What is leadership?
We'll take a brief stop at a Merriam-Webster dictionary and then get on with the discussion.
Any student of English should understand that "leadership" is a thing that is or has the traits of being a leader, and further that a "leader" is something or someone who leads. So let's cut to the chase here.
Amongst the definitions for "lead" we find "to guide on a way especially by going in advance" and "to direct on a course or in a direction".
The order of these are significant. I'll explain why throughout the course of this series.
So let's drop the formal, mathematically precise approach and get on with sharing my lessons here.
When we accomplish a goal for ourselves, we necessarily adopt all the roles. We envision, we plan, we organize, we direct, we execute, and we complete the tasks. Success or failure rides entirely on us, and either we stay focused on the goal, or we don't.
But when the goal involves many people, the work usually needs to be coordinated. Making sure two people aren't working on two different versions of the same thing, making sure the pieces they work on fit together well, and overall ensuring the individual tasks result in accomplishing the group goal.
But that's not leadership. That is coordinatorship. And it's an important trait in most multi-person projects. But thus far we have been assuming that all the folks who said they wanted to help out in working toward the goal will actually do so. That's often a faulty assumption.
Everyone is driven by an internal priority list. Things that bubble to the top of their list get worked on, things that settle downwardly often do not. Some people do this more consciously than others. But to assume that everyone does it consciously would be faulty; to further assume that your goals for the group will bubble up rather than settle down is more so.
Leadership, then, is the ability to *inspire* people to do the work toward a goal -- to keep those tasks bubbling up rather than settling down. To keep the project moving forward by keeping individuals motivated to complete their portion of the work.
Leadership, at its heart, is being inspirational.
So, back to my band. Seven musicians and singers, with what has been described as "an embarrassment of riches" for talent, all wanting to exercise their art and with goals to make some money doing so. Everybody's already steered in the right direction. All cohesive in goal; a leader's dream.
So what happened?
Well, a lot of things. Anyone in my band will readily admit to a number of things that drew their attention away from the band. Some have already done so in response to the introductory prelude to this series. But the point I will continue to press toward is that despite those other issues, leadership would have prevailed under that duress.
I've had time to examine the failure of leadership in several different organizations I've attempted to run. It took time to realize that almost every one of those lessons comes back to one basic principle of leadership where I succeeded and failed on the basis of one trait: Inspiration.
Where I inspired others, my leadership succeeded. Where I failed to inspire others, my leadership failed.
The problem with 7th Root was, essentially, that I did not inspire my bandmates to continue to drive toward the goals of the band. Eventually, almost all of them were so uninspired to work on things for this band that, by comparison, new inspirational avenues which presented themselves in their lives became more attractive. To be fair, these other avenues were more attractive because there were no rewards for the use of their creative talents in the band anymore.
Which goes back to that internal priority list. When the return on investment for time spent working on 7th Root diminished to the point where a new project offered more return on investment there, invariably, the individuals chose the other venue.
Next thing you know, the band's on the back burner.
Therefore, upcoming installments in this series will discuss inspiration, investment, and reward. What they are, how they work, how they effect people, and pre-requisites for adjusting these things in the real world.
These are not the only tools of the leader, but they are tools I did not employ, resulting in failed leadership.
Next up: Inspiration