» A short piece about leadership

People have a bewildering number of ways of approaching and defining leadership.

We favour a definition that

is useful
enables people to lead (an others to be led)
is understandable
and, most importantly, is proven in practice.

Leadership is an attitude. An approach to people. It’s a way of relating to other people which can be practised by everyone—not just “the boss”. Leadership is no more about telling other people what to do than it is blindly leaping into the abyss and expecting everyone else to follow.

In contrast, management is a job, a set of activities, often many and complex.

Being in charge, or being the boss, is a role.

A useful attitude, or approach, to have is one of make the other person more important than you. This does not mean, believe the other person is more important that you. That’s the thin end of a rather unpleasant wedge. It means, act as if the other person were more important than you.

This is what is often called servant leadership. It has been recommended by everyone from Jesus Christ to the trainers at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

What Sandhurst is saying to its trainee officers in its motto, Serve to lead, is ‘if you expect to lead that group of soldiers, you’d better be in service to them first’.

And some people have considerable trouble with this definition of leadership! Part of the problem is that they mistake service for servility and servitude. These aren’t the same thing at all. Servility is about being slavishly submissive and fawning—and, worse, about pretending to be these things. We’ve all experienced this sort of ‘service’ and it is unhelpful to everyone.

In any organisation, leadership is about creating and maintaining a ‘facilitating environment’ in which the people in that organisation can thrive. And, by so doing, the organisation thrives and succeeds.

Further material:
> A short piece about the «facilitating environment»
> Leadership

A short piece about leadership

Further reading