Nobody Wants to Lead

And if you do, you probably shouldn’t

There is an argument that states “if you want to be a leader, you probably shouldn’t be”. Leadership is something earned from followers, and great leaders often take on the role with a heavy heart. Great leaders recognise the burden that leadership comes with. The burden of responsibility, the burden of accountability and the burden of putting selfish needs to one side to benefit the group. Knowing this is what leadership is, who would want that?

Are politicians leaders? Many people don’t consider them to be. Politics breeds a culture of people who want to lead, but they want to lead for the wrong reasons. They usually want to lead because of the perceived status, the perceived financial benefit and the nice house in central London that comes with the job. But more importantly than that, they want to lead because it has been drilled into us from an early age that being a leader is the ultimate form of success. The people that should lead are turned off by politics.

As someone in the unfortunate position of having the word “Manager” in my job title, I need to look at what I can do to become a leader and do more than just “manage”. That fancy window seat I gave myself when I got promoted, not my finest work and neither was taking the upgrade to my laptop that my status now afforded me, but time (and lots of feedback) has taught me the error of my ways.

When staring out of the window next to my luxurious desk, I often observed the parking spaces reserved for the members of the board laying empty while simultaneously read emails from the car park police about another car parked on the grass verge (in direct contradiction of article 3.7b of the parking policy). What is it that makes “leaders” look after their own interests before that of those they lead? Why do communist governments tend to lead a life of luxury at the expense of the people? Why do I get to veto my sons second episode of “In the Night Garden” while I spend the next 2 hours watching 22 cars drive in circles on Sky Sports?

The answer? Because I think I deserve it. I pay the bills, so it is only logical that my needs come first… right? So why does my son look so disappointed in me? Well there are a lot of reasons for that but in the context of this blog post, it is because I decided the reward for leadership, not him. I decided that the privilege afforded to me as leader was to watch my sports when I want to, but my son didn’t sign off on that, especially if it costs him his TV time. He drew me a picture of a dinosaur last week, wasn’t that enough? “I don’t see you drawing me any pictures of dinosaurs” could be his theoretical argument. And if that is how he feels, that is my failure as a leader.

This is the contract of a leader. Leaders make followers feel safe and followers afford the leader certain privileges for making them feel safe. A leader says “I will make sure everyone gets safely off this ship” and followers let that leader have the largest quarters on the boat with a fancy table in it. But the rewards have to be seen to match the benefit. If the rewards start to exceed the perceived benefit, then revolts happen. The pigs of Manor Farm rise up against their human keepers, people rise up against unelected (and sometime elected) government and workers strike.

But sometimes they don’t strike, they do something worse, something that is not as easy to detect. They lose respect. They no longer work to make their leader proud, they work because they have to. Followers aren’t the best they can be because they are too busy thinking about how things could be better. They worry that their leader doesn’t have their back and they put their energy into making themselves feel safe — the primary objective of a leader is now being done by the followers. To the untrained eye, the leader looks to be leading, but without the visibility of a striking workforce, “leading” and “managing” start to look very similar. The hidden metrics of team health and happiness would paint a different picture but they are much harder to measure than the tried and tested “bums on seats” metric.

So what lessons can we learn from this? Well firstly, as a leader, recognize your power comes from your followers, not the people you follow. Too often an office “comes with the job”, the parking space is “just one of the perks” and the state of the art laptop is “the reason I took the job in the first place” (it’s true, I love my new laptop). Ask yourself, is my team ok with this? And really ask yourself, don’t ask your team a loaded question like “as your boss, it’s totally cool that I get this window seat, right?”. Secondly, if your power isn’t coming from the team, empower them. Ask them for feedback, ask them to define your role and ask them to let you know when they aren’t able to be their best, because, at the end of the day, as a leader, that when you are at your best.

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