What is leadership?

Professional Employer Organization

What is Leadership?

Conventional Leadership

Leadership Re-invented

Leaders in business lead AND manage.
There is no sharp disctinction between leadership and management.
They occupy positions of authority.
Leadership is a formal role.
They make strategic decisions.
They are good at managing people.
They have emotional intelligence.
They sell the tickets for a new journey AND take the group to the destination.

Leadership = promoting new directions.
Management = getting things done.
All employees can promote new directions.
Leadership can be shown bottom-up or sideways to people who don't report to you.
Leadership has nothing to do with managing people - that's management.
Leaders don't make decisions. The ACT of leadership is one of pure informal influence.
Leaders sell the tickets for the journey, Managers drive the bus to the destination.

The Changing Meaning of Leadership

Leadership has always been based on power. For the conventional view, this means the power of personality to dominate a group.
But in our knowledge driven world, business is a war of ideas where the power to innovate and promote new products is the new basis of leadership.
Anyone with critical knowledge that could alter business direction can show leadership. This is thought leadership.
It can be shown by front line employees who don't manage anyone.
It can be bottom-up as well as top-down. It can even come from outside. It can be shown between organizations too as in market leadership.
Only management is a formal role.
Leadership re-invented is an occasional ACT, like creativity, not a role or position.
Those at the top sometimes lead, sometimes just manage. Other times they operate as venture capitalists investing in the best ideas (leadership) emerging from below.
Leadership is based on youthful rebelliousness, the drive of young people to challenge the status quo and find a better way.
Bottom-up or thought leadership is more like the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. than business leadership. His demonstrations had a leadership impact on policy makers in the U.S. government and, of course, they did not report to him.
This shows that leadership is really just about taking a stand for what you believe and trying to convince people to think and act differently.

Conventional theories paint a distorted picture of leadership by focusing narrowly on people in positions of power. These theories are in crisis today because they face an unpalatable dilemma: either they have to say that CEOs no longer lead or they have to change the meaning of leadership. The latter option states that leadership now means being a facilitator, like the level 5 leaders of Jim Collins who grill top people with questions designed to elicit ideas for new directions from them. This option preserves the idea that CEOs are leaders. Another option is to retain the older notion that leaders promote new directions but to say that CEOs no longer have a monopoly on leadership. By saying that leadership means promoting new directions, such as new products and services, we open the door to everyone being able to show leadership. This means that CEOs manage as much as lead. But to make sense of this move, we need to upgrade management, to make it a more positive concept. At present, management is cast in a negative light. Explore these pages to learn more about how and why our understanding of leadership needs to change.

The Level 5 Leadership idea developed by Jim Collins is the greatest irony in modern thinking about leadership. Recognizing that CEOs no longer have all the answers, Collins has shifted the goal posts. Leadership now means, according to Collins, drawing ideas for new directions out of your best people. This move preserves the myth that the CEO is the leader but the cost is that leaders no longer provide direction. Surely the reality is that CEOs can no longer provide all the leadership an organization needs. If we retain the idea that leadership = promoting new directions, then it is something all employees can do regardless of position. With a view of leadership so re-invented, we have to say that much of what CEOs do should be classed as management. The level 5 leaders of Jim Collins, when they use facilitative skills to draw new directions out of others, are really wearing a managerial hat, not showing leadership by other means.