Managing Leadership^®

In the military, a common answer to a “how would you. . .” question is: “It depends on the terrain and situation.”

That is the correct answer.

There is no single way, or checklist, for being a “leader.” Time after time, study after study has shown that there is no “leadership personality,” no specific personality characteristics of leadership.

And yet, we continue to be beset with two sorts of propositions: That there are such lists, secrets, or habits, and – much more dangerously – that we should try to emulate them, in order to become leaders, ourselves.

I won’t enter here into the argument about the chimera of personal, individual leadership in modern organizations – I will in coming weeks, but for the present you might view the “must read posts” at the upper right of the page (linked here, here, and here for those of you reading this from your subscription feed).

I only want to underline, today, a single point: “leadership” doesn’t come from one’s personality or individual characteristics. Indeed, the proposition that it does can be quite harmful in practice.

In an organizational setting it actually comes, like everything else that matters there, from the work at hand. It depends on the peculiar nature – not of you – but of your corporate setting and the challenges at issue. In other words, the terrain and situation.

As a manager, it is your job to continuously assess these, the factors working on them, and the assets available to point them toward corporate goals. Some people insist on calling this leadership, descending immediately therefrom into sycophantic panegyrics about the lofty persons who do this.

But it’s not: it’s management. It’s work. We all do it, with all of our wide array of distinct, individual personal characteristics. We are unalike in almost everything except our combination in the collaborative endeavor we call “work.”

Those of us who manage organize our actions according to the work at hand and what needs to be done with it.

Let me summarize the point, here: Managers work, and they are about the work. This makes them relevant to the corporation, its goals, and its employees striving to accomplish them. On the other hand, individual leaders, as described by so many gurus of the modern leadership movement, are self-referential. They imagine the issues, the work, to emanate from them. This makes them irrelevant – even dangerously so.

Try to look at it this way: Leadership draws its peculiar form from the assets available and the issues at hand – not from you. To the extent you exhibit it, yourself, you do so according to an alert, responsible awareness of the unique needs of the particular situation – not by taking recourse to self-congratulatory, self-absorbed prescriptions for personal grandeur. You just aren’t that important: only your job is.

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