number of people who are underneath you.”
Ding ding ding. Intuition wins this round.
“That’s not exactly what leadership means to me,” I said. “For me, Leadership is about ownership.”
“That’s new to me,” he said. “We’ll have to dig into that more.”
What is Leadership?
The more time I spend discussing leadership, the more I find that there are misgivings out there about what exactly leadership is.
For early stage companies, many founders wait until they have a meaningful number of employees to worry about leadership. They equate leadership with having people to lead. While this definition may be technically correct, it misses the heart and soul of what leadership is.
Why? Some of the best leaders I’ve ever worked with had 0 direct reports. Some of the worst had teams of 12. I’m sure you’ve seen the same. “Having people to lead” just doesn’t seem to capture the essence of what leadership is.
A better definition of leadership might be being the type of person that people want as a leader. This starts to get to the heart of matter, but still isn’t operational. It doesn’t yet inform you how to be a good leader.
Much of my view of leadership has been informed by one concept: Ownership. Responsibility. A leader, in my worldview, is someone who takes full responsibility for their impact and influence in the world.
Leadership as Responsibility
This conception of responsibility encompasses far more than results. Sure, a good leader has a results orientation and is driving outcomes. But a true leader takes responsibility for much more than that.
A true Leader takes responsibility for their emotional impact on others.
A true Leader takes responsibility for their own personal and interpersonal development.
A true Leader takes responsibility for the continued development of those around them.
In embodying responsibility, the best leaders avoid blame. Leaders take responsibility and encourage those around them to do so as well, but they do so without blaming**. In the end the entire team is responsible for results, and a teammate cannot fail without a failure on the part of the team and the leader to support and work it out with them.
Through this lens, leadership is not something you do or arrive to at a certain number of employees. Leadership is not even something that is confined to work. Leadership is a way of being, a way of moving through the world. It has its associated principles and practices, but is something that must be embodied. This is why leadership is so difficult to teach: it must be lived and breathed at a fundamental level.
If you aspire to leadership or are in a leadership role, stop aspiring to be a leader someday. Start being a leader right now.
**What is the difference between assigning blame and encouraging responsibility? The difference between saying “this is your/our/my fault” and “What have we learned from this? What are we committed to doing better next time?”
For two of my favorite books on leadership, checkout Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership and Conscious Leadership Group’s The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.