The Elements of leadership

A leader needs three things:

• to care about the mission and their team (vector)
• knows what to do, or how to figure it out
• the will to do what needs to be done

Failures of leadership that I’ve observed tend to fall into one of those

Unsurprisingly, leaders tend to be more gifted than the average in some of the qualities: oratory, thinking. Or at least, they tend to be more experienced, which means older.

There are corresponding failure modes in how leadership can go wrong. A leader can lose courage. A leader can be wrong several times in succession. A leader can

A leader serves the mission and the team in some combination. Sometimes the mission and the team are identical.

That is, the leader is analogous to the “head” of a person; hence the prevalence of expressions like “head of state”.

Business leadership is usually “leadership light”. The stakes are usually money, not lives. The unification part is unnecessary for most managers — oftentimes employees join and leave piecemeal.

That isn’t to say business leadership can’t involve all the pieces — it absolutely can — only that it often doesn’t.

We now get to my personal approach to leadership:

• try my hardest

Against democracy at work