What is Leadership?

In place of a Great Leader article this month, and after reviewing eight Leaders for Perform, it is right to consider just what is “Leadership”.

Despite some of the marketing you have seen you cannot get “Leadership” in a bottle, as a spray, in a book or by telepathy from an inspiring speaker. So what is it?

Anyone who has Googled “Leadership” will have seen a sixth of a billion entries returned in less than a tenth of a second! Clearly many people are asking the question, what is Leadership, and trying to find the store that sells it!

Those website hits show a wide choice in Leadership options. But what does good Leadership look like, how do we recognise it?

To me a good Leader creates an environment and a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. That is the difference between good management and leadership.

A good manager will ensure that she gets 95% plus performance while a leader will get 120% plus. A leader creates the opportunity for extraordinary performance.

Consider the relationship between people’s attitudes and their behaviour. We say that Jo has a bad attitude when what we see is the fact of bad behaviour. Attitude is not measurable directly and can only be imputed form behaviour. In the same way leadership affects performance. Where there is excellent performance we see good leadership, bad performance shows a lack of leadership.

“How do we achieve excellent performance” is a more useful question.

It seems obvious that different situations need different skills. The very first skill is the ability to recognise the different situations, what we call the Work Context. Following that there needs to be a well stocked toolkit from which we can choose the appropriate tool, technique or action.

To make the correct choice of tool we need to understand in some depth, how the tools work in different contexts.

There are many contexts. Three major variables are:

•  Stable/unstable 
•  Growth/contraction
•  Revolution/evolution

Assuming each variable has three values, for example totally stable, totally unstable or midway, that gives 27 differing contexts. What tools can we use to cope with so many variations?

The toolkit has four classes of tools and they deal with managing

•  People
•  Change
•  Work context
•  Internal communications

Excellent performance will only follow from using all these tools in the right context.

But that is not enough. It simply is not possible for one person to be lucky enough or do enough work to get all the contexts and tools in sympathy all of the time.

You need something else and that we call the state of “Followship”.

Followship exists when you have created a belief that your way is a way worth following. The belief is reinforced by some success. You have created many common values with your people. Your people find reward, the recognition, in following your belief to achieve your shared vision.

When you achieve this status you may no longer be regarded as a Leader. Because your people are behaving the way they (now) believe they should.

Leadership is not about being out in front, exhorting your people to do their best. It is about your people doing their best even when you are not there.

How do you identify leadership quality?

A simple test to identify good or bad leaders is to listen how they describe the performance of their department, division or organisation.

A bad leader says “the trouble with my place is that my people don’t work hard enough”.

A good leader says “I am so lucky, I have such wonderful people working for me they make everything easy”.

How do you describe your people?

Date : 01-12-2006