Everyone Has Experienced Leadership at Some Point in Their Lives – But a True Leader?
Possibly from a club, teacher or coach; or possibly from doing the leading themselves. An important person in my life is someone I’d class as a natural-born leader. Throwing a new year’s party, once, we’d planned to try and break up the night with a couple of games so that we’d actually make it to midnight, rather than having 20 drunkards on our hands by 10 o’clock. Beer pong is a classic many would say. If you’ve never tried to coordinate twenty half-cut guests into teams, I wouldn’t recommend it. Better yet, if you’ve never had to get those teams of ten half-cut guests to actually play a cohesive game, I also would not recommend it.
But he did. He respectfully commanded attention and gave instructions without making a single one of the guests even a little bit defensive. “But I thought we were doing girls vs. boys?”, said an insecurely masculine member of the group. “Well there’s not an even ratio of boys to girls so I’ve given the girls a helping hand with a couple of us lads, give them a chance, eh?”.
This response was genius. There was an even ratio, because the ‘lads’ team ended up with a couple of the girls, too. But the leader, my dad, capitalised on the fact that Mr. muscle was probably too drunk to notice and made up a gender-driven excuse that fed his ego. The key here was that Dad never offended anyone. Hulk version 2 didn’t kick up a fuss and was cleverly blinded by the use of his own ego against him.
I know, this example seems a little harsh and manipulative. It wasn’t like that. The leader was simply utilising tools to satisfy a particular member of the group whilst not changing the course of action that had been collectively agreed on by everyone else. I’ve always said, the role of a true leader is to satisfy everyone. Which is why the job is quite literally impossible. Or is it? Telling this guy a bent version of the truth did satisfy him… and satisfied everyone else at the same time, so really, he did satisfy everyone. Or, better yet, he simply made everyone believe they were satisfied.
Good Leader or True Leader?
The quality we’re looking at here is one that sets apart good leaders from true leaders; foresight. In this example, we’ll call the big guy ‘Steve’, who didn’t actually care about playing boys against girls, he just thinks it matters because he’s a little sloshed and wants to flex out of his shirt. My Dad could see through this masculine exterior to someone who is voicing an issue that really doesn’t matter. A good leader may have taken it to a vote among the group and, unavoidably, ended up with at least one displeased member.
However, this true leader noticed the actual gravity of what Steve said and understood that, if he could just get him to forget his ego for a second and just play the damn game, then he wouldn’t even notice the ratio of the teams. So he satisfied his ego momentarily, involved no one else in the process and swiftly continued as though nothing had happened.
Bad leaders want full control, full responsibility, but no blame.
Oh, we’ve all met some terrible leaders, eh? I can think of bucket fulls of people that had control and quite clearly no idea what to do with it. Ultimately, that’s not the worst part, though. Having control and not being of a leadership mindset is fine if you have the self-awareness to then transfer control to someone who can utilise it well.
It’s the lack of self-awareness that makes it tough. That makes you sit in front of poor leaders who have no clue they’re poor and want to smack them about the head until the symbol of your frustration is branded on their cheeks. Bit far? I don’t think so. You must have been there too.
Let’s be realistic, though. There are a handful of types of bad leaders. We all know at least one of them.
Types of Bad Leader
Firstly, there’s the control freak. Control freaks are rarely good leaders. This is mainly due to the fact that they can’t delegate properly. Delegation is fundamentally key to being a strong leader because if you could do the job yourself, there’d be no team for you to be the leader of anyway. There are also micromanagers. These leaders are happy to delegate, but only if you do the job in the exact way they want you to.
Similar to the control freak, a micromanager must oversee every step of every process that gets the team to an ultimate destination. 80% of the work micromanagers do is completely and utterly pointless (whilst also being incredibly irritating).
The last type of bad leader I’ll cover here is Mr Always Right. Taking a very autocratic style of leadership, his slaves, or team rather, must take his way or the highway. Mr Always Right is never open to new ideas or changes, even if they very clearly promote efficiency or better methods.
The 3 by 3 of What Makes a Good Leader
I call this the 3 by 3 because there are three variables in leaders and we pitch them against one another to form an outcome. Let me explain:
We note that there are born leaders and contrived leaders, good leaders and bad leaders and democratic and autocratic leaders. These are the three variables of a leader. I’d like to talk about them each individually.
1. Born Leaders vs Contrived Leaders
Think of some people you know that you’d say are born leaders. Which characteristics do those people have in common? You might have thought about things like confidence, being an extrovert, the ability to unite people etc. All these things are true – they’re qualities of a good leader. The true quality of someone who was born to lead, however, is rather different to these. To help me explain, let’s replace the term ‘leader’ with ‘head-worker’ just for a second. Trust me.
