The more I think about it, the more I think leadership is one of those words that can get thrown around far too easily, perhaps because we tend to confuse having authority with actually being a leader. Someone can have the biggest job title in the room, the best office, have people reporting to them, make all the decisions and still be an absolutely dreadful leader, because leadership isn’t really about the position you occupy, it is about what you do with the responsibility that comes with that position.
For me, leadership is a mixture of skill(s), honesty, discipline and accountability, and I think those things become particularly important because none of them really works properly in isolation. You can have someone who is incredibly skilled but has no integrity, and what you have then is a very capable person who may be able to take an organisation in completely the wrong direction. You can have someone who is honest but has no judgement, so they are not capable of leading people through difficult situations. You can have someone who is disciplined, but completely inflexible – tortous, and you can have someone who talks endlessly about accountability while somehow managing to make every failure somebody else’s fault. Leadership needs the combination rather than just one impressive characteristic.
Skills are obviously important because good intentions aren’t enough: a leader needs to be able to eg: communicate, make decisions, understand their environment, listen to people, recognise risks, solve problems and, importantly, understand when they don’t know something and be honest enough to say “I don’t know”. A strong leader does not need to be somebody who always knows the answer, so long as they know someone who probably will – just being able to say “I don’t know, so I need somebody who does” is a pretty powerful leadership skill in itself, because pretending to know everything is not confidence, it is just a particularly dangerous form of ego. The Harvard work on strategic leadership, for example, identifies anticipating, challenging, interpreting, deciding, aligning and learning as important leadership capabilities, which makes sense because leadership isn’t simply about standing at the front and telling everyone where to go, it is about understanding what is happening around you and being capable of adapting when reality doesn’t cooperate with your original plan – and let’s be honest that can happen quite a lot! Then there is honesty, and by that I mean not just about not telling porkies – it’s about whether people can actually trust what you say, particularly when the truth is uncomfortable. Anybody can be transparent when everything is going brilliantly, but the real test comes when something has gone wrong, when the numbers aren’t good, when a decision has failed or when somebody needs to hear something they aren’t going to like. The American Psychological Association has specifically highlighted honesty, transparency, credibility and admitting when you don’t know the answer as important elements of trustworthy leadership, because people don’t necessarily need a leader who can guarantee that everything will be fine, they need someone who is prepared to tell them what is actually happening.
That also links directly into accountability, because I think accountability is one of those words that has been distorted to the extent that we sometimes forget what it actually means. Accountability isn’t finding somebody to blame when something goes wrong, and it certainly isn’t creating a culture where everyone is frightened of making a mistake. It’s taking ownership of decisions and consequences, including the consequences that aren’t particularly flattering. If I make the decision, I should be prepared to stand behind the decision. If I get it wrong, I should be prepared to say I got it wrong. If somebody working under me makes a mistake, I need to look at whether I gave them the right information, resources, training and support they needed, rather than immediately throwing them under the bus because that makes the organisational failure look like an individual’s failure.
There is actually something quite revealing about how someone behaves when they are wrong. Anybody can look like a leader when they are winning, when everybody agrees with them and when their decisions are producing good results. The interesting bit is what happens when they aren’t doing so well; do they become defensive, start rewriting history, blaming other people, insisting that everyone else misunderstood them, or pretending that the mistake never happened? Or can they actually stop and say, “That was my decision, it didn’t work, this is why I think it went wrong, and this is what we’re going to do differently”? I would have considerably more respect for the second person, even if they had made the bigger mistake, because at least you know where you stand with them.
And that is where I think discipline comes into it, although I don’t mean discipline in the sense of barking orders at people and expecting everyone to jump. I mean personal discipline, such as consistency and the ability to hold yourself to the same standards that you expect from everyone else. A leader who demands punctuality but strolls into meetings late, demands honesty but selectively withholds information, talks about accountability but refuses to accept criticism, or expects people to maintain standards that they themselves routinely ignore is not demonstrating leadership, they are demonstrating hierarchy. There is a huge difference between the two in my opinion.
Discipline also matters because leadership often involves doing the boring things repeatedly, rather than just making dramatic decisions when everyone is watching. It’s following through, checking things have actually happened, maintaining standards, communicating when you said you would, dealing with problems before they become crises and not allowing standards to gradually slide because challenging them has become inconvenient. In that sense, discipline is what turns values from things written on a wall into things people can actually see in behaviour.
