Listen on your favorite app:
In This Episode:
The final part of a three part series on leadership as a buzzword. After covering why it’s a problem and how it got this way, we turn to practical steps: defining leadership clearly, demanding precision in language, and rethinking how we train and hire for it.
What You’ll Learn
- Why defining leadership clearly and consistently is the first and most important step toward fixing the buzzword problem
- How to spot when someone is using “leadership” as a stand in for something more precise, like character development, strategy, or entrepreneurship
- Why it’s okay that not everyone wants to be a leader, and why pushing everyone toward it doesn’t actually help
- Why sharing and reposting feel good, fluffy leadership content keeps the cycle going, even when the intentions behind it are good
- How vague performance reviews, job descriptions, and interview questions about “demonstrating leadership” quietly hurt hiring and development
- The difference between personality based leadership training and training that actually teaches the skill of leading people
- Why hiring for technical skill alone, like promoting a great individual contributor straight into management, often backfires, and what to look for instead
Resources Mentioned
- Peter Northouse’s definition of leadership (paraphrased in this episode)
Transcript
Welcome to the Real Truth About Leadership, where we debunk myths and teach what works. In the past couple of episodes, we’ve talked about how leadership has become a buzzword, that the biggest buzzword of leadership is leadership itself.
And that’s an issue because as a buzzword, then the meaning’s lost. And when leadership means anything, then basically it means nothing.
And if it means nothing, and if there’s no clear definition of leadership, of what leadership is, then we keep getting bad leadership. Two episodes ago, we talked about the issues behind it and how it’s happening and the ways it’s happening.
We talked about the why it’s kind of happened, what created this or what is kind of perpetuating it in the last episode. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about things that we can do to help end it being a buzzword, just steps that we can take to stop it and things we can do about it.
Define Leadership Well
One of the first and biggest steps we can take to help fight it being a buzzword is for us to start defining it well and using that definition and excluding things that don’t really fit it. And you’ve heard me use a definition throughout this process, and again, it’s a paraphrase of Peter Northouse’s definition.
And this definition is very similar to others, they just use different words, but basically they mean the same thing. And it’s the process of guiding people toward the accomplishment of a goal through influence.
Or a simpler version: guiding people somewhere through influence.
Advocate for Precision in Language
So, first step, we need to define what leadership is and use it. Secondly, we need to advocate for precision in the words we use and that others use and stop using leadership as a cheap substitute for everything.
Stop using it as a catch-all. When we talk about leadership, we need to actually talk about leadership.
If we’re talking about communication skills, or goal setting, or other kinds of personal development, character education, whatever it means, let’s just call it that. If we’re teaching goal setting, call it goal setting.
Now, if you’re helping leaders develop goal setting, you could call it goal setting for leaders if you’re specifically talking about for leaders to help their goal setting. But just calling something leadership because it sounds good just keeps hurting us.
So, we need to advocate for precision and make sure what we’re calling things is the accurate term for it.
Examine What Others Mean by “Leadership”
When other people start using the word leader and leadership, we should examine what they really mean by that. Because, again, it’s used often.
So, we should take a look at it. Is—are they really talking about leadership, or are they talking about something else?
Are they talking about character development? Are they talking about strategy? Are they talking about entrepreneurship? What are they talking about?
And the more we can encourage others to be more precise in their terms, then the more we’ll cut out the buzzword. But it also helps you, like, if you examine, oh, it’s leadership something, what do they really mean?
And it can keep you from getting hooked into that thinking that you’re going to learn something about leadership when you’re not if you dive deep and look to see what the term—what they really mean by that.
Stop Pushing Everyone to Be a Leader
We should also stop this mentality of always pushing everyone to be a leader. Now, granted, leadership is a skill and it’s something I believe anybody can learn if they want to put the effort into it.
But some people, especially when it comes to roles, not everyone wants to be a leader in that way. And that’s okay. It’s okay to be a follower.
And truth is, probably not everybody needs to be—we really don’t want everyone to be a leader in that way. But stopping this overall push of everyone be a leader, or there’s a leader in you that needs to come out, and all of those things, which doesn’t necessarily help in the process.
Stop Posting the Cheap Leadership Content
Another step to take is to stop posting the cheap leadership stuff online. Or stop resharing it, and stop liking it.
All the feel-good, motivational, superficial stuff, whether quotes or whatever it is, or the things that are calling leadership as this and leadership is that when it’s really not. Stop reposting and stop posting that.
Instead, learn what good leadership is and post about that. And I get it, social media rewards the cheap fluff stuff that gets likes.
