The Meaning of Leadership

I was discussing with a colleague the other day about what leadership is and what it means. To help my understanding I looked up the meaning in the Collins English Dictionary which defines the verb ‘to lead’ as ‘to show the way, to guide, to go ahead’. At its heart leadership I concluded is about taking people to new and different places. I reflected on the great Antarctic Explorers such as Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen, and realised that is exactly what they did. They took their teams to places that no one had ever been before. They did not have detailed maps, signposts or directions to show them which direction to go in, they just had the vastness of the Antarctic, and they had to provide the direction for their team themselves. My conclusion is that this is not so different from a leader of any team today. Neither I nor anyone else knows what the future will hold. There are no Ordnance Survey Maps, signposts, directions or a yellow brick road to future success, only blank space. This is an important point as my own experience has been that employees tend to look to their leaders to provide comfort from this ambiguity by providing a clear direction for them to follow. In my view this doesn’t matter whether the leader is the CEO of a multinational or the leader of a team of maintenance engineers. Working in an environment without clear direction is hugely frustrating. It is like watching a film that’s not in focus; you know that something is going on, you just don’t know what it is. I have seen the consequences of this at first hand. Without clear direction, employees chose for themselves the direction they should take and what they should focus on. While in some instances this may be acceptable, too often I have seen it create divisive relationships and poor performance as different team members pull in different directions and work on conflicting priorities. As stated above, the Collins English Dictionary defines the verb ‘to lead’ as ‘to show the way, to guide, to go ahead’. At its heart leadership is about taking people to new and different places, and in my view providing clear direction is a vital part of being a leader.