What is leadership? What identifies a leader within a business?
A leader is someone who has a vision, a drive, and a commitment to achieve beyond that vision. The leader must then also have the skillset to enlist the support of others in the organization to achieve the stated goals.
Colin Powell, a well-recognized leader in the U.S., once described good leadership as “being responsible and sometimes that means pissing people off”. Leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which might mean that employees get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable if you are honourable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you‘ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering different rewards based on different performance because some people might get upset. Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally “nicely” regardless of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people you wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.
Powell also offered these key thoughts on leadership:
- The day people stop bring you their problems is the day you stop leading them. They have either lost confidence that the leader can help them or concluded that the leader doesn’t care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
- Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgement. Elites can become so inbred that they produce haemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
- Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.
- Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.
- You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.
- Keep looking below the surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so just because you might not like what you find.
- “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It’s an excuse for inaction.
- Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavours succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.
- Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing. Titles mean little in terms of real power, which is the capacity to influence and inspire.
- Effective leaders create a climate where people’s worth is determined by their willingness to learn new skills and grab new responsibilities, thus perpetually reinventing their job.
- Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
These are great examples of some of the truisms about leadership. Another great business leader, Lee Iacocca, said it best:
LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET OUT OF THE WAY.
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