Defining Leadership Once and For All

The following is an installment from the weekly teaching of Leadership Laboratory, an international cohort of 100 leaders who share a desire to build better leadership capacity and design better teams. Curious? Find more information at HoldTheStandard.com now! ———

The most annoying question asked in the Leadership School at the University of San Diego was, “What is leadership?”

Most courses led with this question and I’m sure lots of definitions went around, but surely none of them stuck. 

Then again, if you check out the Leadership Section at a bookstore, you’ll see entire texts on Servant Leadership or Compassionate Leadership or some other brand name leadership style. We love a good style variation when selling books (and skirting around defining leadership). The other thing us humans love to do is we try to get to a definition of leadership by talking about its characteristics. 

You know, we do the leadership version of “love is patient, love is kind, blah blah blah..” Harvard professor Ronald Heifetz has equal distaste for this dancing around the issue. According to the author of the seminal work, Leadership Without Easy Answers, we ought to divorce the concept of leadership from the characteristics associated with leaders we admire and connect the concept of leadership to the work needed to be done. 

After all, is leadership even necessary if there are no issues present or challenges to face? 

Words are important. And, it seems that we think leadership is important, but I’ve just never heard someone define it well. This is dangerous in my opinion, especially if we want more leadership or better leadership, for example. 

We believe in a definition of leadership that I’m confident I didn’t come up with myself. I’m pretty sure I once heard it defined this way by my friend Brian “Tosh” Chontosh. He’d hate being referenced by name and he’d hate even more that a definition of leadership be attributed to him. Nonetheless, his life (and military citations) speak for themselves. 

Whether Tosh originally coined this definition or not, it is worth noting that it’s no coincidence that many of the most useful expressions of leadership and group dynamics are byproducts of the behaviors of high level military action. The reason for this is less of a glorification of war, but the obvious, high stakes consequences for failure. But, we’ll talk more on that later. 

We define leadership elegantly this way:

To be in leadership is to be responsible for the results. 

That’s it. Period. While Webster’s will likely not come to plagiarize this anytime soon, I would argue it’s the most high utility definition I’ve seen.

What does this definition do for us? 

This definition makes leadership egalitarian. It may be difficult to take responsibility for the results in your life, but surely anyone can do it.

The definition has many wonderful features! It divorces leadership from common limiting traps and pitfalls like equating authority to leadership or talent or age or tenure or charisma or gender or height or power.

This definition decentralizes responsibility.

It’s dynamic, agile, and forever present for all of us if we so choose to take it. Frankly, being a follower is easy. Anyone can do that. But, having leaders around? That is interesting! With shared leadership, individuals and groups can explore their peak potential and that is valuable stuff. 

The definition also makes hierarchy less fragile. A team of forty people could have forty people in leadership, which creates a world where failure leads to forty people taking responsibility, using failure to improve, and working in a system that benefits from negative experiences.

When compared to the alternative, would anyone want an archaic definition of leadership that allows individuals to outsource blame and victimize themselves and avoid the wonderful growth available from failure? Hell no! 

When groups embody this definition it sets the stage for a potential high performance culture. We will explore implications of a high performance culture in the coming material. 

It’s also worth noting that from a human psychology perspective, we’re often wrestling with this concept of agency. How much agency we have is tethered to how much control we have over our reality. And, spoiler alert, high agency is a much better way of being than low agency. 

Before we move on from this definition, let’s outline a model for leadership in action that can be overlayed any task, role, lifestyle, or context. 

Consider a world where for any task, job role, lifestyle, or context that a high powered computer could calculate the maximum potential for that context. We call this “the standard,” but many synonyms work in its place. You may call this peak potential, idealism, perfection, optimal, or some other facsimile. What I know to be true about me, you, your favorite quarterback, the company you work at, and everyone else that our current reality is not our peak expression. 

This implies a gap between reality (or where you are right now) and your potential (or where you could be). Of course, we need someone to take responsibility for overcoming this gap. Our definition says that leaders will take responsibility for overcoming this gap. 

This is where we get Hold the Standard™. Leaders hold the standard. 

In fact, DEUCE Gym, which will be utilized as a case study for context in this material, has a clear North Star belief that is rooted in leadership and a high agency living.

We believe that overcoming the gap between who we are and what we could be is life’s highest aim. 

While defining leadership may seem overly foundational, it’s critical to name this and define it publicly in any group espousing to be a high performance team. When groups go to the edge of their abilities, they will most certainly have to reconcile failure and when this utilitarian definition of leadership is a group norm you’ll be able to name leadership when it’s presence and call out poor leadership when it’s lacking. 

1. AUDIT. Where in your organization is accountability outsourced to people who hold authority? 
2. PRACTICE. What outcomes would be possible if all team members viewed their role as one of expressing leadership? Choose a project review or performance review where all parties are encouraged to embody leadership and own their part in the outcome.