When people say leadership is about X, they’re usually naming a function of leadership, not its definition, and mistaking the two has real costs.
If someone says that leadership is about “X,” they’re probably wrong. Why?
One reason is when people say leadership is “about” something, they’re often taking a small piece of it and using the word “about” to make it the overall whole of leadership.
They may talk about something good that leaders do or may take a function of leadership. For example:
- Leadership is about building relationships.
- Leadership is about decision making.
- Leadership is about taking care of those under your charge.
These are or can be good things that leaders do. The problem is, they aren’t what leadership is about.
And there is a danger to this.
When you say leadership is about something, you are saying that something is the focus of it, the main idea of it. And since it’s the focus, you or others may act and focus on those abouts. When you focus on the wrong things, you become a less effective leader.
If someone believes leadership is about building relationships and taking care of people, and then neglects results and hard conversations in that pursuit, they may have good relationships but nothing actually moves.
If someone believes leadership is about decision making and makes all the decisions because of that, worse decisions get made, employees get frustrated, and that person becomes a bottleneck.
It’s like a car. A car is made to get you places, but if I said a car is about its wheels or about turning, I’d be naming something incomplete. Wheels and turning matter, but they don’t define the whole car or what it’s about.
That leads to the question, “What is leadership about?”
Let’s look at the definition of it. Here’s a paraphrased version of Peter Northouse’s definition:
Leadership is the process of guiding people toward the accomplishment of a goal through influence.
That’s what it’s about: you are taking people somewhere through influence (the trust, respect, and relationship you build with people that cause them to act with and for you). You have to have both parts of that. If you ignore either one, you aren’t leading.
Granted, sometimes people frame this as a comparison (I’m guilty of it as well). For example: “Leadership isn’t about having the answers, it’s about asking the right questions.” Because it’s correcting something that sounds bad, the “about” that follows feels right.
But asking the right questions is still a function, not the definition or what it’s about. It’s the same issue as before, just wearing a better disguise. It still contributes to the confusion of what leadership is really about.
Now, someone may think that it’s arrogant to say that some are wrong about what they say leadership is about. However, if there is no standard of what leadership is then leadership itself has no meaning.
For it to have meaning there has to be a clear definition of what leadership is and is not.
It’s not a function. It’s not an action you take. It’s not how you do it. It’s what it is: the definition.
