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In This Episode:
“Leadership is about building relationships.” “Leadership is about asking the right questions.” These statements sound good, and the things they name are often genuinely worth doing. But calling any one function the point of leadership narrows your focus to a piece of the job and quietly makes you less effective at the whole of it. This episode explains why, and what leadership is actually about.
What You’ll Learn
- Why saying “leadership is about X” turns one function of leadership into the whole point of it, and why that framing makes leaders less effective
- What happens when you believe leadership is about decision-making: you become a bottleneck, make worse decisions, and disempower your team
- Why relationships and results aren’t opposites, and what gets lost when you treat building relationships as the whole job
- Why even well-intentioned “it’s not about A, it’s about B” framings, like the popular line about caring for those in your charge, still leave you with an incomplete picture
- Why a clear definition of leadership matters: if leadership can mean anything, it means nothing
Resources Mentioned
- Peter Northouse’s definition of leadership (paraphrased throughout this series)
- Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, source of the widely quoted line “Leadership is not about being in charge, it is about taking care of those in your charge”
Transcript
When someone says leadership is about X, it’s about this or about that, they’re usually wrong. Now, that may seem a little bit arrogant to say that, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but let me explain why I say that.
When people say leadership is about this, when you’re saying it’s about something, you’re saying that’s the main focus of it.
When “Leadership Is About X” Falls Short
What happens when people say it’s about something, they’re usually just taking a function of leadership that’s maybe important, but then they say that’s what leadership is about in whatever context they’re trying to say it. So, for example, you may hear things like “leadership is about building relationships,” “leadership is about decision-making,” “leadership is about taking care of those under your charge.”
And we could go on: “leadership is about problem solving” and so on.
Good Things That Aren’t What Leadership Is About
And these are, or can be, good things, right? It’s good to build relationships with your team.
Leadership—you can’t lead without influence, and building relationships is a kind of a big part that can help you build influence. But it’s not what leadership is about; it’s just part of it to be able to lead well.
Decision-Making
As a leader, you should make decisions at times, but it’s not about decision-making. If in fact, if you focus on that definition—if you say that’s what leadership is about, it’s about decision-making—then you’re likely to want to make all the decisions because that’s what leadership is about.
And then if you do that, then you become a bottleneck. You probably make worse decisions because you’re making decisions you shouldn’t, that you should be passing down.
Your people feel disempowered because you’re making all the decisions. And and the list could go on.
Decision-making’s good, but it’s not what leadership is about.
“Taking Care of Those Under Your Charge”
Even with the “taking care of those under your charge,” and that comes from a popular saying and I love the work of the person who is attributed this quote—that leadership is about taking care of those under your charge. And that’s a good thing, but ultimately, that’s not what leadership is about.
It’s what you do to generally lead well. You take care of the people under your charge versus the opposite that it’s often saying is it’s not about being in charge, right?
So that’s a good thing; it’s just not what leadership is about.
Why This Matters
So it’s not that these aren’t good things or things that you shouldn’t do. But when we say something is about something, then that becomes, like we said earlier, the focus.
And then that’s what you act on, and that’s what you kind of focus again on doing. And when you focus on the wrong things, it makes you less effective.
And when we keep saying things like “leadership is about this” and “leadership is about that” and people embrace that, or if you embrace that, then you’re getting a false mentality of what leadership is really about. And that again affects your actions and keeps you from being as effective as you should be or could be because you are doing or focusing on the wrong things and maybe even doing the wrong things.
You may be neglecting things that are important because of your faulty view of what leadership is about.
The Relationships vs. Results Trap
We talked about decision-making, but for example, with relationships, if you believe that building relationships is what leadership is about, or even taking care of people, and that’s your focus, and you neglect results and having the hard conversations and all of that that goes with with that, then you may have great relationships with people, but nothing’s happening.
You’re not getting anywhere. And sometimes people put results and relationships as binary, like one or the other, you can’t have both.
And that’s that’s false, because you can have good relationships and you can set good expectations and you can hold those people to those expectations all together.
In fact, if you want to be effective, that’s what you need to do.
The Car Analogy
Think of a car. A car is made to get you places.
But if I said a car is about its wheels or about turning, which is something you do with the car—you turn on the road—it’s an accurate thing, cars turn, but I’m not being complete with that. I’m being incomplete; I’m not being accurate about what a car is about.
So What Is Leadership About?
So the question is: what is leadership about? If all those other things aren’t—and again, those generally are functions or things that leaders do, actions that leaders take is that what’s often said, “leadership is about this,” “leadership is about that.”
If those aren’t what leadership is about, what is leadership about? I think the best thing we can do is look at the definition of it.
Here’s a paraphrased version of Peter Northouse’s definition, and we’ve talked about this before. And when you look at other definitions that are from people or organizations that have, I guess you could say, respect or whatever when it comes to it, you have something similar to his definition.
They use different words, but it generally leads to the same thing. And it’s this: leadership is the process of guiding people toward the accomplishment of a goal through influence.
That’s what leadership is about. It’s about you taking people somewhere.
And of course, through influence because that’s a part of leading, because if you’re forcing people, you’re not really leading; it’s through the influence. You have to have the direction, you have to be moving people and have the influence with people.
If you’re not taking people somewhere, then you’re not really leading.
Even Reframed Comparisons Fall Short
Now, sometimes people frame, when it comes to saying leadership is about something, they frame it as a comparison. Kind of like one of the examples before: it’s not about being in charge, but taking care of those in your charge.
I’ve done this before in some of the things I’ve said. It can be easy to do because you’re saying it’s not this, but this. But I think it’s still something we have to be careful about.
I’ll give you another example. So we had the one, here’s this one: “leadership isn’t about having the answers, it’s about asking the right questions.” And it may seem good because you’re correcting something bad that sounds bad so the “about” after it that follows it feels right.
But the thing is, it’s still not complete. Leadership isn’t about asking the right questions. That’s a good thing to do, something you should do, and if you do that well, it will help you lead well, but that’s not what leadership is about.
So even with those, we have to be careful.
Why a Clear Definition Matters
And with these things, those things just continue to contribute to the confusion about leadership. There’s a lot of confused—there’s so much stuff out there, so much confusion—and when we keep saying things are about leadership that are just functions, it just continues making the situation worse or continues to make it muddled.
Now, someone again may say, like I mentioned, that it might be arrogant for me to say, “Hey, some things are wrong about leadership, what they’re about.” My answer to that is, if there’s no standard of what leadership is and what it’s about, then leadership itself has no meaning.
Because if there’s no clear definition of “this is leadership, this is what it’s about,” if it can be anything, then it means nothing. For it to have meaning, there has to be a clear definition of what leadership is and is not and what it’s about.
Closing Thoughts
So leadership isn’t a function, it’s not a single action you take, it’s not the how you do it, just what it is. It’s guiding people somewhere through influence.
Would love to hear your thoughts. thomas@realtruthleadership.com. Online training at realtruthleadership.com.
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Hope this helps. See you next time.