Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters
Bob Dylan
The sheer quantity of articles and quotations on the subject of leadership is impressive. Lots of people over lots of years have offered lots of advice — in the form of adages, axioms, and maxims — but, as with any human endeavor, the results are decidedly mixed. Some leadership aphorisms are wise and pithy while most are banal or overwrought. More than a few are outright stupid or misleading.
Frankly, I have been feeling a bit left out of the leadership aphorism party that seems to take place all over the interwebs, so I have decided to contribute one myself:
Leaders relate.
Profound, huh? Catchy, too. Let me explain. The best leaders build and maintain relationships. They understand that leading is about people, so their leadership starts with relating to people. Their people see their backside far less than their faceside. Most aphorisms on leadership fail to acknowledge this truth, but there are exceptions. Here are a few of my favorites.
Mahatma Gandhi
I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.
Gandhi’s insight is key to my argument. The best leaders are relationship builders first, not champions of battle, not lifters of heft. Leaders create connections with and among humans.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
This is one of my favorite leadership insights on how leaders motivate others in a particular direction. I have written in the past on the power of a common mission to drive people forward. Achieving this ideal requires communication and persuasion through an appeal to shared values.
In another famous quote, Eisenhower links leadership and integrity. Quite right. I have written on that as well.
Lao Tzu
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, “we did it ourselves.”
A cousin of the Eisenhower quote above, Lao Tzu’s contribution is that leadership is in service to a group and/or cause. True leaders are not in it for personal glory but for collective good. If personal glory is your motivator, you are not a leader. You are merely a boss, and a really bad one at that.
Napoleon Bonaparte
A leader is a dealer in hope.
Sure, Napoleon is a problematic character — what with the overly eager war-making and empire-building and all — but this one is a powerful insight about a leader’s relationship to people and the ability to conjure a shared vision.
Grace Murray Hopper
You manage things; you lead people.
Yup. Simple. Clear. Wise. One of the biggest problems in the land of Bossdom is that mediocre and bad bosses think they need to manage people as though they are things. I guess, then, it is inevitable that a few will also try to lead things as though they are people. It makes about as much sense.
Ralph Nader
I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Uncle Ralphie. I just discovered this one, and it expresses my animating principle precisely. The best leaders, like the best teachers, serve in order to replicate, but they do not strive to replicate themselves, at least not in any precise way. These leaders strive to replicate the ethos they have developed and live by.
For good measure, here are a couple of quotes on leadership that I abhor.
Anonymous
Leaders lead.
This one slays me. The only wisdom to observe here is the fact that the original spouter (the ur utterer) of this trite and meaningless aphorism remains unknown.
Tony Blair
The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Does this guy ever get tired of being wrong? Saying no is ridiculously easy for a leader — in fact, addictively so. By way of thought experiment, let’s review a short dialogue.
Employee: Boss, I wanna…
Boss: No.
Employee: But…
Boss: No.
Employee: Can I at least…
Boss: No. Now go away.
Aaaaaand scene.
Seems pretty easy to me.
In contrast, saying yes requires temerity and creativity in order to follow through. To be clear, though, saying yes and not following through courts disaster and is not worth entertaining.
Also consider that the boss who says no because they think it makes them seem tough is like the teacher who fails students for the same reason. The latter misses the point entirely about what teaching and learning are. The former misses the same about leading. I wrote a whole essay on this issue way back when entitled “Start with Yes.”
The last two quotes, by Messieurs Anonymous and Blair, are dogs in part because they neglect the human factor. Blair reduces people to nuisances while Anonymous reduces them to cyphers. Both focus entirely on the leader and not qualities of leadership or, more importantly, the people who are being led.
In the other aphorisms, note that their merit is centered on the leader’s relationship with others. As I said, the best leaders are relationship builders. They work with and rely on their people to get things done, which means they know how to consistently move people in positive directions. You cannot pull this trick off if you don’t cultivate healthy relationships, which is why one mark of a bad boss is a tendency to spend much time pouring over endless spreadsheets and requesting pointless forms rather than seeking and welcoming interactions with actual human beings.
One important caveat: having relationships with your people, even healthy ones, does not automatically make you a good leader. Most people intuitively know that bosses who take you out to dinner or invite you to a round of golf or buy you a birthday cake may be nice people but are not necessarily good leaders. Doing all those things is just fine, but leadership relationships are not about the leader being amiable. In fact, they are not primarily about the leader at all. Nor can you build such relationships with herky-jerky one-offs — the five-year pin or the lavish Christmas raffle or the obligatory round of kudos at the beginning of a mindnumbing annual meeting.
No, true leadership relationships are meaningful, robust, and ongoing and require constant attention, assessment, and adjustment — just like all functional human relationships. Good leaders seek to empower their people, and the best leaders strive to be outshined by their people and are proud to have participated in their success.
Furthermore, the best leaders build such relationships in three dimensions — down, up, and sideways — and over time. Again, it takes a lot to create such relationships and even more to consistently and persistently recalibrate, but doing so can help foster a gratifying and productive work life for all.
Therefore, good leaders relate, and from the relationships they build, positive movement ensues. As you seek to move others forward as a leader, you cannot overlook the vital power of relationship building.
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