leadingtoday.org

Leadership Tip of the Month

February 2001

Copyright 2001 ã weLEAD, Inc.

What Leadership is Not

The purpose of weLEAD is truly different. During the last 50 years we have experienced an explosion of books and consultants focused on promoting management and leadership. Yet the fact remains that much confusion exists today, even about the very definition of the word leadership! Even in our modern society we have yet to distinguish between the positive role of those individuals who beneficially change our times and organizations to attain remarkable achievement, and the highly ambitious who simply claw their way to the top of their heap! We have a terrible cultural tendency of calling them both leaders!

Take just one look at the daily news and you will easily see what we mean. For example, when speaking of an international meeting including political tyrants and dictators, the media will typically proclaim something like “world leaders gathered”. Often you will hear how a CEO or business executive has been convicted of a criminal act, yet they are typically referred to as a “business leader”! Sadly, we still call individuals leaders simply because they gained control of an organization. We use this term loosely no matter how they arrived at that position or how ineptly they have managed. Think about this fact; in what other setting could we be allowed to put individuals like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Sadam Hussein in the same classification!

In our western culture we have made a few feeble attempts to distinguish between these vastly different types of achievers. Some authors and management consultants have coined beneficial phrases like servant-leadership, stewardship or principle-centered leadership to draw a distinction, but with little effect. So we continue to degrade the real position and achievement of those who guided others to attain incredible progress, while artificially granting status to those whose lives were dedicated to manipulation and control over others. We do this by calling them both…leaders. As a society, we obviously have not gotten to the point where we are ready to dogmatically articulate the difference. At weLEAD we are committed to drawing this clear distinction and emphasizing the difference between those who merely seek to “command and control” others, in contrast to those who truly lead others with an attitude of service demonstrated by positive core values.

Our organization is an advocate of what is now called the servant-leadership or stewardship philosophy. A real modern leader is a servant first! Secondly, the servant-leader aspires to lead in order to help produce positive change. The leader’s main goal is to help the followers grow as individuals. This allows them the freedom to reach their needs as they become more autonomous, wiser and productive. In turn, they also become servant-leaders since they will model those who have earned credibility and their respect. We believe you can become an “army of one” in your organization and begin to influence many co-workers by being a servant-leader. Others will notice the difference. Maybe you can’t single-handedly change the culture or environment of your organization, but you can change yourself as a great beginning. Those co-workers who work for you and with you will notice the difference!

Our goal is to articulate a new set of terms to distinguish between what is the positive role of a leader whose service beneficially changes our world, in contrast to the anti-leaders who simply exist to serve themselves and their ego at the expense of others. This will not be an easy task, but it must begin somewhere. It is going to begin right here and now. We will promote this difference in all of our publications and services.

For weLEAD, this is Greg Thomas reminding you that it was Horace Mann, who once said,

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

To learn more about leadership go to the weLEAD Home Page!