Lecture

The question comes up early in most leadership courses, and I dread when it comes. The question is: How do you define leadership? And I never know quite how to answer the question because defining leadership is sort of like picking up water in your hands. No matter how tightly you hold your hands, something leaks through.

And leadership definitions usually start as a sentence, and we read them, and then we turn it into a paragraph, and then we turn it into a page. And we still find—after we’ve written a page, there’s still stuff about leadership lying on the desk. It’s almost impossible to get a single definition that captures it all.

I usually respond by saying leadership for whom, by whom, to do what, over what period of time, under what circumstances? Because leadership is so situational that I may do one thing in the name of leadership given a certain set of circumstances that works very well. That same act given a different set of circumstances is disastrous to leadership. So the wonderful professorial response to the question “What is leadership?” is, “Well, it all depends.” It sounds like a copout, but it’s really the best answer to give. H. L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, easy and wrong.”

And that’s sort of like defining leadership. If you don’t know what you’re defining leadership for, it becomes very difficult to define it. I find it’s easier to ask the question, “What does leadership look like?” I find it’s easier to talk about what leadership looks like. Defining art is tougher than analyzing a picture. Defining music is usually a lot more abstract than talking about a song. And talking about leadership without some kind of a context is tougher than asking, “What does leadership look like when it happens?” “How do I know when I’m leading?” “How do I recognize it when I see it?”

I think, simply stated, the result of leadership is that where we are isn’t where we were. Leadership takes us where we “ain’t.” Let’s say I’m sitting . . . well, I am sitting in the Vernon Grounds Library. Let’s say I had a group of people here, and I were to say to them, “I’m going to lead you to the Vernon Grounds Library.” Well, people would say, “We’re already there; how are you going to lead us where we are?”

If I said, “I’m going to lead you from the Vernon Grounds Library to the coffee shop over here,” most everybody in the room would say, “We already know how to get there. We don’t need to be led there.” So leadership implies that we’re going someplace that we’re not, and we need leadership because we don’t know how to get there.

So to say leadership takes us where we “ain’t,” pretty well for me—while the grammar isn’t all that hot—summarizes what leadership is about. Now that moves leadership outside the realm many of us confine it to. We’re not just talking about executives or foremen or bosses or principals or teachers. We’re talking about anybody. We all have a responsibility to move people from where they are to a better place. Parents do this. Scout leaders do this. Friends do this. If I see a friend in a place that he shouldn’t be, and I help that friend go from a bad place to a good place, taking him where he ain’t, I have led that person. So when we talk about leadership in this series of lessons, we’re talking about everyone being a leader. So leadership moves us from one place to another. Good leadership takes us to a better place than we are. That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes we follow a leader, and where we end up is a worse place than we were. We’ve been led, but we wouldn’t call that good leadership because we’re in a worse place than we were.

Effective leadership says, “When we get where we want to be, we’re ready to be led again.” The leader still has followers following, because effective leadership works with the followers in a way that the people are set up to be led again.

The essence of servant leadership, which we’re going to talk about in our next lesson, is that when we get to where we’ve been led, we’re better people for having been led there. Servant leadership talks about a process of leading in such a way that the people who have been led and the leader are actually better people; they’ve learned something through the process of being led.

Bennis and Nanus tell us that there are over 300 definitions of leadership, but we still aren’t clear on what it is. Another writer said, “Leadership is one of the most studied and least understood phenomena on the planet.” So why is that the case? Why is it so difficult to understand what leadership is? Well, as we’ve said before, it’s because it’s so contextual and to come up with a broad, cover-everything definition of leadership may actually do more damage than good.

There are some helpful definitions out there, but whenever we think about leadership, we must always ask ourselves, “Who am I leading? Where am I leading them? How long is this going to take? And what’s it going to look like when we get there?”

Another danger of leadership is treating it as a concept and not an act. Lead is a verb; to lead is an infinitive, which is another verb form. Leading is a participle, another form of a verb. Leadership is something we do. Bennis also told us that, “Most organizations are over-managed and under-led.” And I believe that’s because people get a title or an office, and because we have people in offices, people with titles like “president” or “director” or “leader,” we think we’re being led when in fact we’re not being led.

Leadership takes us someplace. Management helps us do what we’re supposed to do while we are in that place. But the reason Bennis laments the fact that we’re over-managed and under-led is that we have organizations in a rapidly changing environment that aren’t changing; they’re not going anyplace, because nobody is asking the questions in order to keep up with our changing world. In order to deal with the complexity of our changing world, we need to be thinking differently about where we’re going than we’re thinking now.

For a person to say, “I am a leader,” but they’re not doing what leaders do, is a very subtle, but a very destructive, thing. If I tell you I’m an athlete, and you ask me, “Do you golf?” And I say, “No.” You say, “Well, do you play tennis?” And I say, “No.” You say, “Do you run? Are you a cyclist?” And I keep saying, “No.” And you say, “Well then how come you call yourself an athlete?” And I say, “Well I watch sports on TV.” You would probably say to me, “Well that makes you something, but it doesn’t make you an athlete.”

Golfers golf, runners run, boxers box, and leaders sit in an office with a title and pretend they’re leaders. No, leaders lead. If we want to be known as a leader, we have to do what leaders do.

In our next sessions we will talk about what exactly do leaders do.