What is a leader?

I write a lot about management, and also about leadership, and a question that often arises concerns the difference between the two. For me, management is, in its essence, a very easy beast to pin down; a manager is someone who has responsibility for the supervision of others, and is judged at least partly on the basis of their results. There are a multiplicity of more and less effective ways he might go about these tasks, but essentially, it is these things that define him as a manager.

Leader, however, is a much more slippery term; for one thing, it's not a job title. You don't have to be a manager to be a leader, and many managers are not, in any real sense, leaders. It's true to say that leadership qualities are implicit in many job descriptions, getting that job will not automatically make you a leader. It's that tricksy word “quality” that's the key here; leadership is a quality, and the result of exercising a set of skills, it's not a job.

So, to get tighter hold of it, let's distil it back to its essence. A leader is someone who others are willing to follow. This can mean that in some senses, leadership is transitory; people can become very effective leaders for short periods in certain circumstances; an individual who is so pushy and directive that he crosses the line into rude can be just the ticket when the building is on fire, and you need someone to get you out before everyone burns, but if the people in question are social workers, then continuing to lead them in less extreme circumstances will require a different approach. Thus, we come to the idea of effective leadership, and particularly, leadership which can be effective in the longer term.

So, what makes an effective leader? The answer, in one form or another, is influence. A leader is someone who can get people facing in the same direction willingly, get them to buy into her vision of the future as their own, and who inspires loyalty in others. And that, in my view, is what anyone with managerial responsibility should be aspiring to; sufficient influence that the staff working for them willingly engage and deliver, without needing to be coerced or financially incentivised. How can that be achieved? In many ways, which are and will be the subject of other blog posts, articles, learning modules and books. Suffice it to say that when I mention leadership, this is what I mean.