What is the single most important quality that defines a leader? Leadership has been a source of debate for centuries, from the “Great Man” theory, to Management theory, to Relationship theory. Where does leadership come from? Can it be taught? What defines it? Most people think of leadership in the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.”
What it’s not
No matter how Hollywood portrays it, or politicians pretend it is, leadership is not power and power is not leadership. The CEO may run around pointing fingers, making excuses, and being indecisive when the project is on fire while the intern is calmly asking the right questions and creating a plan of action.
A director may sit in an executive meeting taking credit for their team’s long hours, hard work, and brilliant insights while blaming them for any shortcomings while the project manager next to him heaps praise on the team and takes responsibility for the delays.
Powerful people display a distinct lack of leadership every day, and their subordinates often rise to fill the vacuum that is left behind. Leadership can come from anywhere. At its core, I believe it only requires a single thing…
Responsibility
Responsibility means ownership. Ownership of problems and ownership of mistakes. It means a lot of other things as well, but these are the two I want to focus on today.
Owning a problem doesn’t mean working on a piece of it, handing it off to someone else, and then considering your part done. Ownership means asking the questions to understand the whole problem, putting together a plan to resolve it, and making sure that every part of that plan is being executed. It means tracking what tasks are still in process, and continuously following up to make sure that the tasks aren’t being blocked, and if they are help remove the blockers. Owning a problem doesn’t mean fixing everything yourself, it means coordinating all of the fixes and tracking them until completion.
Owning mistakes doesn’t just mean taking the blame for everything that goes wrong on a project. It means asking the questions to understand what went wrong, putting together a plan to prevent it from happening again, and following up to make sure that the plan is being implemented. Every mistake made on the team could be prevented by the right process, the right training, the right communication, or the right plan. All things that the leader is responsible for. If you have the wrong people on your team, then it’s your responsibility for hiring them. If you have people on your team who cannot be trained or aren’t contributing, then it’s the leader’s responsibility for getting them off of the team.
Somebody has to do it
Responsibility isn’t just some evil that is the price to pay for leadership. Real leaders seek it out. They understand that unless someone owns the problem, it’s not going to get fixed; unless someone owns the mistake, it’ll keep happening. They want to be the ones who put their necks and reputations on the line to get things done and to solve the problems.
If your hand doesn’t go up when it comes time to solve the hard problems, if you don’t want to get involved because you’re afraid you might make a mistake, if you’re relieved when someone else steps forward and takes the burden, then leadership isn’t for you. Real leadership isn’t glamorous and powerful, it’s dirty, hard, and selfless.
Ask me to find the leader on a team, and I don’t immediately look at the person in charge. I look for the person who takes responsibility, volunteers for the thankless tasks that it takes to make the team succeed, and that person could be anyone.
