Leadership (1): Definition

As the old saying goes, “If you think you’re leading but no-one’s following, you’re just taking a walk.”

Leadership is more than simple influence. Everyone has influence but – contrary to popular belief – not everyone is a leader.

Leadership is influence that moves others towards the things you’re aiming for.

Leadership can be deliberate or incidental but is rarely entirely accidental, because it emerges from the leader’s purposes (“the things you’re aiming for”).

I’ve avoided mentioning “goals” because leadership can be towards very general or undefinable things (“towards the flourishing life”), although it is often specific (“towards getting this house built”) with a clearer sense of outcomes and impact.

Three other things about leadership to get us started:

1. Leadership is always about change, including when it seems to be about preventing change, in which case it is about changing the things that are causing unwanted change.
2. There are good (moral, benevolent, skilled, effective) leaders and bad (amoral/immoral, malevolent, incompetent, stagnant or destructive) ones – your favourite tyrant from history was probably a charismatic and effective malevolent leader.
3. Leadership is messy. It does not happen in your head or on the page, but in the real world with real people. It is much easier to dream, read, write and talk about leadership than to actually do it, let alone do it well.