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.

Goals and Goal Setting

If you’ve ever been to a management seminar, you probably heard a great deal about goals and goal-setting. It is certainly true that goal-setting is a crucial activity in any leadership role. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’re likely to wind up somewhere else. Goals serve several different functions for individuals and groups.

A goal is a desired future state. Human beings are, under healthy conditions, naturally goal-oriented, which means that every time a healthy person achieves a goal, he or she normally looks around for a new goal or a new challenge. The first and most general function of goals is to orient behavior in a particular direction. In a group, goals provide legitimacy and group spirit to the extent that all members agree upon and collaborate on the same goals. By orienting behavior in a particular direction, goals provide motivation, since people are more likely to work on targets they can see or imagine. For motivational purposes, leaders should try to make sure that the goals they set are neither too high nor too low – they should be challenging but within reach. Finally, goals serve as measuring rods for performance. They help us determine how well we’re doing or how much progress we’ve made in a given amount of time. In general, purposelessness is one of the hardest things for people to endure, and purpose in life is mostly a matter of setting and achieving goals.