Leadership is Three Things

I’m often surprised by how unclear people are on what leadership is and what leaders are. There’s certainly no shortage of unhelpful claptrap out there such as “leadership is about making sure every voice is heard”. But while it may often be extraordinarily difficult to do, leadership is actually quite easy to understand.

Leadership exists because some tasks require more than one person to pull them off. For instance, let’s say a band of hunter-gatherers spies some bison grazing near a cliff. One person alone can’t do much to move the herd. But many people acting together can surround the animals, get them into a panic, and drive them over the cliff to their demise. (Yes, this is an actual ancient hunting technique.)

For this to happen, someone needs to have the idea of even doing this — “Hey, what if we worked together?” Someone needs to form a plan on how to get it done — “Ok, you’ll go here, I’ll go there, she’ll go that way and start shouting” — and potentially update the plan in real time as the situation evolves. And someone may need to supply motivation if the band is more fearful of getting trampled than hungry — “This will provide smoked meat for the whole winter!”

So as I see it, leadership involves three distinct functions: unification, direction, and motivation. These functions can all be performed by the same person, or each function can be performed by different (or multiple) people, it doesn’t matter — it’s all leadership. For instance, a great orator can persuade several hostile tribes to join forces to defend their land from a powerful invader. Then two generals can direct the strategy of the unified army. And then several courageous captains can spur their men to victory by remaining confident about their chances, and through their own examples of courage. Each of these actors can be fairly said to have led their people to victory, though they did so in very different ways. (In some cases a situation may be so threatening that it spontaneously creates unity without anyone needing to instigate it, and supplies plenty of motivation besides, leaving the leaders to focus on directing the response to the threat.)

To put it slightly differently, for a group of humans to successfully accomplish a shared mission, three things must happen. First, they need to become a team, which usually entails defining the mission, and may also require persuading each member that they’re better off as part of the team than on their own, or even negotiating the terms of a union. Second, they usually need to undertake the mission as a directed force rather than chaotically, lest a key advantage of unification be lost. And third, because humans have their own interests and will often cheat, shirk, or slack off if they can get away with it, they need to be encouraged to try hard. Leadership is the mechanism by which these things happen. A leader is just a person who supplies one, two, or three of the pieces of leadership.