What is a Leader?

Leadership is a journey.  We start on the journey by active choice and the journey continues throughout our lives.  The leadership journey challenges us to be great – to go beyond our fears, perceived limitations, accepted practice and bureaucracy.  The journey leads us to many unexpected places and into situations that inspire, terrify, validate, uproot, amuse and bewilder us.  Sometimes we are forced to completely re-invent ourselves to survive and stay on the journey.  Leaders start from within and work from their inner vision, their strengths, their passion and their deep understanding of themselves and others.  Leaders are inspired and inspirational, light fires within people and create pictures and pathways. 

The biggest challenge of the leadership journey is authenticity.  We must be real, be authentic and be ourselves.  We can’t follow prescribed rules or play roles or copy someone else.  Leadership comes from within and from our deepest understanding of ourselves.  When we lead, we act and react from our center, our hearts and our deepest beliefs.  We are totally human and totally vulnerable.  Nothing is held back or hidden.  Leadership is the journey of truth.

The second biggest challenge of leadership is showing up.  To lead we must be present - not only physically but also emotionally, mentally and spiritually.  We must be totally present and ground our efforts on the land and in the space where we work.  We are fully alive; we show up and are totally alive in what we do.

The third biggest challenge of leadership is that leadership is always shared.  We must interact and create relationships with others to lead.  We need to work with others to be effective and we need them to trust us and respect us.  Leadership cannot be done in isolation.  We lead in the areas of our strengths and others lead in their areas of strength.  We influence and lead each other and the collaboration and cooperation create the atmosphere for success.  To share leadership, we must still be authentic, and we must also have highly developed emotional intelligence.  We must develop the social skills to authentically interact with others and share feelings as well as ideas.  This connection with others includes the empathy to recognize and respond fittingly to people's feelings and concerns.  Developing our social skills leads to an easy intimacy and a sense of rapport.

The fourth challenge of leadership is right action.  High performance leaders get the right things done.    Leaders are always focused on strategic objectives and achieving long-term performance through right action.  Leaders use their personal influence and energy to motivate others to get things done. 

The advanced challenges of leadership include finding and knowing our life and organizational purpose, the intuitive ability to see and envision the future and the abilities to energize and organize our organizations.  These are the wisdom skills of the sage, the visionary and planning skills of the wizard and the governance and charisma abilities of the king or queen.  

One of the most accepted definitions of leadership is that "Leadership is the process whereby one individual influences other group members toward the attainment of defined group or organizational goals".  This definition lacks heart and soul and doesn't get to the essence of the concept.  There are many schools about what leadership is and how to develop leaders.  The academic approach is to scientifically study leaders and create leadership theories.  The performance school of leadership wants to correlate corporate performance with leadership traits, behaviors or characteristics.  The positional school of leadership believes that the position defines the person as a leader whether in the military chain of command or the corporate bureaucracy.  The academic, performance and positional schools of leadership all concentrate on the outer manifestations of what leaders do and what they accomplish and ignore the deeper questions of what makes a person into a leader and what are the inner processes of becoming a leader.  An inherent assumption of the three schools above is that the leadership goals to be achieved are externally defined and acceptable by definition.  I have observed that true leaders create their own goals from within and are intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically or externally driven.

The process of becoming a leader is much the same as the process of becoming a fully integrated human being.  Leadership is also authentic self-expression that creates value.  There is a huge difference between achieving a defined goal and creating value.  Creating value leads to a higher standard of thought and action and a more internally generated and supported set of goals.   Creating value is a quest with inherent values and standards.  It is a long term process and a lifetime commitment, not a short term accomplishment of someone else's tasks. 

The true leadership journey is the journey of uncertainty, ambiguity, the void, creativity, vulnerability, humanity, authenticity, the muck of everyday life and soul.  Soul draws on imagination, passion and reflection to remind us that life is a constant tension among opposite pulls... Soul introduces us to mystery, it leads us to our own darkness, and it reveals new possibilities.   Leadership also embodies a deep connection to service instead of self interest and a commitment to sustainability.  Sustainability is defined as staying in existence, prolonging life, keeping supplied with necessities and strengthening spirit and courage.    Leadership needs to encompass and embrace these notions of sustainability and leaders need to be working toward making their organizations sustainable. 

Leaders have found their own inner purpose. They have connected to their heart, their soul, their personal values and beliefs and are passionate about what they do.  Leadership is thus defined as purpose and passion in sustainable action.  Another way to express this is that Leadership is living our purpose and using our gifts and talents to achieve sustainable success.