Defining Leadership

Leadership is not something that can be defined within the confines of a witty statement. In fact, it may be that you cannot easily define leadership in several pages of intelligent ramblings. My personal belief is that defining leadership is like describing a boot with nothing to go on except a boot print. Let’s see if I can describe the boot print.

First, leadership does not exist outside of the individual. It requires a host to manifest itself. This is why so many fail to capture the essence of leadership when trying to describe it as a separate stand alone quality. Leadership is not a thing to be assigned. It is, instead, a result of other “things”.

Second, leadership does to exist without followship. It works like this. Leadership exists because of followship, which exists because of leadership, which exists because of followship….

For a leader, followship comes in two forms. First, a leader gets the authority to act from their followers. Supervisors get their authority to act from higher up in a management chain. This is why you will often find that the supervisor and the leader in a group are not the same person. The supervisor will never find significant success without collaborative leadership, from themselves or someone else in the group.

The second followship comes from a leader’s willingness to follow others when necessary. Delegation and sharing of control come from trust, which is at the core of leadership. A leader knows to stay focused on those things that only they can do and delegate to others what others should be doing. A leader who will not share control is nothing more than a supervisor.

If you want to be a leader, do not seek to be a leader. I know this seems like double talk, but leadership cannot be coerced or taken like a prize.  Leadership chooses its host, when others chose to follow. In other words, you can chose to be a leader only when leadership is offered from followers. It is earned instead of assigned.

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