Leadership
Here is John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, on the difference between leadership and management:
For me, leadership is imagining the world that you want and figuring out how to go make it that way and how to get other people to help you… CEOs can be leaders and leaders can be CEOs but they’re hardly synonymous. Same thing with managers—managers can be leaders and leaders can be managers but it’s not a one-to-one relationship.
On this blog, both Ash and I have found ourselves writing about management while generally ignoring matters of leadership. Perhaps this is because we feel unqualified to write about leadership—after all, while we do plenty of “imagining the world that [we] want”, we have only just begun “figuring out how to go make it that way”. Or perhaps we write more readily about management because management is such a thoroughly studied and theorized field, to which it is easy for us to provide incremental commentary. Above all, we probably feel that having a bold, singular vision for the world is not something toward which one can strategize. Whatever the reason, we’re unlikely to provide to write a leadership field guide any time soon.
Nevertheless, it’s useful to be able to distinguish between leadership and management (and other leadership-like characteristics). Here is my attempt at an ostensive definition:
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Scheduling team meetings, planning team outings, ensuring team harmony, productivity and happiness—this is simply competent management. Just because a team is involved and someone is making decisions doesn’t mean that there’s an act of leadership (unless of course friday afternoon beers play an important part in executing on one’s grand vision for the universe).
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Leadership requires one to present a consistent narrative, however outlandish it may be. If the narrative changes slightly to suit the listener, that’s not leadership—that’s pandering. If the narrative changes substantially to suit the listener, that’s probably lying. Either way if that person then buys something, we just call that sales. If they like you but don’t buy anything we’d probably call it marketing.
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To hire in accordance with some formal process or following best practice is not leadership, it’s merely recruiting. Leadership involves convincing one’s friends to quit their jobs, take pay cuts and make life-significant sacrifices in order to work on a project that everybody else thinks is crazy.
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Seeking out the absolute best is tenacity or perhaps just optimism. Leadership means being able to hire them, despite the fact that they’d probably be more successful outside of one’s organization than within it.
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The issuing of short, sharp directives is merely assertiveness. Much like the act of pointing vaguely at the horizon, say, or walking briskly with elevated elbows, it is an occasional artefact of leadership and nothing more. Pay no attention to such practices and certainly don’t engage in them, otherwise you will have succumbed to cargo cult leadership.
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Any act performed on the basis of good advice is not leadership. It is diligence at best and plausible deniability at worst.
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Making an effort to work longer hours than one’s colleagues is not leadership. It’s ineffectiveness.
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Hustle is not leadership, obviously. It’s just hustle. There are still door-to-door salespeople in this world, the best of whom hustle admirably. They are not leaders.
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A member of management who does not understand the company’s core competency can not possibly be leading. Most likely, she is executing a responsibility. This is why most executives aren’t really leaders—they merely execute.
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The act of fixating on a solution is somewhere between advocacy and evangelism. Fixating on a convenient solution, such as a “market opportunity” is even worse—that’s evangelism motivated by opportunism. Leaders fixate on problems, not solutions.
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Using underhanded tactics to achieve one’s outcome is not leadership. It’s being a dick.
Most of the terms in bold represent useful characteristics (even “being a dick” has its place). If you simply want to be successful, you could do so with a handful of these traits. If you want to be a great manager, you need just one or two. But to be a leader… that requires something else.