Primal Lexicon for Leaders: It's never too *leit- to go forth

The word lead is both simpler and more complicated than it needs to be.

Peeling back to the Indo-European root of the word, we get *leit-, which basically meant to "go forth." It's not in any way an unuseful basic interpretation when you think about it. To ask yourself if you are leading, ask if you are "going forth", moving forward, taking initiative, putting yourself out there into the uncertain future, being accountable and taking responsibility (for others). Being bold. Being curious.

This notion of going forth followed the word's development into Proto-Germanic (*laidjanan), with the sense of travel and movement, and by the time it landed in Old English it was liean and (causative) l?dan - with an intriguing broad range of definitions encompassing:

• cause to go with oneself
• march at the head of
• go before as a guide
• accompany and show the way
• carry on
• sprout forth, bring forth
• pass (one's life)

All of the above are useful reminders of what it means to lead, and what we ought to mean when we invoke the term in relation to ourselves or others.

Interestingly, Indo-European had a large number of words that equated to the notion of leading, several of which I will introduce later in this series. Our contemporary use of the term lead is a bit more catch-all and therefore potentially vague; we have to dig a little to pull out those (I think important) notions of "go with", "accompany", "guide", "carry on" (a potentially useful pun there, when you consider some less than ideal leadership behaviour), "sprout", "bring", "forth" and "passing life".

An intriguing sidebar here might be to also mention the word littoral, with the sense of being alongside or in the general region of a sea (or lake) shore - basically the edge where the land ends and the sea "moves away" or "goes forth". Admittedly, this may be from our Indo-European root *leit- or another root *lei- ("to flow"). For those of you who enjoy a more poetic twist on the notion of leadership, the sense of negotiating edges and transitioning from one medium to another, or even going forth on voyages, may appeal.

An inevitable question in this space always lands somewhere in distinguishing leadership from management. I'll come to that one later as well, but a preview would be to say that to genuinely lead you need more than your hands. And people are not horses.

This is a new entry in my ongoing series of articles in 2021 titled A Primal Lexicon for Leaders, where I take common terms we bandy around in organisational management and leadership and peel them all the way back to their Indo-European roots. The etymological unpacking of these terms can bring us back to a more primal sense of things, and potentially some refreshing insights.

Check out other recent entries in the Lexicon: *kwel- (culture as a turning of things) and *lois- (to learn by following or finding the track).