The Essence of Leadership

It is relevant to You.

Today, leadership is more valuable than ever. With increasingly capable machines, we need leadership to leverage our human strengths.

However, when it comes to such a widely discussed concept, it’s hard to find a clear definition. After studying a wide variety of articles, books, and TED Talks on leadership, I hope to extract for you in writing the essence of leadership, presented in a way that’s easy for you to apply to your situation.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly align ourselves.

Why is leadership relevant to YOU?

• leadership actualizes your potential to drive change
• leadership makes solving challenging problems possible through collective effort
• leadership enables you to achieve your goals
• leadership attracts people you like to work with
• leadership lets you understand and connect with incredible people

Anyone can lead, anywhere. Leadership exists far beyond top management. Whether you’re a student, an entrepreneur, a workplace newbie, or someone seasoned in your career, you can benefit from discovering your leadership potential — that starts by knowing how it works.

Defining Leadership

When we Google leadership, here’s what comes up.

Dictionaries: Leadership is the ability of an individual or a group of individuals to influence and guide followers or other members of an organization.

HBR: Leadership is the accomplishment of a goal through the direction of human assistants — a human and social achievement that stems from the leader’s understanding of his or her fellow workers and the relationship of their individual goals to the group’s aim.

Forbes: Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.

There are two common components in all of these definitions:

1. Influence people (understand, relate, maximize effort, guide)
2. Achieve a goal

So, leadership is the ability to influence people to achieve a goal.

The Four Components of Leadership

You might find this definition quite general. Let’s break it down.

How do we influence people to achieve a goal?

To do that, we must know four things:

1. the goal,
2. what it takes to achieve it;
3. the people,
4. how to influence them.

Essentially, we need to know our destination, know our way there, and know how to get our people to go there.

1) Know the goal

It all starts with the Why. We need to know the answers to the following questions:

1. What are we trying to achieve?
2. Why do we need to achieve it?
3. How will we know when we did it?

Make sure the “What” is clear, the “Why” is powerful, and success is defined.

It’s best to follow the classic, SMART guidelines here — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

I want to highlight measurable, attainable, and time-bound.

Attainable means that with our current or future capabilities and efforts, it’s possible to achieve the goal — if not, better put it on hold or find another way to do it.

Measurable means we must define what success looks like. Often, we don’t know where we’re at and how long it’ll take before we reach our destination, and this is dangerous not only because we could go down the wrong path, but also because of how demotivating it is when we don’t get feedback.

And finally, Time-bound. Setting a deadline and following it is very helpful because we humans function at our best when we’re being chased by deadlines — when we’re under the right amount of pressure.

Here’s how they tie together to clarify our goal:

1. What are we trying to achieve? (Specific, Attainable)
2. Why do we need to achieve it? (Relevant)
3. How will we know when we did it? (Measurable, Time-bound)

What you’ll need:

• Domain knowledge, to set relevant goals and evaluate them effectively
• Structured thinking, to break down complexity while seeing the big picture

2) Know what needs to be done

Now that we’ve clarified our goal, we must evaluate where we are right now against where we want to end up — to figure out how we’ll get there.

Why do we need to know what needs to be done? If we don’t know the direction, directing a team will eventually turn into chaos. Think of it like airplanes. If every plane going from Paris to Rome knows where they’re going and what air route to take, they’ll eventually all make it there. But if they’re told they’re going to Rome but not given a map, they’ll probably bump into each other trying to navigate their way or land in Australia.

Results-oriented thinking is important here — you can work backward from the goal to determine what needs to be done to get there.

You also need to prioritize the limited resources you have to allocate them in a way that maximizes results.

The 2nd half of the equation

Knowing the goal and how to get there is only half the equation. Now comes the fun part — the people.

When I watch leaders who are unsuccessful, it seems to always be for the same two reasons:

1. They couldn’t get the job done
2. They got the job done, but their people weren’t happy

Results and people go hand in hand in execution.

No matter how charismatic or how likable someone is as a leader, if they can’t get results, no one will follow them. At the same time, having motivated and satisfied people is the only way to get consistent, sustainable results.

So, to execute optimally, we must, for one, maximize the value each person creates by leveraging their strengths, and for two, motivate them by satisfying their personal needs.

Getting the job done is a must, and that doesn’t have to conflict with making people happy. There are many ways to achieve the same result — effective leaders choose the optimal path to get there, and the optimal path is the optimal people path.

To “optimize” our people, we need to know them first. This leads us to the third step:

3) Know the people

What should we know about our people to lead better?

We need to understand who they are now and who they want to be.

Who they are now is concerned with their strengths, their preferred working style, their skills, their areas of expertise, how they respond to feedback, what annoys them, what excites them, and what motivates them.

Where they want to be is about their learning interests, their career goals, their personal goals, their aspirations, their sense of purpose, and their ideal selves.

4) How to influence your people

The point of knowing our people is to put that understanding to good use, to lead more effectively. Let me explain how you can accomplish this.

How do you get people to follow you? What makes them willing to do what you want them to do?

Leadership is about empowerment, it’s not about taking the spotlight for ourselves, it’s about being the light source and shining our light on others.

It’s not about shouldering all the weight, it’s about delegating it to those who can and want to get the exercise so they can become stronger too.

It’s not about choosing between cold hard results and human emotions, it’s about understanding human emotions and leveraging them to achieve greater results together.

Sure, we can coerce people with our authority to do things once, but can we do it three times, five times, and sustain it long term?

If we start seeing our relationship with others as leaders as a marathon instead of a sprint, then we can focus on our team’s “body parts” to make sure they’re building up cohesive strength instead of burning out. Exactly like in a marathon, a leader is like the head of the body. You need to engage the body parts to run even one step — it’s not meant to be done alone.

Stemming from these principles, here’s what you can do:

• Delegate → I value your strengths, expertise, and interests and give you work that helps you develop into who you aspire to be.
• Challenge → I believe you have potential and you’re capable, and I give you opportunities to challenge you to grow.
• Trust → Go for it, I trust you, if something goes wrong, I’m here for you.
• Coach → I understand you, I respect you, and I’ll share what I know to get you to where you want to be.
• Be fair → I am clear and transparent, I give credit where it’s due, I tell you my honest thoughts, and I put OUR interest before my own.
• Unite → I bring us together, I align us to a meaningful purpose, I address issues right away, and I want you to feel that you belong.

If you’ve kept up until here, thank you — I appreciate your time, and I hope you feel more equipped to lead.

Let me know your thoughts and what content you’d like to see; I hope to bring valuable content to you to help you achieve your goals!