Leader

Dec 02, 2023

In this episode, we explore what it means to be a leader, and why so many ‘leaders’ don’t actually lead

I’m a leader! I’m special! I’m important! Like every leader, I’m suave, brilliant, charismatic, bright, brimming with self-confidence!

And I’m…

Uh…

Maybe not…?

Over the past few weeks there’s been a fair bit of a back-and-forth conversation between various of us about the role of the leader - perhaps particularly the supposed ‘thought-leader’, but other forms of leadership as well.

After all, what is a ‘leader’? Why are some people called ‘leaders’, and others aren’t? What do leaders do? - or not-do, for that matter?

And how do they lead? What do they look like? Isn’t a leader supposed to be charismatic, gleaming, exuding certainty and all that? Or, in my case, maybe not?

In short, it’s another one of those seemingly-simple questions that turns out to be not simple at all. For example, having the word ‘leader’ in a job-title doesn’t necessarily make that person a leader. Merely claiming to be ‘a leader’ doesn’t make us one, either.

Instead, settled on this: a ‘leader’ is someone who other people choose to follow. For whatever reason they choose to follow.

Oh, and that point about the choice to follow or not-follow is important, too.

And that’s it, basically.

Pretty much everything else about ‘leadership’ is just fluff, vanity, self-importance, self-advertising or desperate clinging onto old hierarchies that never had any honest meaning in the first place.

Oh well…

Okay, sure, in practice it’ll often be a bit more nuanced and contextual, of course. But at the basic level, it really is as simple as that: someone becomes a leader only when someone else chooses to follow them

Those nuances and contextualities are important though, and do help us make a bit more sense out of this whole ‘leader’ thing. For example, consider a military leader. Sure, too many military ‘leaders’ are more like that old song from ‘Oh It’s A Lovely War’, about ‘leading’ from the back, “with our old commander / safely in the rear”. Sure, if you’re about to head off into battle, you probably do want a leader willing to lead from the front and who’s reasonably confident about what they’re doing. On the other side, you probably also don’t want that leader to be over-confident - in fact there’s a member of my own extended-family whose job, for many years, was to teach young officers how to not lead their squad to their deaths by the wrong kind of over-exuberant leadership. So yes, getting the right balance there can be tricky, but also rather important…

This often gets even more tangled in that whole notion of ‘thought-leader’, in part because there may be very little actual in-person leading that’s happening there, and in part because there’s also often a muddled, mixed-up, murky mess of Dunning-Kruger versus Impostor-Syndrome going on, where those who make the most noise actually know the least, and vice versa. All too often, people who describe themselves as 'thought-leaders' are just using the hyped-up label to puff up an empty sales-pitch, knowingly or otherwise, whereas those who genuinely are worth following probably won’t advertise themselves because they’re too filled with self-doubt to do so.

And there are a whole bunch of other catches that can lead to that self-doubt. The first, perhaps, is that in order to have those 'new ideas', we have to be away from the centre, away from the usual echo-chamber - far enough away from it to get a different perspective and all that. As I wrote here in a recent episode, 'Eccentric and crank', we have to be literally and/or metaphorically eccentric, 'ex-centric'. Which can be a real challenge just in itself - and often an agonisingly-lonely one, too.

The next part is where much of the self-doubt comes from, because when we try to come back towards the centre, we get all kinds of stones and other stuff thrown at us because the idea is 'different'. (To think differently - the literal meaning of ‘heresy’ - is often considered bad enough ("Ooh, look, 'e's a forriner - 'eave 'arf a brick at 'im, Fred!"), but to a clique or cult the real enemy is the apostate, a former 'insider' who dares to have any different idea.) Which in turn means that if we want people to discover and explore different ideas, we need to find a way to make it safe for them to do so - because usually it ain't…

Then the next trap is that we've gotten so scared and scarred from all those metaphoric stones and cabbages and rotten tomatoes being hurled our way over the years, that when someone then does start following our ideas, it will often feel more like stalking than support. Which means we may well shy away from the support that's being offered - or else we're so lost in self-doubt that we think that anyone actually foolish enough to follow us must be some kind of idiot because they're following us. Or we want to warn them that if they do follow us, they'll risk being as much derided as ‘eccentric’ as we already are. There are ways out of that trap - Derek Sivers’ classic video ‘First Follower: Leadership Lessons From A Dancing Guy’ is one well-known example - but yeah, it is hard to get this one right.

There’s then the other side of this story: not the leader, but the follower. For example, as above, someone only becomes a leader when others choose to follow: but why they choose to follow can sometimes be an important question. In some cases, that point about the ‘stalker’ is, unfortunately, not so imaginary at all - which definitely ain’t fun… In other cases, the joys of the possession-economy will bring about a situation where people are following in order to ‘make money’ from the ideas, but fail to realise that the ‘leader’ they’re following likewise does need support in order to create those ideas in the first place. (I’ve had a lot of first-hand experience with that one…) Again, it’s tricky.

And yes, it can get worse than that: sometimes a lot worse. The classic example here is when the followership turns into a cult: for more detail on that, and just how ‘un-fun’ it can get, see the episode ‘On cults’ here, from about a year ago. For a narcissistic self-styled ‘leader’, a cult of followers might seem like heaven, for a while: but the reality is that it’s essentially a codependent relationship, each party offloading responsibilities onto the other - and it can get really nasty if either side breaks that kind of game, even accidentally, or even for the briefest moment. As mentioned above, the cult’s greatest hatred is not so much for the ‘outsider’, but even more for the apostate, a former ‘insider’ who dares to shed doubt on the story. For just about everyone involved, allowing a followership to devolve into a cult is most definitely Not A Good Idea…

So yes, the quick summary here is that someone becomes a leader only when others choose to follow - with choose being perhaps the most important point here. And yes, there can be complications on both sides of that story - for the leader, for the one who chooses to follow, and for everyone else. Yet it’s also the only way that ideas can get out there, that ideas and actions get shared: so if we want good change to happen, and happen well, we need a good understanding of the tasks and role of the leader.