“What’s the difference? That’s like replacing tangerine for ‘small orange’”
Yes, I know. There is method in my madness… promise. The term leader somewhat separates that thereof from their team. ‘You are the workers, I am the leader’… is a terrible mentality to have. However, tying both of those things together creates the mentality of a ‘head worker’. A head worker sees themself as equals to their team. Whilst being equals to their team, they also simply happen to be the go-to worker for final decisions to be confirmed and ideas to be run past.
Teams without leaders fail, teams with bad leaders fail harder, teams with head workers succeed every single time because the leader doesn’t actually care about leading, they simply want to progress a team to success. A contrived worker can strive for this, but someone who is not naturally born to lead is likely going to struggle to balance working and leading in equal measures. To most, one can be a leader or a worker, not both. The irony is that the key to great leadership is to lead as little as possible and work just as hard as the team you’re leading.
It’s quite simply to spot the natural-born leaders in your life. Well, I say that. I’ve personally found it hard to think of all that many great leaders outside of roles where there’s no choice but for them to lead and me to follow (a teacher at school, for example.) What I’m saying here, is that if you can’t spot the born leaders, maybe it just might be you.
2. Bad Leaders vs Good Leaders
Now, this was ultimately covered in the opening anecdotes. Although, we’ve thrown in variable number one now; born vs. contrived. Born leaders would struggle to be bad leaders, but contrived leaders can be both.
A contrived leader is someone who’s worked on their personal leadership skills to the point where they can lead a team to a destination. This doesn’t mean they’ve worked on these skills, or are utilising them, in the correct way, however. I know many contrived leaders, as I’m sure you do as well, that are especially terrible. Even compared to people opposed to leadership altogether. So, to be a self-manufactured leader that’s bad at leading, you’re really losing the rope.
The qualities of a leader who has consciously attempted to be a leader are usually quite obvious. They’ll come at the task at hand with some serious structure. In the minds of most non-natural leaders, leaders have game plans. Not only this, they come strutting out of the gate armed with their game plan and plans B through Z as well. This can be helpful, yes, and in most situations, there’s almost no downside to this.
Although, a born leader, a good leader would come at it open-minded. They’d likely devise a structured plan, but with the input of the entire team. They wouldn’t face the challenge with a pre-prepared pathway to success, they’d build the pathway to success as a collaborative effort so that everyone is on board and is satisfied from the get-go. Leaders that simply articulate their plan to the team, are not born leaders, and most likely aren’t very good leaders either.
Another tell-tale sign of a bad leader is, again, a thirst for control. For people that don’t properly understand how to lead well, it’s assumed that they must feel like they’re leading at every step of the process. In fact, the real case is on the contrary. A true leader will only feel like they’re leading at small moments throughout the process. When a worker asks for a decision to be confirmed when a worker runs an idea past the leader when it’s time to build a pathway to success. These are all little moments in which leaders feel like leaders, the rest of the time they should be working just as hard as the rest of the team on the plan they all built together.
3. Democratic vs Autocratic Leaders
This one is so key it’s unreal. If you’re leading your team in an autocratic manner, the likelihood of success is low. If you’re leading your team in an autocratic manner, and it’s so far successful, then your team are miserable. It’s quite literally a lose-lose. Democracy is absolutely fundamental in team leadership. As aforementioned, building plans and discussing methods among a group is ten times as effective as one person building their own plan and forcing the rest of the team to follow it, whether they agree it’s the right method or not.
Take this analogy as an example;
Let’s create a team of three people, being led by a fourth member. Joe, Karen and Shannon are a workforce being upheld by Stacey – the team leader. Now we’ll outline two scenarios. In scenario one, Stacey devises a plan, articulates it to Joe, Karen and Shannon who then carry out the plan. In scenario two, Stacey comes together with Joe, Karen and Shannon and the four of them devise a plan together. They then execute the plan as a group.
Scenario One
The group is being led by one brain. The plan was devised by one brain. The plan fails. This means Stacey must come up with another plan, which fails too. Let’s say this particular problem takes 400 mistakes to solve. Each 100 mistakes takes an hour to plan and execute. In this case, Stacey is going to have to put her group through three hundred and ninety-nine failed plan executions before they solve the problem as a group. 4 straight hours of work.
Just writing that sentence made me want to bang my head against a wall. Poor Joe, Karen and poor Shannon.
Scenario Two
The same problem takes 300 mistakes to solve. Let’s say the collective plan is devised that each of them will work on the problem themselves for one hour and then report what works and what doesn’t work back to each other. During this hour, each person simply has to fail 99 times each. They come back together and realise that there is now only 1 of 4 ways left to figure it out. They spend another hour running those 4 plans, one works, job done. Less than 90 minutes of work.
Final Thoughts on the True Leader
Hopefully, in the last couple of thousand words, I’ve made it clear what makes a good leader. If your main takeaway is mostly things about bad leaders, reverse them, and do that.
Thomas Edison said, in order to know how to make a lightbulb work, I must understand 1000 methods that do not make a lightbulb work.
Lead well, be a head-worker.
