I Finally Realized the Difference Between a Leader and a Boss
I had this thought cross my mind one night in my room when I was recollecting, and then I remembered a workshop held in my secondary school where the facilitator spoke on being a leader and being a boss. Before drafting this, I never really understood the things he said, even though I remembered most of them, until one evening while I was at a mini restaurant with a friend of mine, and as he spoke, I could differentiate a leader from a boss.
Leaders aren’t bosses. Although these two classes of people give commands and end up getting things done, there’s a big difference in how they work.
A leader leads the way in times of fear. Bosses don’t even face fear; they transfer fear.
When there’s a dangerous or uncomfortable situation, bosses mobilize people to fix or find out what the problem is, but leaders lead the way in finding out or fixing what the problem is.
It’s like the case of “Who will bell the cat?” The rats came up with a very clever way of alerting themselves to the cat’s presence by tying a bell around the neck of the cat. The only problem with this idea was that no one was willing to take the risk of tying a bell around the cat’s neck. It must have been a leader who summoned the meeting; if it were a boss who did, he would have assigned one of the rats the task of belling the cat. The leader knew how dangerous the task was and how scared everyone else was, and he was as scared as his subjects.
A boss is never a team player because he cannot relate properly to the other team members. A leader is a team player, a functional part of an activity, and a person who understands all that is going on. He relates well with the other team members, understands their problems, and even motivates them to be better versions of themselves.
A leader is humble because humility is the surest way of getting to people. No one would open up to a person who comes with the impression of trying to impose whatever on them.
People want to be respected, and this kind of respect is subtle. Bosses don’t come down well enough to subtly respect people, can never get to them, can never understand people, and will never motivate people.
A leader is selfless, but a boss is selfish and wants everything done in such a way that the result pleases him the most.
A leader respects his followers, but a boss takes advantage of his followers.
While recollecting, three people and one thing crossed my mind. The three people are a few examples of practical leaders I’ve known so far in their capacity, and I’d like to talk about them.
The first person was my secondary school administrator. She passed away in an attempt to save the students before the school was hit by an explosion. I wasn’t present at the scene, but from different eyewitness accounts, I can say that she might have been as scared as everyone else on the day of the incident, but one thing’s for sure: she could have “selfishly and fearfully” backed out to safety like everyone else; after all, she wasn’t the cause and could not stop the explosion. But she went on to take the risk of ensuring, to the best of her ability, that all the students were in a place safe enough from being hurt.
There’s also another story of her saving a student from being trapped in a place when there was a fire, but that was in the previous school she was assigned to, and I don’t have any eyewitness details on that, so I can’t say much about it.
The second person is the former student body president of my department at the university. One day we had an event going on at the faculty, and students needed to clean up the place before time, but the volunteers were few. I was surprised by the way this guy humbled himself and fetched water to flush the filthy toilets.
Oh well, there was no janitor in charge of the toilet at that time. Perhaps he knew that even though he was the student body president, assigning that task to any other student would have been a disrespectful thing to do, and if he didn’t do it, no one else would have done it, and there wouldn’t have been a convenient restroom for the students and guests on that day.
The third person is my classmate, whom everyone acknowledges as a leader. During practical classes, he buys the markers to be used for teaching, but what I admire the most about him is the fact that there are some experimental procedures that, for some reason, students are reluctant to carry out, but this guy just does them because nobody else is willing to. It may not seem like a big deal, but having this guy around lets you rest assured that practical classes will go as smoothly as possible.
The fourth thing is that place in the Bible (Matt 23:11) where Christ said to His disciples and the crowd, “The person among you who is most important will be your servant.” [Easy English Bible]
Christ is our leader; He loves us, and He served us with life by giving up His life as a sacrifice.
There are a lot of other people I would love to write about as case studies for the whole leadership thing, but I believe that anyone reading this already gets the gist by now. These people had to sacrifice something amidst their emotions. That’s what love does. It makes us able to give up something (not necessarily physical) without feeling at a loss. It makes us selfless enough to sacrifice.
A leader is someone who serves and loves their followers. Love makes us strong. Being strong means doing things that people are normally scared of or are unwilling to try. It’s not that these people weren’t reluctant, scared, disgusted, annoyed, or tired; they just knew that something had to be done so that things would be okay. They did something no one else was willing to do because if they didn’t do it, who else would?
Whether leaders are born or made, one thing is certain: leaders are not the people who receive; they are the ones who give, and if you have no love for people, even love manifested in one of its very subtle forms, you can never be a leader because love is sacrificial.
