Leadership under any name

I drove past two high schools last week, each with a large banner stretched across the front of the building. I didn’t catch the school names. I caught the word.

LEADERSHIP

Both of them. Same word, different zip code, same promise. We are growing leaders here. Your children will emerge from these doors ready to lead. Send them to us ordinary and we will return them consequential.

I drove on. But the question followed me.

If both schools are producing leaders, and presumably every other school with a banner is doing the same, who exactly are these leaders going to lead? There are only so many positions at the front of the room. The math doesn’t work. And yet the banners multiply, the mission statements accumulate, the word appears in every graduation speech, every LinkedIn profile, every performance review, until it is everywhere and therefore, quietly, nowhere.

Something has gone wrong with this word. You probably already sense it. You’ve used it, and felt somewhere underneath the using that it wasn’t quite landing on anything solid. Not recently. Slowly, the way words go wrong. Through overuse, through flattery, through the very human tendency to take something that matters and market it until the meaning drains out and only the prestige remains.

I want to try to say what went wrong. Not because the word is beyond rescue, but because the thing it points to, when it points to something real, is worth rescuing. Here is my suspicion, stated plainly before I try to earn it: leadership is not something you become. It is something others decide you are. Everything else follows from that.

The first thing that went wrong is that leader became a synonym for person we are proud of. A high-achieving student, someone who will go out into the world and do something that reflects well on the institution that formed them. That’s a reasonable aspiration. It’s just not leadership. It’s consequence. Impact. All of which are real things, but they don’t require anyone to follow you. You can matter enormously in a room by yourself.

When we substituted leader for all of those things, we smuggled in an assumption so quietly that almost nobody noticed: that consequence requires hierarchy. That the only way to count is to be in front. The researcher who spends a decade on a problem nobody else thought worth solving, the teacher who changes the frame for a generation of students, the craftsman who does the thing at a level nobody can quite explain. These people matter. The word leader doesn’t fit them, and when we try to force it, something is lost. Not just precision. The particular dignity of their way of being in the world.

The second thing that went wrong is harder to say politely. The banner told every student they could be a leader. But leader is a word with a long memory, and its memory is aristocratic. For most of human history it described the person at the top, by birth, by force, by divine appointment. We democratized the aspiration while leaving the structure intact. Everyone can aspire. Not everyone will arrive. And the ones who don’t will be measured, forever, against a standard they didn’t choose, by a word that was never really theirs to claim.

There is a student behind one of those banners who goes home every afternoon and makes dinner for younger siblings while her parents work. She holds a family together and carries weight that would buckle most adults. The banner does not see her. Or rather, it sees her as someone who has not yet become what she could be. Which is precisely backward.

But here is the thing that stopped me most, somewhere on the drive home.

Leadership is not something you become. It is something others decide you are.

In every domain where leadership actually exists, there is a mechanism external to the wanting. An electorate. A hiring committee. A congregation that decides, for its own reasons, to trust someone with its direction. A team in crisis that turns, without quite deciding to, toward one particular person. The wanting is neither necessary nor sufficient. History is full of people who desperately wanted to lead and never did. It is equally full of people who led without ever particularly choosing to, pushed forward by circumstance, by others’ confidence, by the specific gravity of a moment that needed someone and found them available.

You cannot will yourself into being a leader any more than you can will yourself into being beloved. The relationship has to happen. The others have to manifest. And they manifest, or don’t, for reasons that have very little to do with whether you took the right courses or attended a school with the right banner.

None of this is an argument against preparation. Churchill prepared obsessively for decades: the reading, the writing, the years of political failure that sharpened rather than broke him. The preparation was real and necessary. What he could not do was manufacture 1940. That is the distinction the banners collapse. Preparation for capability is yours to do. Preparation for leadership is a category error, because whether leadership comes is not yours to decide.

And this, I think, is where the whole project goes quietly wrong. It seems to treat leadership as an internal achievement, something you become through the right formation or the right school. As if wanting hard enough, and preparing well enough, closes the gap. But leadership is a role, not a character type. It exists in a specific context, with specific people, toward a specific end. Remove those and you don’t have a leader. You have someone standing in an empty room, waiting to be followed.

Which means the schools are not, in fact, producing leaders. They cannot. What they might produce, what the good ones do produce, is people with enough judgment, enough craft, enough genuine care for others that when the right moment arrives, in the right circumstances, with the right community around them, something we might honestly call leadership becomes possible. But that is a much quieter promise. It doesn’t fit on a banner.

Here is what I think leadership actually is, when it is something real.

It is a vision for a specific group of people, in a specific set of circumstances, at a specific moment in time. Not transferable. Not a credential you carry from room to room. Churchill in 1940 is a leader. Churchill in 1945 loses the election. Same man. Different moment. The moment had needed something he had, and then the moment passed, and what it needed next was something else, and someone else.

In that frame, the people around the leader are not generic followers, waiting to be animated by someone more consequential than themselves. They are the condition of possibility. Their readiness, their willingness to move: these are what call leadership into existence. The community does not follow the leader. In some deep sense, the community produces the leader. The causality runs the other way.

