What is leadership?

It's a process

Leadership is a special type of relationship that marries management and mutual collaboration. It’s the process of building an alliance for the purpose of fulfilling a goal. As with any relationship, leadership is all about listening, and is inherently messy due to the human limits of communication. It involves being able to know, relate to, and handle people’s needs in order to better influence and motivate them to action. Leadership is watching your own self because everyone else is looking up, down and sideways at you. Pretty much, leadership is really hard.

One important thing to remember about leadership is that it is a multidimensional, intersectional relationship. There is no question that leaders and followers can be very different people. Everyone doesn't necessarily have to agree to the same things, but they should agree on the same goals, even if the methods of arriving at that goal might be challenged and through this perfected. The journey of working together to figure out the best way to achieve a goal is the process of leadership. All of this includes the subtle soft skills of knowing how to be a good person to someone by being open, honest, and available for criticism and complaints.

The complexity of learning and practicing leadership theory is significant and is highlighted by the readings from class. Research findings on leadership illustrate the increasingly sophisticated and complex nature of the process that is leadership. The definition of leadership itself has evolved continuously since the start of leadership studies. In fact, the only thing that scholars can agree on is that they can’t come up with a common definition for leadership. It is not a simple skill that is easy to grasp, understand and master. There are many different ways to lead and multiple approaches to leadership, just as there are lots of unique people in the world.

The idea of leadership as a process is a pressing and practical one. This definition of leadership promotes that leadership is not determined by or attributed to a set of properties held by certain, select individuals who were blessed to be born with height, intelligence, extraversion, and fluency. Leadership actually is a transactional event that resides within the context of interactions between leader and followers. In this way, leadership is made available to everyone because it is exhibited through behavior, which can be observed, imitated and absorbed.

In class we discussed how the process definition of leadership has affected and corrected the common misperceptions about followers. The main message was that the role of leader and follower can and will be a bit blurry at times, as they are both active, important roles that can be exchanged. Followers are courageous, competent contributors and are committed to the purpose and principles of an organization, maybe even more than the leader might be. For this reason, leaders and followers should be equals. Followers should be present when discussing any decisions that would affect them. These two equally difficult roles influence one another in such a special way that they should be in constant communication in order to build credibility and focus the efforts of the group in the most effective way possible.