Learning Leadership

Chapter 9It's Not Just About You

People constantly ask us, “How do you define leadership?” Although we have our definition, before responding we usually turn the question back to the audience and ask, “What do you think is the simplest answer to that question? What's the easiest way to know if someone is a leader or not?”¹

Invariably, the answer we get is some version of this: “They have followers.” That's the aha moment. It is followers who define whether someone is a leader. There can't be any leaders if there aren't any followers. If you are marching forward toward a future destination and you turn around and notice that no one is there, then you're just out for a stroll. Leadership is fundamentally a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who would choose to follow, and if no one is following you, then there's no relationship there. There's nothing that connects what you see to what they want. This is true regardless of whether that relationship is one to one or one to many.

Don't get hung up about being the leader. Even though Alan Daddow, at that time, was the person in charge at Elders Pastoral in Western Australia, he understood that his “responsibility was doing whatever I could to maximize the team's effectiveness.” Repeatedly, upon reflecting on their personal-best leadership experiences, people appreciated that it “wasn't about me; it was about us.” As Sunil Menon, research and development (R&D) director with Avaya, pointed out, “Leaders know that ...