Why we need Leadership vs. Why being a leader?

If you are in a leadership role you may recognize the feeling of many questions popping up, and a famous one for almost every new leader is:

What is the purpose of leadership?

When is leadership done well?

Those same questions came to me when I got promoted into my first leadership role 25+ years back. And when discussing the topic today the exact same questions seem still to be relevant.

The 2 purposes of Leadership: When leadership is done well

You have probably already experienced different managers in your working life. Some with whom you felt well, and others where you felt they had room for improvement. No matter which type, they are great sources of inspiration whether it was for a good or a less good cause. They all have things to learn from.

A manager where you felt "I don’t want to be like that" is a great learning, helping shape your personal leadership style.

In my further work to get into the core purpose of leadership, you find overlapping definitions:

•  Deliver results through others (...right, that is what leaders do)
•  Develop more leaders (...OK, that is for sure part of being a senior leader)
•  Make the vision come to fruition (...yep, no results without a clear direction)
•  …establish purpose, the direction or strategy he stands for, the reason why others should follow him (OK, to me that is sort of justifying your own existence)

None of these appears to be wrong, yet condensing it down to the fundamental, short and strict essence, there are ultimately 2 important purposes of leading:

Purpose #1:
Achieve results

Purpose #2:
Develop people to take on tomorrow

 

This is not about what you as a leader are DOING physically, it is much more about doing great over a period of time.

Purpose #1: Achieve results

It should be rather obvious that the leader is ultimately responsible for the results and achievements of his department, team, division or organization which he or she is leading.

No matter your level of responsibility, that ultimate responsibility rests on your shoulders. That is per se a part of being a leader.

Yet, HOW you achieve these results of course depends on what you are doing, and this is where elements like mission, vision, strategy, projects, must-win-battles, work planning and scheduling, follow ups and performance reviews along with other direction-setting activities come into play.

While you remain ultimately responsible for the results, you are not DOING the actual work. Your core task is to enable the team to make the right things happen that ultimately leads to great results.

And it includes the on-going performance management: Did we hit sales numbers this week, did we handle all orders, did we produce / deliver / service customers, was the reporting done on expected time and quality etc.

Purpose #2: Develop People

Development today is exponential. Things move fast, market and competitors develop, AI is a buzz-word these years, and the way businesses and public services are executed changes constantly.

There is and will only be one way of dealing with this and staying ahead of that game: To develop people to make them capable of solving tomorrows problems even smarter and in a better way.

Helping people grow into their full potential
is one of the biggest and most rewarding accomplishments
you, as a leader, can make.

And this is NOT a question of a seminar or educational programme once or twice a year. This is just as much about how YOU - the leader – orchestrates the team on a day-to-day basis, e.g.:

• Involves in problem solving
• Challenges for better / more / smarter
• Delegates responsibility
• Coaches and provides feedback
• Stimulates an assertive culture of continuous learning (eliminate any blaming!)

Only by continuously developing your people, they can take on smarter or better ways of doing things, and they can ultimately replace you with ease, leaving you to focus on bigger issues, more development or bigger assignments.

What if leadership was not there?

Reversing a question can sometimes provide more insight:

What would happen if leaders were not there? Would you see results? And would people grow?

Without leadership, short term results would probably continue to come in,
which is a sign that the previous leader did a good job.

But over time, further direction setting and orchestrated development is needed to reach a common understanding of direction.

Without a leader, this might come gradually through team cooperation – and you would in any case see an informal leader taking ‘the lead’ on orchestrating a common picture of direction.

If there was no leader around, people development would gradually suffer even harder. People development needs to be derived from the overall direction of organization, and so if no common direction is available due to the lack of leadership, the evolution of competencies will gradually fade out.

Results and people development are strongly interrelated:

You do not grow results without the teams’ competencies to make it happen.
And the teams’ competencies are not growing,
if no-one sets a direction for that growth.

Net net: Short term results will keep coming in, but over time results and people development will both suffer, dragging towards a negative spiral which takes much more energy to turn around than a gradual, continuous development.

The philosophy here about purpose, results, and improving for the future is the backbone of the principles in my book Leadership: Lesson One, in which we also uncover the simple - but fundamnetal - Leadership Ecosystem guiding leaders to continuously adjust and refine to enable teams to perform.