What we talk about when we talk about leadership
Leadership is more than a booming voice and a big idea. It’s the ability to work intentionally in the direction of your values or goals, and to make others want to come along with you. And it takes different skills than we’ve been taught.
“Many people who’ve watched me lead couldn’t tell that I was doing anything because what I was doing — listening, asking questions to help people clarify themselves to each other, making sure everyone got to talk, bringing difficult issues up front so we could talk about them instead of ignoring them — didn’t look like the public performance of leadership that they knew how to recognize.
In my experience and that of my women friends, this happens frequently to women, and to anyone else who doesn’t do one of the stereotypically gendered-male public performances of leadership.”
This Twitter thread summed up so perfectly both what drew me to leadership work…and also what makes me want to scream in most conversations about leadership.
We’ve been so acculturated to think of a leader as the charismatic, authoritative person in the front of the room, we struggle to realize that there’s so much more to leadership than a booming voice and a big idea.
So what is leadership, really? If you ask me, it’s pretty simple: leadership is the ability to work intentionally in the direction of your values or goals, and to make others want to come along with you.
Sometimes the best way of doing that is to stand up and rally a room around a cause. But oftentimes, it’s actually much more effective to slow down and see what’s stopping people from getting on board. To talk things through until they feel clear. To mediate disagreements about the best way to get from here to there. To ask questions, build rapport, and generate trust.
All of those are leadership skills. We just don’t often call them that.
That’s a problem. Because we don’t label these skills as essential to good leadership, we don’t often see them on performance reviews or consider them must-haves in a hiring process. We let people who are loud and confident get away with being jerks, because they’re “performing” in the ways we count.
And it’s not just that our culture lets others get away with lacking these skills. It also encourages us to devalue them in ourselves.
Over the past year, I’ve heard from more clients and workshop participants than I can count that they just aren’t sure whether they’re really leaders. Sure, they’re good at listening, they’ll say. Or at creating consensus. Or at organizing projects. But those aren’t leadership skills. They’re “just” people skills or ops work. “Anyone” could do those things.
I’m here to say: nope. Those are leadership skills. And they matter so much — especially right now, a year-plus into a pandemic when everyone’s beyond fried.
It’s not just me. I asked my Twitter followers the other day which leadership skills they wished more people recognized as such. Here are a few things they told me:
- Demonstrating trust by deferring to teammates and supporting their decisions
- Asking what people need to feel supported and successful
- Facilitating a conversation without dominating it
- Asking hard and uncomfortable questions
- Creating an environment where others can ask questions
- Bringing genuine curiosity about the other person’s thinking to a conversation
The truth is, there’s no one way to look or act like a leader.
Some leaders are amazing at facilitation. They can guide teams through sticky problems in a way that feels almost invisible. That’s leadership.
Some leaders are most powerful when they’re bringing folks to a deeper understanding. They can unpack a problem, lay it bare, and make the root causes clear to everyone. That’s leadership.
Some leaders are at their best when they’re championing their team — reminding them of their strengths and coaching them to do their best work. That’s leadership.
The key isn’t trying to perform someone else’s idea of leadership. That’ll always feel a little flat, and suck the energy right out of you. The answer is actually to dig deep within yourself, and start recognizing where your leadership strengths already lie. Because trust me, they’re there. And once you let yourself believe they matter — and start trusting them — they’ll become your superpowers.
This post originally appeared in the April 9, 2021, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.
