Almost 3,000 years and 12,000 kilometres separate the lives of Lao-tzu and Nelson Mandela, two extraordinary individuals who accomplished extraordinary things during their fleeting appearance on planet earth. And, interestingly, were they to be given the opportunity to share a stage and speak about leadership at a business conference today, the chasm between their perspectives would likely be as broad as the gap that separates them in time and distance.
One (Mandela) would advocate for the leader to be at the front — visionary, bold and a fearless inspirer of followers. The other (Lao-tzu) would go for the leader at the back, a silent and selfless enabler, almost invisible and unrecognized.
Despite the discrepancy between these two approaches, what is fascinating is that each speaker would attract from a modern audience equal numbers of committed advocates, passionately defending polar opposite beliefs about the meaning and nature of leadership.
Diversity of approaches
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, almost every subject of human science — from psychology to history to culture — attracts widely competing perspectives. Why should leadership be any different? But such diversity makes life difficult for professionals who want to understand leadership, to define their own approach and practice, and become better leaders themselves. And ultimately, who is to say that one approach is right and the other wrong?
Career stages and leadership
The situation gets more complicated when we look more closely at the average international company, and at the strange way that professionals have to reinvent themselves as leaders as they progress through their careers. At the beginning of a career, for example, it seems that expertise and performance are all that matter for those seeking to become a first-time leader. To qualify as a “talent”, analytical excellence and task excellence are at a premium. As a result, we see the fast-thinking and fast-performing whizz-kids get to progress to the junior leadership rung of the corporate ladder.
For the mid-career professional, the requirement changes. Here, in addition to task excellence, emotional excellence and maturity are required. You need the ability to build teams and to survive in unfamiliar cultural contexts and outside your comfort zone.
At the most senior level, things are different again. Now, leadership is really about the ability to see the bigger industry picture, to be future-oriented and to think strategically. Indeed, at this point, your performance becomes less significant. Leadership is more about developing the performance of others and/or growing the next set of leaders.
Is leadership really a choice?
At this point, you may believe that things are getting too complicated. Instead of being a leader, you may just want the easy life of followership. After all, who wants all the headache and responsibilities of leadership? Life is stressful enough already. But this line of thinking, I’m sorry to inform you, is deeply flawed. Paul Watzlawick, the Austrian-American communication theorist, once famously said that “one cannot not communicate”. And in a similar way, the truth is that one cannot not lead.
We inevitably have an impact on the people with whom we interact. We cannot not influence others. The only issue is which style of influence or leadership we choose. Imagine, for example, that you are in a room filled with a group of people. Even when everyone is busily talking to each other and is oblivious to your presence, your leadership choices begin.
You can abdicate the responsibility to the loudest person, perhaps the least wise choice, and decide to be led. You can enable others to speak, to bring the most able individuals or group of individuals to the fore. Or you can take on the mantle yourself and begin to talk and influence others more directly.
You can, of course, decide to exercise self-leadership and leave this room for another. The only choices you ever have with leadership are over its scope and style — it’s a question of how, not whether.
We are therefore all leaders — and, curiously, all leaders are therefore born, not made.