Why The Leadership Safe Is Empty

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

-Aristotle

I invite you to try the following thought experiment. Imagine you’re in a room with a hundred senior people from various disciplines. Each of them gets a scrap of paper, and is asked to write down their definition of “leadership”. Next, the scraps of paper are handed in, and carefully compared.

Twenty-five years of working in this field tells me two things. Firstly, you're likely to get a hundred useful, thoughtful definitions of leadership. Secondly, no two definitions will agree.

As in the shiny world of advertising, where everything is “unique”, every idea is “new” and your laundry is always “brighter than bright”, the term “leadership” has been used in the service of so many agendas that it’s lost its meaning. It’s become too bound up in the politics of who’s more important than who, who has the corner office, whose viewpoint should be listened to, and whose teaching methodology should be followed to the exclusion of all others as the One True Grail.

If you still doubt that “leadership” has lost much of its punch and meaning, type the word into Google and see how many used car dealerships claim to be leading sales with leading models that lead on price with great industry leadership in leading ways. And they’re cleaner than clean and totally unique, too.

We’ve emphasized “leadership” too much in modern workplace rhetoric. That’s because we believe it to be the glamorous choice, the choice which reflects best on us as the ones who get to intone “leadership” while looking wise. As a result, followership is out of fashion. When we glamorize the patina of “leadership” – whatever it may mean – as the one natural and desirable prize at work, we disempower all the workers we actually rely on, relegating them to secondary status.

Who wants to be a follower, when the glamor of who gets lauded and preferred clearly shows that followership is a second-rate thing, the booby prize? The unintended effect is like trying to build a car from steering wheels, and it works just as well.  Too many organizations are characterized by a cadre of “leaders” locked in a death match for importance, while the great mass of staff wander around as spectators like Banquo’s ghost, with little or no stake in the game.

Wordsmithing definitions of “leadership” in committees doesn’t help either. Like a maiden aunt with halitosis at a wedding, it simply carries too much baggage to be helpful. The military is an exception – each service knows exactly what they mean by “leadership” – but a broad civilian definition will always fall prey to an undignified scramble for the survival of individual viewpoints. 

It’s just too shiny a prize, not the modern idea or the magic bullet we really need for today’s work teams. We need to escape from the prison of “leadership” by rejecting the word itself. 

If anything is a magic bullet in team and group psychology, it's behavior. When we want results in a work team, let’s start by throwing the word “leadership” over the fence and instead listing the specific behaviors we'd like to see, focusing on helping everyone in the team play their position with equal status and inclusion.

List the needed behaviors in detail, avoiding all jargon, and using plain language that everyone can understand. Long words and intellectualized approaches frequently conceal fuzzy and untested ideas. People with serious experience in running work teams will have no trouble making such a list. And when others want to advise you, don't be shy to ask them what they have led, personally, themselves.

Focusing on behaviors rather than buzzwords is more effective because behaviors are definable, rehearsable and adjustable. Buzzwords aren’t. Or as former Secretary of State Colin Powell once said, “Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgement.”

We don’t need to be too Orwellian. We can still say “leadership” as shorthand in casual conversation, just as we can still say “love” and “beauty”. It’s just that we all have different definitions of these things, so it has to be okay that collectively, none of us really knows what these terms mean. At work though, where precision matters more, let’s stop pretending that there’s a secret universal definition of “leadership” locked away in a safe somewhere that we can all agree on. The safe is empty.

It's a challenge to emerge into a world where we can't appeal to old, ill-defined terms, and can't just reach for a comfortable brand name as we might for a Starbucks. Instead, the modern quest should be to focus on the hard and unglamorous work of drilling down on specific behaviors, and walking the rocky road of thinking for ourselves. It’s not easy, and at times can be murderously difficult.

But that, as they say, is why they pay us the big bucks.

John Kolm is an internationally published best-selling author, a former intelligence officer and the CEO of teamwork and leadership (there’s that word again) development company Team Results USA. He’s also a member of the SEA’s Corporate Advisory Council, and can be reached at [email protected], www.teamresultsusa.com, Facebook and Twitter at @teamresultsusa, and LinkedIn at team-results-usa .