The Biggest Lie of Leadership

 Why You Need to Rethink Your Understanding

Most people don't understand leadership. They relate it to a title or position. Leadership is not about power. You are not superior to others when you lead.

Leadership is about people.

I write a lot about leadership. It turns some people off. It is one of those areas that has been over-marketed. Every day you see people posting platitudes about it. It can get annoying.

Who wants to learn leadership from someone unless they have done something great?

The paradox is this. A lot of incredibly success people are terrible leaders. Some of the most amazing leaders are people that you will never hear of.

Being a successful leader is not about arbitrary results. What one person considers successful, another will think it fell short. Real leadership comes down to how you shape other people.

What is Leadership?

This is the best way you should think about leadership:

A process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others to accomplish common goals

Positioned that way, how you think about leadership starts to change. Where you think leadership happens, starts to change.

Leadership is not about exerting power over others, it's being a catalyst for others. It promotes some movement or change in another person towards a goal.

It's important to not confuse tasks and time management with leadership. Management and Leadership are often interchanged, but they are not the same.

Leaders can be great managers, and people in management roles can be incredible leaders, they are different skillsets though.

The Leadership Skills That Matter

Let's start off with a list of widely accepted leadership skills / qualities:

• Self-Awareness
• Emotional Intelligence
• Decisiveness
• Communication
• Trusting
• Goal Oriented

None of those skills are specific to any one job or industry. They are not something that only matter at a certain age. They are not things that matter at one level of your career and not another.

These are universal skills. Soft skills as they are often referred to. These are the things that separate you from the crowd.

Self-Awareness - The most you understand about yourself, the better you are to interact with others. You understand your strengths and your weaknesses. You recognize the type of person you are your natural style. 

Emotional Intelligence - You are able to understand and manage your own emotions. You are able to understand and influence the emotions of others. The crucial thing with EQ is understanding that you and another person can (and often do) react differently to the same situation.

Decisiveness - You make decisions. All the time. Decision making is a skill and something that you have to get comfortable with. People get paralyzed thinking they will make the wrong decision. What is forgotten is that there is a cost to inaction as well. 

Communication - No one achieves anything alone. Everyone needs help in one way or another. To be able to influence people and have them change towards the goal, you have to be an effective communicator.

Trusting - Real leaders trust. You trust by default. You need to trust first. Share the vision, share the goal. Let others take the reins and do their part. You cannot micromanage everything. At some point, you can't do everything yourself anymore.

Goal Oriented - For all the great ideas in the world, they aren't worth anything if you can't execute. Execution is what everything else is all about. You have to be able to do it.

What Leadership is Not

You aren't a medieval ruler sitting perched up in a castle. It is not about presiding over the people. Stroke of the pen authority and barking orders at your team is management (at best). 

Making people feel afraid, not giving them room to grow or sharing ideas is not leadership. No listening to feedback they give related to the project, the plan or the strategy, is not leadership.

Thinking you are more important than others or believing you have the best ideas is not leaderhship. 

To use a current example, Vladimir Putin is a leader by title, but he is not a Leader.

Leadership is For Everyone

Thinking that you aren't a leader is the thinking that has to go. Everyone leads in some area of their life, they may not realize it though.

Are you on a team? Participate in a club? Have siblings? Friends? Coworkers?

In any of those relationships you can lead. Look at the six qualities we listed above. Where are you using them?

To pull a current example. Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Ukrainian President) is a leader. He's a lawyer become actor who became president. People thought it was a joke. With his country on fire, he's in the thick of it, leading from the front. He's more of a leader than almost anyone in the last 50 years.

Because he knows leadership is about people. How you fit into the community and knowing that your goal is to move people towards action.

Leadership is Self Propelling 

The best way to improve your leadership skills is to take the challenge on yourself. Formal programs can be fine, they will always provide insight. What your employer suggests, is also fine. But you will never unlock your leadership potential investing 8 hours a year to it.

Luckily, leadership fosters learning. The best way to improve and develop is to stay humble. Listen more, talk less. Ask more questions. If there is something you don't understand, look it up. Most importantly though, you have to be open. You have to be vulnerable. You have to let go of the fear of being embarassed. 

There are more resources now than every before on any (and all) of those skills. All it takes is to prioritize and execute.

Want a bit more guidance?

Start with emotional intelligence, self-awareness then communication. Improving those 3 things gets you half way there and miles ahead of everyone else.