{"id":1097,"date":"2009-05-11T21:45:24","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T05:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/?p=1097"},"modified":"2009-05-11T21:48:51","modified_gmt":"2009-05-12T05:48:51","slug":"leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Charlie asked the question last week: <a href=http:\/\/www.thisisgoingtobebig.com\/2009\/05\/why-arent-you-striving-to-be-a-leader-in-your-field.html>&#8220;Why aren&#8217;t you striving to be a leader in your field?&#8221;<\/a> which has gotten me thinking about leadership, and what it means to be a leader.  It also sparked an email exchange with a friend on the topic, which led to some interesting thoughts.  <\/p>\n<p>What does it mean to be a leader?  <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Is it being an &#8220;active participant in professional societies, write popular blogs about your industry, get asked to write articles for magazines and regularly speak on conference panels&#8221;, as Charlie suggests?\n<li>Is it being the person on top of the org chart giving orders?\n<li>Is it about knowing more than others?\n<li>Is it being the person who everybody gets along with and goes to with their questions and problems?\n<li>Is it being the person motivating others to achieve more?\n<li>Is it about <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/09\/being-impressive\/>being impressive<\/a>?<\/ul>\n<p>We can probably think of people in all of these categories who we think of as leaders.  So it&#8217;s clear that &#8220;leadership&#8221; is not an easily definable characteristic.  Yet it&#8217;s like obscenity &#8211; we know it when we see it.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps leadership is about helping people achieve their goals.  In other words, if I want to be a leader, I must gain followers, and therefore I must do something that would get people to follow me.  I can do that in a number of different ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I can be an industry spokesperson, with the potential to widely publicize followers who add value, possibly turning them into leaders themselves.\n<li>I can be the organized one, who puts together plans, prioritizes goals, makes sure resources are available, etc. so that my followers efficiently use their time and effort.\n<li>I can be the domain expert, with the experience to understand how to turn ideas into reality and the ability to enhance others&#8217; capabilities by providing them with the knowledge they need to succeed.\n<li>I can be the consensus builder, able to bridge different viewpoints and synthesize them into solutions that are better than any individual contribution.\n<li>I can be the inspirational one, able to convince people to reach deep inside themselves to work harder towards a common goal.\n<\/ul>\n<p>One way to measure leadership might be to see who everybody in the room looks to when a decision needs to be made.  Just because somebody is the manager on the org chart doesn&#8217;t necessarily make them that sort of leader (as <a href=http:\/\/www.randsinrepose.com\/archives\/2008\/10\/12\/the_culture_chart.html>Rands&#8217;s great story about &#8220;The Culture Chart&#8221;<\/a> illustrates).  One can be <A href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/10\/the-guy-theory\/>&#8220;The Guy&#8221;<\/a> to whom others look using any of the methods described above.  <\/p>\n<p>So what can one do to become a leader?  Part of being a leader is understanding one&#8217;s own strengths and weaknesses and choosing a leadership style that matches one&#8217;s tendencies.  <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/15\/becoming-a-technical-leader-by-gerald-m-weinberg\/>Gerald Weinberg&#8217;s book <em>Becoming a Technical Leader<\/em><\/a> offers advice about finding one&#8217;s own path towards leadership.  And, on the flip side, it&#8217;s hard to take somebody seriously as a leader when they are acting in a way that is contrary to their nature &#8211; the engineer trying to schmooze his way to the top, or the MBA spouting half-understood technical jargon.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly I&#8217;m fascinated by this idea of leadership that initially seems so prosaically obvious &#8211; we all know what leadership is &#8211; and yet so difficult to define.  <\/p>\n<p>What do you think defines a leader?<\/p>\n<p>P.S. There were a couple crazy months there, both at work and in life.  Things have calmed down a bit, and I enjoyed a slothful few weeks to recover from the craziness, but it may be time to pick up the posting habit again.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charlie asked the question last week: &#8220;Why aren&#8217;t you striving to be a leader in your field?&#8221; which has gotten me thinking about leadership, and what it means to be a leader. It also sparked an email exchange with a friend on the topic, which led to some interesting thoughts. What does it mean to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-management","category-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1097"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1104,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions\/1104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}