What IS Leadership?

Leadership – it's a lot like love!

We know "it" when we see and experience it, but “it” sure can be hard to pin down with specific words!
Volumes have been written - on love and leadership!!!

We'll even recommend some favorites on leadership - we're dropping the love connection here – but we'd like to make several points about this all-important skill/behavior/trait/competency/concept/practice called leadership .

“All people have untapped leadership potential…
with coaching and practice,  we can all get much better at it.”
Noel M. Tichy, author of The Leadership Engine

#1.  Certainly there is a hierarchy within organizations and most of us immediately connect leadership with the senior or executive positions at the top of that hierarchy.

But leadership is really a process – one that involves skills and abilities whether an individual is an executive or on the organizational front lines.  

Leadership is all about influencing others - to go somewhere or do something – it's all about making people want  to follow you .  And that kind of influence occurs at every stratum of an organization.  

In Good to Great , Jim Collins illustrates Level 5 leadership in his hierarchy of executive capabilities – Level 5 embodies all five levels of the pyramid. Collins' research data revealed “all the good-to-great companies had Level 5 leadership at a time of transition.  Furthermore, the absence of Level 5 leadership showed up as a consistent pattern in comparison companies.”

Good to Great,  page 21-23

#2.   In any organization, the challenge is to develop leadership  characteristics – in any individual, at any organizational level - that will positively impact organizational culture, business goals and results.  Some of those characteristics include (and this is NOT  an all-inclusive list) the following:
(Click the underlined attributes for a specific ALD resource that addresses that trait)

Self-awareness	Inspire trust	Challenge self & others
Deal with ambiguity	Learn from others and the environment	Shake things up
Involved and in touch	Teacher	Create and facilitate change - & create a capacity for change
Risk-taker	Interpersonally competent
Credible Capable of elation, intensity, caring, kindness, even love Generosity Accountability Commitment Set high expectations	Find balance – integrate the important areas of their lives (family-work-community-personal) Model values Enable others to act Encourage growth and development	Attract followers Inspiring  Passionate, a strong belief in purpose & willing to express it with conviction Inspire others to a shared vision A long-term future orientation Fearless – Humble – Willful - Modest … and so much more!

In his seminal work, Leadership , James MacGregor Burns may have
come the closest to a definition when he wrote:

Leadership is leaders inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent
the values and the motivations – the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations - of both leaders and followers.  And the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders see and act on their own and their followers' values and motivations.

#3.   Recognizing that leadership can assert itself anywhere in an organization, your focus for developing leadership characteristics may be on:

• The leadership “body” as it coalesces, understanding each other's values, strengths and needs, to become an effective team to identify and enable the achievement of goals                 
• The leadership team's transformation of organizational culture to enable the achievement of goals                   
• Individuals who may be formally designated leaders and managers or  individuals with no formal title, but an interest in exerting influence over others, becoming a postive informal leader
• Individuals who just want to be the best they can be – everyday -without any ambition to climb an organizational ladder

#4.   That's why ALD's services champion the development of leadership skills at every hierarchical level:  Leaders can transform organizations, but leadership is not a role belonging solely to the organization's high-ranking officials.  Leadership  is manifested in the characteristics and behaviors of people throughout  the organization - at all levels.

So we do not endeavor to be the final word on leadership right here – we do endeavor to work with organizations to develop “leaders” from highly capable individuals to executives.

For your own information, some of our long-time favorites on leadership reading include:

• Jim Collins, Good to Great . HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 2001
• James Autry, Love & Profit-The Art of Caring Leadership . William Morrow and Company. 1991
• Kouzes, James & Posner, Barry, The Leadership Challenge . Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers. 1987
• Buckingham, Marcus & Coffman, Curt, First, Break All the Rules . Simon & Schuster. 1999
• Maxwell, John, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership . Thomas Nelson, Inc. Publisher. 1998
• Maxwell, John, The 21 Indispensible Qualities of a Leader . Thomas Nelson, Inc. Publisher. 1999
• Phillips, Donald, Lincoln on Leadership . Warner Books, Inc. 1992
• Bennis, Warren & Nanus, Burt, Leaders-the Strategies for Taking Charge .  Harper & Row Publishers, 1985.
• Susan Gebelein et al, Successful Executives Handbook , Personnel Decisions International Corp, 2000.
• Napolitano, Carole & Henderson, Lida, The Leadership Odyssey , Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers. 1998