Can we quit calling everything leadership already? It’s leadership to get up early and get started on the day. It’s leadership when you read more books. It’s leadership when you speak out against the comfortable consensus at work. It’s leadership when you save your money instead of spending it. Nope. It’s not that these things aren’t necessarily great because they are. They might be traits among a number of leaders, but they aren’t the art and craft of leadership. When everything becomes leadership, then nothing actually is. So, we should define it much more narrowly. Leadership is moving people to action on a mission. It is the sum total of the leader’s acts that are intentionally designed to get other people moving on a mission. Moving physically. Moving mentally. It’s about beating Newtonian mechanics. “An object at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon…” Many of us tend to remain at “rest” until we are acted upon. The job of a leader is the manifestation of a mission via others. Just sayin’…
With your teams, don’t get out of the way, do this instead
"Get out of the way!" I often hear some version of this sentiment when talking about building a culture to incentivize high performance teams. "You have to find the right people, equip them, and then get out of the way." People who talk about getting out of the way...