What is the purpose of leadership?
What is leadership and why do we need it? If you do a search for leadership books on Amazon you get back thousands of titles, all with a different take on what makes a great leader. Some emphasise technical skills. Some emphasise people skills, others emphasise whatever magic formula the author believes holds the secret. You could read leadership books for the rest of your life and and up more confused than you were when you started.
So what is the secret? What does make a great leader. Why do we need leaders anyway? The only way we will answer the question of what makes a great leader is to work out what leaders really do.
Leadership is what allows coordinated activity to scale. If you want something done that takes more than a few people, it's leadership that allows that to happen. Leaders are needed to make sure that everyone involved is working towards the same goal. Small groups can self-coordinate. Think about a self organising team. They don't need a designated leader to coordinate because they can communicate sufficiently well between them that they stay aligned. Beyond that size though, communication becomes harder and the group tends to fragment and alignment to the goal starts to drift. Leaders are needed to ensure that larger groups stay aligned.
Without leaders, large groups will be ineffective. Leadership allows them to stay aligned and deliver outcomes. Essentially the function of leadership is to scale the ability of groups to deliver outcomes.
Often leaders try to do this by being the best or knowing the most about whatever the group is trying to do. Being the best technical person. Knowing the system better than anyone. We've all seen this. Leader as the expert. A lot of leadership books stress the importance of the leader's technical competence. They say that the thing that makes a great leader great is being extremely good at whatever the organisation does. That technical competence is the defining trait of great leaders.
If your leadership book says that, throw it in the bin immediately. It's wrong. just plain wrong. While technical leadership is useful, it's not the most important quality a leader can have. If you think about it, having the leader as the most technically competent person means that they become the information and knowledge bottleneck. Rather than allowing an organisation to scale, you reduce the scale right back down to one. The organisation can only deliver as much as that one leader can manage.
Technical leadership is important; in fact most great leaders are technically competent. It’s just that it doesn’t matter whether that's technically competent in whatever process or product or technology the organisation uses, or technically competent at management skills - delegation, giving feedback, financial reporting and so on (the sorts of things you learn in an MBA). But technical skills are not what makes them great leaders. Technical leadership is like table stakes in poker - you need it to play the game but it doesn't make you a great player. What sets great leaders apart is their ability to scale outcomes. They do this in a number of ways, but one of those ways is definitely not by centralising knowledge and decision making into one extremely competent individual.
Great leaders facilitate the distribution of knowledge and information. Instead of concentrating knowledge in themselves, the mark of a great leader is the ability to get knowledge out of their head and into the heads of others. And even more than that, they need to be able to get the knowledge out of other people's heads, wherever it exists in the organisation and distribute that around the organisation as well. Great leaders are facilitators of knowledge transfer.
It's the same with information. Rather than having all the information flows come through them, a great leader will make sure that information is flowing from where it is generated to where it is needed, with as few unnecessary steps as possible. They will make the right introductions and assist in building the relationships across the organisation to ensure that information flows.
Same with decisions. Great leaders facilitate decisions, they don't make them. They ensure that the systems are in place and the information is available so that everyone in the organisation can make decisions.
Great leaders keep the organisation aligned and effective by clearly communicating vision and direction. By sharing knowledge freely, by making sure information flows. Not by trying to be the best at things. What they need to be best at is making other people better.
They do this by fostering a culture where people are encouraged to talk to each other and share knowledge and information freely. They build trust. They build teams. They build culture. They need to lift everyone in the organisation up to their level of skill, or higher. They need to make everyone as good as them at building the right relationships to keep things flowing. They need to make everyone in the organisation as passionate about the vision and direction as they are. The real skill of a great leader is to scale skills and relationships across the organisation.
As a leader your technical skills stop mattering. What matters is your ability to scale those skills across large groups. The vital skills for a leader are not technical skills. Yes, technical skills are important and most great leaders will be technically strong, but technical skills are table stakes, they let you enter the game. What helps you win and become a great leader are your skills at bringing out the best in everyone.
What skills do you need to do that? Studies have shown that the skills or qualities a great leader needs are people skills, team building skills and the need to display passion and vision (and yes, those things are skills that can be learned). I'll look more at those specific skills next time.