Leadership as a Behavior

What is leadership? Is it a mindset? A tangible set of acquired skills? An innate talent? A “must” for MBA students and C-level executives?

Leadership can be defined in a myriad of ways. In this particular article, however, I take the approach that treats leadership as a behavior. In this sense, the word ‘lead’ that constitutes the topical concept of ‘leadership’ may be, in my opinion, misleading.

This insight was primarily influenced by Peter Bensinger, Jr., also dubbed by American Lawyer as “The Most Wired Lawyer in America.” During my study at Yale University, I was fortunate enough to take a course on leadership led by Peter, who delivered to me the perspective and the resulting discipline that I explore below.

How does defining leadership as a behavior differ from our traditional understanding of the subject? Behavior is an accumulation of actions and mannerisms performed by individuals, largely in interaction with others. In this vein, leadership can be deemed less of an axiom and more of a set of tangible actions that we carry out throughout our lives.

Before I proceed further, I must emphasize the distinction between positional leadership and behavioral leadership. Positional leadership (e.g. CEO, professor, governor, etc.) is authoritarian by nature. It provides a certain level of assumed superiority through procedural transfer of power. On the other hand, behavioral leadership, while still may be exercised by positional leaders, is voluntary and personal. Furthermore, while positional leadership may be limited in terms of how many leaders there can be in a given relationship or organization, behavior leadership is not. There is no zero-sum calculus.

To return to the purpose of this article — exploring leadership as a behavior — the simplified message that I want to deliver is this: leadership as a behavior is not only good, but to a certain extent necessary in any relational or organizational interactions. Regardless of your position in any context, everyone should learn the skills of behavioral leadership, which include, but are not limited to, listening actively, taking on crucial conversations, making critical decisions and asking powerful questions. You may wonder what these skills really mean, and the purview of this article is merely to direct your interest in the subject. I provide below several fundamental behavioral leadership books that are part of a much expansive literature that will better explain the significance of the tangible skills and how to improve upon them.

• “The Art of Active Listening: How to Double your Communication Skills in 30 Days,” by Josh Gibson and Fynn Walker.
• “Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others,” by Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas.
• “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High,” by Kerry Patterson et al.

In short, engaging leadership as a behavior is essentially improving upon your interpersonal skills that can be applied to any interpersonal context. It is the ‘how to better approach’ for your interactions with your partner, friend, boss, teacher, parents or colleagues. Thus the discussion is not necessarily whether which is behavior is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The conceptual approach in which I discuss leadership here defies such classification. It is rather a discussion of ‘more’ or ‘less’. In fact, there really isn’t such a thing as “too much attentive listening,” at least within logical boundaries. The more you engage with behavioral leadership, the better you invest in your interpersonal relationships for the good of those involved.

The discipline that has transpired from this insight is the following: embracing leadership as a behavior means becoming a better person and a better member of a community, whether it be school, neighborhood, corporations or the larger community of humanity in general. Unless you decide that all of the above are not to your liking, I urge you to try the books listed above as a step towards uncovering the behavioral leadership that lies within you. In the behavioral sense, leaders are not born. These skills are to be consciously acquired, and more important is the awareness that these skills are in fact attainable by anyone.

Through this brief read, I hope that you can acquire the leadership behavior that will allow you to be a better friend, partner, family member, colleague or, if you are in a positional authority of leadership, a better leader.