‘Leadership’ is the wrong word

Being out in front of an organization or a movement requires a stewardship mindset

Read the previous article here.

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If you’re a business owner1 today, you are bombarded with leadership best practices.

“Great leaders possess dazzling social intelligence, a zest for change, and above all, the ability to set their sights on the things that truly merit attention,” they say.

“Leaders must motivate, instruct and discipline the people they are in charge of,” they say.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way,” they say.

Nice. These pull-quotes all sound super efficient and catchy. Of course you’re supposed to motivate, instruct, discipline, know, go, and show the way with “dazzling social intelligence!”

But these things are hard. They’re not linear and they require a John Deer tractor to unpack because my experience is not your experience, therefore my strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots are not yours—which can make it hard to translate each of those catchy little phrases into actionable steps.

That’s a problem in a culture telling you to to constantly maximize your time. I mean, reading through a leadership and management blog makes me feel bad sometimes because my life and companies don’t function with the efficiency of a 1980s, Japanese Toyota factory.

Which is why I think it’s so important to talk about leadership: leadership is often not efficient. And it’s often not efficient because you’re not dealing with a conveyor belt. You’re dealing with organizational structures and the internal political coalitions that come inherent in those structures; you’re dealing with newborn ideas and the fragility that comes with being responsible for them; and you’re dealing with people (including yourself) who are wonderful and brilliant and volatile and unpredictable.

In short: you can maximize efficiency to manage the creation of a product because the steps don’t often change. But it is incredibly hard to maximize your efficiency as a leader because you’re not in control. And so many of our leadership gurus feed our egos by making us think that leadership is all about control.

Let’s take another look at those quotes.

“Great leaders possess dazzling social intelligence, a zest for change, and above all, the ability to set their sights on the things that truly merit attention.”

It’s about you. You control where people put their attention!

“Leaders must motivate, instruct and discipline the people they are in charge of.”

It’s about you. You are the source of people’s motivation! You are responsible for their instruction and discipline!

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”

It’s about you. In this instance you are “the way,” incarnate!

And so, by these definitions I think “leadership” requires an ego. You are “the leader.”

But what if we reframed it? Not leadership, but stewardship. If you’re “in charge,” your job is to guide and steward that thing— to leave it better, healthier, more solutions- and people-focused than you found it.

Don’t get me wrong, in order to steward something well, you need to lead, demand excellence and improvement, and be clear about your vision and expectations. All of those things are still true and that’s why we need to focus on leadership in the first place.

But let’s not lose the forest for the trees: being a good steward is encouraging leadership at every level. That means knowing when to stand down and let other people get out front because it’s not about you, and it means knowing when to prioritize peoples’ humanity as individuals over their efficiency as workers.

One of the challenges we face all around the world right now is a bias towards “strong” leadership. We like leaders who already have wealth and status because we think their wealth and status bring legitimacy and security with it. We like eccentric leaders eccentric because we’ve idolized the mad genius. We like a leader who lays down the law because so much of our world feels unsteady right now.

Your job is to resist the feeling that doing what feels “strong” actually makes you and your organization strong.

To know the difference between backbone and bravado.

To know that often acting on what you’re feeling strongly can be, at times, a kind of weakness, an impulse that will pass—but if you act on that anger or frustration2 and take it out on an employee or partner, vendor, customer, spouse or friend you will eventually be forced into a position where you need to double-down on the wrong thing or apologize.

You don’t want to have to do either.

You need to know that you are in a position of leadership in order to stewardsomething to its next phase—and there’s a lot of strength and power in that, all on its own.

1 FYI, while I may reference startups and startup culture throughout this series, when addressing you, the reader, I’m going to simply refer to your startup as a business.

2 And, sometimes, if you act on that good feeling without thinking it through. It’s not just the “bad” feelings that can get you in hot water.