But if we really want to help people, if we really want to change leadership, then we need to start making sure what we post and repost is accurate.
Be Clear About What Leadership Means in Your Organization
Now, as an organization, if you are part of an organization in any kind of management role, that you lead people in any kind of way, then you need to be clear what you mean about leadership. When you’re telling people to be leaders, when you’re asking people to demonstrate leadership, you need to make sure you’re defining leadership well and what you mean by that.
Often things in performance reviews, job descriptions are very vague when it comes to leadership. Especially, again, with it being a buzzword, things like “demonstrate leadership,” what do you mean by that?
If you’re grading people on their leadership, make sure it actually has something to do with leadership. Make sure it’s specific that people know what leadership is, what’s expected.
Hiring and Interviews
When you are hiring and you have your job descriptions, make sure you’re being specific about it. Make sure that when you’re doing interviews and things that you know what you mean by leadership and what you’re looking for, that everybody knows as they’re hiring.
So that everybody has this one definition that they’re going by of what they’re looking for as a leader, in a leader, for a leader, when they’re trying to hire a leader. Ask people how they define leadership as you’re interviewing them.
And again, make sure people know exactly what you’re looking for, what that definition is, and what’s making good leadership and not.
Train Actual Leadership, Not Fluff
And in your company, make sure you teach and train actual leadership as leadership. Avoid the fluff, avoid calling things leadership that’s not.
Again, communication skills and stuff are things that you want to be able to do well as a leader, right? Just be careful just calling something leadership.
Be specific about it: helping you communicate better as a leader, things of that nature, versus just a blanket leadership thing.
A Personality-Based Training Example
And again, make sure it’s actual leadership. I know one organization I talked with or some people in with, they—the company or the organization spent a lot of money on this leadership training, and basically it was personality-based.
And one of the guys was like, “I never knew so much about my personality mattered in leadership,” or it wasn’t exactly like that, but it was interesting that that was the whole focus. And a lot of the training I saw from that organization was about more duties, that was their leadership training.
It was the duties of the roles versus how to actually lead people. And the whole actual leadership part was just your personality, which is not effective leadership training.
Principles First, Then Adjust to the Situation
Like, what are—what makes good leadership? What are the skills you need to learn?
Help people learn them, but also how, like, this is—again, I keep using this analogy—you have a foundation, the basic principles of good construction, right? Like you’re building a building, especially a tall building, there’s certain things you need to do to make sure it stands and doesn’t fall over.
Good principles of construction. Now, what you do depends on the building you’re building, right, based off of that.
And so as a leader, there’s certain principles of leadership that make a good leader—or that make, I should say, make effective leadership that will help you be effective. Now, what you do based off that depends on the situation.
There’s different skills you can learn, different things, but you need to have the foundation and you need to adjust based on the needs of the situation. And those are some two things you can teach.
Hire for the Right Reasons
And lastly, when you’re hiring for people, make sure you hire people who actually know how to lead, or who have that teachable spirit, who know how to build influence with others and so on. Because if you’re trying to train up new leaders, yes, they may not know it super well yet, but if they have that teachable attitude, they have the right motive about leading, about serving versus just being narcissistic and being about themselves.
If you find the right people for that, then you can train them for that. Or if you’re looking for a leader, make sure, again, you’re hiring someone that you’re not just hiring for technical abilities.
Because sometimes that’s one of the biggest mistakes is people hire someone because they were a good graphic designer to be the manager of graphic designers, but often those are two different jobs, two different skill sets. They don’t equate each other, right?
So, make sure you’re hiring for the right reasons.
And that’s one reason we get, again, some bad CEOs and stuff, because you have people in the boards who may not know leadership well and they hire a CEO like, “Well, we need someone who’s good with marketing.” So, people don’t always move up because of leadership skills.
And we know that. Sometimes it’s politics, sometimes it’s because they just have a good technical ability and so on, and so they—they move up for the wrong reasons and it just hurts.
Closing Thoughts
All that being said, those are just some things that we can do. Some of the most, again, the most important is just to be to define leadership well and be precise in our language and make sure what we’re posting and doing is accurate.
And the more we can do it, the more of us that do it, the more we can fight the buzzword. The more we say, “No, this isn’t leadership, this is leadership,” the more we can start fighting the buzzwordiness that leadership has become.
But I would love to ask you, what do you think are ways that we can end the buzzword of leadership? What are some steps that we can take?
Would love to hear from you. And I’ll see you next time.