But I think I would add judgement to the four things I started with, because you can have all the right qualities and still make some really awful decisions if your judgement is poor. Leadership involves making decisions with incomplete information, sometimes under pressure, sometimes when there isn’t a perfect answer and sometimes when every available option carries a downside. That means a leader needs to be able to weigh evidence, recognise uncertainty, listen to people who disagree with them and understand the wider consequences of a decision rather than simply going with whatever feels right in the moment. Harvard Business Review has gone as far as describing good judgement as one of the most important roles of a leader, while also recognising that nobody gets every decision right and that effective leaders are essentially those who make a high proportion of good decisions when the decisions really matter.
And there is another part of judgement that I think gets overlooked, which is knowing when your own judgement might be compromised. Ego can be quite a dangerous thing in leadership because once somebody starts believing that being challenged is the same thing as being undermined, they stop listening to the people around them. Suddenly the people who agree with them are “loyal” and the people who question them are “difficult”, when in reality those difficult people might be the only ones preventing the organisation from driving itself into a ditch. The Center for Creative Leadership’s work around leadership character also points towards integrity and social intelligence as important elements of leadership effectiveness, which fits with the idea that leadership isn’t simply about individual capability, but about how that capability is exercised in relation to other people.
I also think there is a difference between being respected and being liked, and good leadership shouldn’t be built around the need to be liked. Obviously, nobody wants to work with an someone who is unpleasant, but leadership sometimes means making a decision that people aren’t going to like, having a difficult conversation or saying no when yes would be easier. If your entire leadership model depends upon everybody being happy with you all the time, you’re probably going to end up making decisions based on popularity rather than what is actually right. At the same time, that doesn’t mean becoming authoritarian and dismissing people’s opinions, because listening is part of good judgement – you can make difficult decisions while still treating people properly.
Ultimately, I think the best leaders create an environment where people know what’s expected of them, understand why it matters, feel able to speak honestly, know that mistakes can be acknowledged and corrected rather than hidden, and know that the person at the top is not going to disappear the second something goes wrong. That last bit matters enormously because people watch what leaders do far more closely than they listen to what leaders say. You can have the most beautiful values statement imaginable sitting on a website, but if the leadership behaves differently when there is pressure, that’s the real organisational culture and ethos that your employees and clients will see.
Which brings me back to the four things I started with, because I believe they form a pretty useful little test of leadership. Skills give you the ability to do the job, honesty gives people a reason to believe you, discipline gives you consistency, and accountability gives people confidence that you will own what happens. Then judgement sits across all of them because it determines how you use those qualities when things become complicated. And perhaps the simplest test is this: when things go well, does the leader share the credit, and when things go badly, do they take responsibility? If the answer is yes to both, I would already be paying attention, because that tells me considerably more about somebody’s leadership than their job title ever could.
There is a reason the Centre for Creative Leadership’s work on accountability describes accountable leaders as people who act with integrity, building trust rather than fear and encouraging people to take ownership themselves. Accountability has to be modelled from the top, otherwise it becomes little more than a management weapon or phrase thrown about in a training module. Ultimately, leadership isn’t really tested when everything is easy: it’s often tested when the pressure’s on or the information is incomplete or if somebody has made a mistake – that’s when you find out whether someone is actually a leader or whether they just happen to be the person with the title.
References:
Harvard Business Review, “Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills” — research identifying anticipating, challenging, interpreting, deciding, aligning and learning as core strategic leadership capabilities.
Harvard Business Review, Tichy & Bennis, “Making Judgment Calls” — discussion of judgement as a central leadership responsibility and the importance of making good decisions when they matter most.
American Psychological Association, “How leaders can maximize trust and minimize stress” — discussion of credibility, expertise, dependability, honesty, transparency, admitting uncertainty and modelling behaviour.
American Psychological Association, “Leadership in times of crisis” — research and expert guidance around trustworthy communication, transparency, honesty, empathy and learning from mistakes.
Center for Creative Leadership, “The Irony of Integrity” — research examining character strengths and their relationship with leadership effectiveness, including integrity and social intelligence.
Center for Creative Leadership, “Accountability Training for Leaders” — discussion of accountability, integrity, trust and ownership in leadership.
