David Piccione.com

If you did a Google search for the title of this article, you’d get over 110 million results. It seems there are a lot of people looking for an answer to this question.

You could spend a lifetime studying what it means to be an effective leader and not find yourself any closer to actually becoming one. There are mountains of work on the theories of leadership, the styles of leadership and even the benefits of no leadership at all. None of it matters. Each and every person reading these words can tell me within five seconds those people they have known that are good leaders. Regardless of our knowledge of the theories, one can consistently and correctly identify a good leader from a poor one.

Something so inherently natural to us deserves a simple definition. I think Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American President and General, nailed it when he said of leadership: “the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” That is exactly what leadership is.

Good Leaders Have a Talent For Leadership

The first thing Eisenhower does is classify leadership as an art. Although accurate, it is a principle often ignored, especially in the business world. A painter needs to learn the basic brush strokes and colour theory the same way a leader needs to have a solid foundation, but beyond this, both the painter and the leader begin to develop their own sense of individual style. At a certain point, no amount of colour theory will turn someone without talent into a Picasso. It is for this reason that I refrain from investing too much time in the psychology behind leadership.

All the Theory You Need

Saying that, there are two main aspects of leadership theory that are actually quite important for new leaders to grasp. This first point is that there are three leadership styles which all leaders must use from time to time. These styles are shown in the diagram below:

Each leader will learn when to employ each style in certain situations, but good leaders will naturally live in the participative world and journey temporarily into the others. Those who are naturally authoritarian are - to be blunt - the “asshole bosses” of the world. Those who spend most of their time in a delegative world usually hide in their offices, or run for it.

The second bit of theory is something that you may not be prepared to accept, but is just as important - not everyone is cut out to be a good leader. This isn’t what you’ll usually hear from those that peddle leadership courses. Of course it’s in their interests to sell training as a means to create leaders from non-leaders. It is nonetheless true that leaders must be born with certain talents. This is such an important topic that there is another article in this primer dedicated entirely to this point.

Good Leaders Promote Action

Eisenhower makes another point that leaders will inevitably get something done. Without a task or challenge to be completed, there is no leader. It is for this reason that good leaders tend to be absent from committees and assemblies, or at the least regard them with distain. Their need for action is too great to suffer the endless opinions of large groups of people. (An important note here is not to say that leaders do not value input or hold meetings. The difference being that leaders use this opportunity to look for resulting action.)

Good Leaders Breed More Good Leaders

Finally, perhaps the most important part of Eisenhower’s message: Good leaders promote their followers, and that is true both literally and figuratively. Leaders give those under their charge the chance to own the challenge, along with the glory of overcoming it. In their practice of the art, they sow the seed of leadership itself. Not all who are lead will become a leader, but all will take pride in the accomplishment, and even the notion of being a member of a well led team. Those with an affinity to lead will be attracted to the organization, and the leader benefits in a beautiful symbiotic relationship of all around higher functioning.

We now have a simple, solid and straightforward definition of what the word leadership means. Leaders practice an art form that gets things done while encouraging others to become leaders themselves. So, we know now what good leaders do, but what is it that they share that sets them apart? What qualities make for a strong leader? Keep reading the Leadership Primer to find out.