Which means the competent professional is not a failed leader. The responsible citizen is not someone who didn’t quite make it. The nurse who has no interest in administration, who simply wants to be excellent at the thing she does, who shows up and carries the load and does not need to be in front. She is not the consolation prize. She may be the whole point.

I drove home thinking about what we lose when we tell young people that leadership is the aspiration. We give them a word that has been stretched until it covers everything, sorted until it flatters only some of them, and pointed in a direction that isn’t quite theirs to walk. We ask them to want something that will only come, if it comes, as a consequence of everything else, not as the goal itself. And we leave them without language for the things that might actually guide them: craft, judgment, accountability, the willingness to be responsible for something that matters without needing an audience for it.

The banners mean well. They always do.

Last week I mentioned something new was coming. Here it is.

On April 17th I am launching The-No-Need-to-Read-the-Book Workshop: five Friday mornings, every other Friday through June 12th, from 8:30 to 9:15am Eastern.

I have read the books. You bring the thinking.

Fifteen books across five sessions, none of the titles announced in advance.

One flat fee of $100.

First 12 to register. That’s it. (And no, I will not be telling you to act now while supplies last.)

If that’s you, the details and registration link are here.

Managing in Prose, Leading in Poetry: A Shift in Perspective

Even in our most pragmatic moments, something elusive tugs at the edges of management. We create schedules, set metrics, establish procedures—all necessary elements of organizational life. Yet in the spaces between these structured elements, we sense something more fluid, less containable.

This tension shows up in our language: we speak of management as something mechanical—an engine pushing forward in a predetermined direction, fueled by clear objectives, hard facts, and deadlines. The manager, like the operator of an engine, exerts control over the process, ensuring that things run efficiently and according to plan. In this view, managing is often described in prose—straightforward, functional, and to the point.

But what if we reframed this? What if we began to see leadership as something more poetic—a sail catching the wind, letting the currents of the moment shape our path rather than forcing an outcome through sheer willpower? Leadership, in this sense, becomes more about flow and responsiveness than control and direction. Instead of controlling, we guide. Instead of dictating, we harness.

Imagine, for a moment, seeing the people in your organization as the wind. They bring energy, motion, and power—but they are not entirely predictable. You cannot control the wind, but you can learn to harness it. This raises an essential question: How do we discern when to push forward with steady effort and when to let the current carry us? What happens when the winds of a team’s energy blow in unexpected directions?

The metaphor is simple: An engine pushes forward, controlled by its operator; a sail catches the wind, responding to forces outside of our control. Managing fuels the engine with resources and intentions, pushing it forward with determination and precision. But leadership, like a sail, requires a different kind of wisdom: a willingness to surrender a bit of control, to work with the unpredictable elements of human nature, to read the shifting winds and adjust our course as necessary.

In this model, management doesn’t lose its value—it simply evolves. The prose of management, with its structure, deadlines, and frameworks, remains essential. It ensures stability and creates the conditions for progress. But leadership, like poetry, calls us to think beyond the mechanical. It invites us into the realm of possibility, emotion, and instinct. It asks us to listen deeply to the voices within our teams, to feel into the currents that are already there, and to find ways to move with them rather than against them.

To manage in poetry is not to abandon logic or structure—it is to invite something more fluid into our practice. It is to learn the art of collaboration with the unpredictable forces of human potential, to steer not by brute force but by understanding, respect, and adaptability.

And yet, there are moments when even this dance feels insufficient—when the currents shift in ways we never anticipated, or when the wind dies altogether. What then? Perhaps this is the true invitation of leadership: to accept that there will be times of stillness, turbulence, or storms. The challenge lies not in controlling these forces but in navigating them with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to learn as we go.

Go HERE for more Essays.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Can we manage without managers?

In response to an article in The Economist about the need for middle managers, Michele Zanini writes:

Just because the ladder has fewer rungs doesn’t mean leadership opportunities are scarce-quite the opposite. By giving people the ability to gain influence (and compensation) based on accomplishment as opposed to advancement, an organization ends up with more, not fewer leaders. And these leaders don’t have to devote their talents and energy to politicking or sabotaging each other in zero-sum promotion battles.

The accomplishment-advancement distinction is worth exploring, but I don’t share Michele’s conclusion: the organization will likely end up with more spirit of initiative, not necessarily more “leaders”.

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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.

On the difference between management and leadership

Managing is getting something done, stabilizing existing processes, controlling and correcting deviations to ensure quality and reliability.

Leadership is about doing something new or better, whether a simple process improvement or a transformation. It is more about reframing for improvement. It likely calls upon people to learn new skills and shift beliefs.

Our tendency to ascribe leadership to individuals that hold a formal entitlement as head of a team, group, or function is unhelpful when distinguishing management from leadership as activities with different purposes.

Leadership is not the property of a formal position, but rather an activity that occurs anywhere in the company. A person responsible for such a change is therefore in a leadership role irrespective of title.

source: “Culture shift with Ed and Peter Schein” in Dialogue. Also a Twitter thread.