A quick note: this isn’t a textbook definition. Like everything in this digital garden, it’s a snapshot of my perspective right now and subject to evolve.
I started thinking about what the term “leadership” really means the first time I made the jump from a programmer to a manager of a software engineering team. While thinking that I just needed to learn a set of skills for my 9-to-5 job on how to “run a team”, what I didn’t appreciate at the time was that it came with 24/7 mindset applicable to almost every aspect of human life.
And it is through that journey of discovery that this idea of “leadership” became deeply personal to me. At the very core, it is…
- A distinction and a choice between passive existence and being an active influence.
- The mindset and skills that help us uncover what is truly important to us and drive toward those things.
- A choice between letting external forces push you around versus becoming your own force that shapes the world around you.
It scales out, not up
While professionally, we tend to think of leadership in terms of org charts, the actual progression is a lot more personal and human: lead yourself ⇒ lead others ⇒ lead an organization
Maybe very few of us will lead organizations, but every single one of us, whether we want to or not, whether we are good at it or not, are already leaders. Each of us will make countless decisions which will have profound consequences for ourselves, our families and others in our lives.
Since going on my own leadership journey, a few realizations that bubbled up for me:
- Many of skills and mindset I’ve had to learn and practice were applicable to every level of the above scale starting with learning to lead myself.
- The level of leader’s effectiveness is directly correlated with the reach of their spheres of control and influence
It’s a mindset, not a title
There is a very clear distinction between management vs leadership:
- A manager (or a director, a vice-president, etc…) is a role and a title — and sadly there are managers (and VPs) out there who are not leaders
- A leader is a mindset and a behavioral choice. You don’t need a promotion to start acting like one
I write about this stuff because one of my goals in life is to find every single person who’s ever said, “fuck this, I want to make it better” and help them discover and expand their leadership voice in any way I can.