What Is Leadership?

The English language has included the word “leader” for a very long time. But the word “leadership” didn’t make it into the dictionary until around the year 1800. The new word reflected the emergence of a new approach to human organization and governance: democracy. Since then all sorts of definitions of leadership have cropped up – some good, some less good, and some downright silly.

Back in the nineteen sixties, a scholar at the Ohio State University program in leadership studies set out to categorize all the supposedly scientific definitions of the term “leadership” that he could find. He found about 130 different kinds of definitions. That’s not 130 different definitions, it’s 130 different kinds of definitions. Some focused on the traits of leaders, some on the power of leaders, and some on the roles and responsibilities that leaders share. One social scientist had the audacity to claim that leadership is whatever social scientists say it is.

I like to define leadership as a reciprocal process of mobilizing resources and motivating individuals in pursuit of goals shared by leaders and followers alike. My emphasis is on reciprocity between leaders and followers and on shared goals. But I must say I am partial to some of the more interesting statements made by people who have lived with the realities of leadership in important places. Harry Truman’s summation is one of my favorites. Truman said that a leader is a person who gets other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it. But probably the most quoted description of leadership isn’t a definition at all, but a paradoxical statement by an ancient Oriental philosopher and politician named Lao Tsu. The best of all leaders, he said, is the one who helps people so that, eventually, they don’t need him. Then comes the one they love and admire. Then comes the one they fear. The worst is the one who lets people push him around. Where there is no trust, he said, people will act in bad faith. The best leader doesn’t say much, but what he says carries weight. When he is finished with his work, the people say “we did it ourselves.”

Lao’s ideal leader sounds a bit like Harry Truman’s.