Somehow it rubs me the wrong when people philosophize about “leadership”. I think we have way too many leaders or people who want to be leaders and give a lot of respect to these people but neglect the people who are doing the actual work.
At the same time, those workers don’t have any conception of the hard work that goes into actual leadership. Life is so complicated.
Not sure most managers and executives know how much hard work go into actual leadership either.
I agree - good leadership is hard, and there aren’t many that are good at it
Leadership is actual work. I don’t think anything is harder than being in a leadership position - it’s usually lonely, isolating, exhausting, precarious, and with little support.
So what you're saying is if work is already lonely, isolating, exhausting, precarious, with little support, then I might as well go into leadership?
I’m saying you may find it even more so in a leadership position.
I would agree. I just feel that a lot of talk about leadership is feel good talk for wannabe leaders. When I look at my company a lot of people in management don’t lead but they just pass on orders from above and take zero risks. I would call them administrators. But they still go on offsite meetings about leadership.
Modern leadership practices have become a truly qualitative phenomenon with a lot of feel good conversations. I wish leadership evangelists can support effectiveness of their leadership philosophies using some numbers. Like demonstration of how their version of leadership achieved results x, y, and z. And please let’s not even talk about increasing engagement scores.
How can you possibly create a controlled enough experiment to give quantitive results? You’d need two different leaders leading the same people and companies to be able to compare.
I may not have an absolute answer but I think it’s not impossible to measure the leadership styles. There is a lot of survivorship bias in leadership stories and acknowledging that is a very first step to measure it. To me a good leadership style inspires and help others to become a leader particularly those who at first glance don’t seem like a leadership material. We can simply count the number of people one personally guided to either become a leader or grow as leader. We can also measure the impact they created in their own functional area as well as in whole business unit.
For a unique view on leadership, i recommend the Jocko Podcast[0]. Approximately one third of his podcasts are directly about leadership from a military command and control perspective, and he does great interviews with his guests.