What is great leadership?

I’m not shying away from subjective topics in this blog, obviously.

To start with, you should know what I think leadership is:

Leadership is creating a future that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Leadership isn’t reactionary or operational: it’s visionary. It’s being able to combine the human capacities of imagination and intellect to mentally develop feasible future scenarios. It’s ideating potential that gets brought to life; thereby, shaping our world’s future.

“Our world’s future” doesn’t have to be on the level of Ghandi, Obama, or Kanye West. Every human who creates a vision that gets brought to life is exhibiting leadership, regardless of the number of people who witness it or are affected by it. You can be a leader of your own life! This perhaps seemingly nonsensical phenomenon is proven by its contrary: people are all too often not leaders of their own lives, rather they are passive victims of the stimuli around them. (This for another article…)

In complimentary contrast, managing is implementing. It’s operational. Ideally, it’s leveraging skills and tools to align people and resources to bring vision to fruition.

Business leadership

Being a leader within an organization narrows this future focus to the people and environments within the scope of the business’s reach. The employees, clients, customers, citizens, and partners, with whom you work - their futures are within your influence as a business leader. The same goes for your market, industry, ecological environment, and community.

You can absolutely be a leader without a formal leadership title.

Great leadership

Let me begin with a disclaimer and public service reminder for those new to this topic: there is no one-size-fits-all leadership style. There is no formula to follow on the path to greatness. How leadership is exhibited should be authentic to the person practicing it and reflective of the unique needs of the business it represents.

Although there is need for customization, in my unimpressively short career thus far I’ve witnessed some common denominators worth sharing. I would call these golden standards that really belong to great leadership across the board. Far wiser than I thought-leaders on this topic have also confirmed and/or inspired the following leadership characteristics:  

Be inspirational

This is directly related to the visionary attribute explained in the basic leadership definition above. Having an un-inspiring vision will not get you far in leading others. Likewise, having a vision and keeping it to yourself will not motivate anyone to help you bring it to life. Inspiring others to see the potential you see and having them voluntarily join you on the journey to bring that potential to life, this is when vision turns into great leadership. The ability to communicate well, one of the most critical skills for impactful leadership, goes hand-in-hand with this trait of inspiring others.

Develop others

As a leader, recognizing human potential is the most important visioning ability to have. It is not your responsibility to come up with the best ideas - you need to be able to recognize great ideas and champion them. But as a leader, it is your responsibility to recognize the unique greatness in the people you serve as a leader. Help them to recognize it themselves and coach them to find ways to bring their potential to life.

The acute awareness that together you are strongest is core to great leadership. Developing human capital is deeply motivating to the recipients of your efforts and will snowball the impact your leadership can have.

Be of integrity

Integrity - and its positive impact on organizations - is best explained by academic Michael Jensen. Paraphrased, he describes having integrity as honouring one’s word. “We can honour our word in one of two ways: first, by keeping our word, and on time; or second, as soon as we know that we won’t keep our word, we inform all parties counting on us to keep our word and clean up any mess that we’ve caused in their lives.”

As a leader, when you exhibit this kind of integrity, you nurture trust. When you say you’ll deliver, you do. You also exhibit humanity: sometimes you can’t deliver on your word and that’s ok. By owning that explicitly when it happens and taking responsibility for any mess made, you role model imperfection and accountability.  

Have humility

As a common denominator to the other elements of great leadership, I present humility.

You are not the goal. You are not the focus of attention nor are you the cause. With ego motivating your action, your results will likely be short-lived at best; thereby, ego is strictly excluded from the “great leadership” golden rules list.

Your organization, your employees, your clients, these are your foci. Your raison d'être is to ensure that things continue to improve far beyond your presence and tenure. You build no dependence on your leadership, you enable and equip your company and colleagues to flourish without you. Your legacy should be the success of those around you, not your fame or esteem.

———

What leadership traits do you think belong on the list of golden standards? Would you add any or trade any? Do you think there should be no standards and all should be customized? Feedback below!