On leadership

Dave Lorenzo’s recent post pointed me to this article on leadership that really struck a chord. I’ll start by saying “read the article,” but I also want to try to paraphrase and extend it a bit because I think the ideas are pretty important.

In business, it’s an unquestioned reflex to say that companies need leaders and good leaders are hard to come by. Why is this?

Herzberg would say leaders help lift people up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs


Peter Senge would say leaders draw people up the ladder of commitment from being simply compliant with their company’s policies, to becoming committed to its mission.

The concept is the same: leaders draw the best out of people around them. So having a leader on your team or in your company is like having a multiplier: the leader produces output, but better still he or she ups the performance of everyone he or she is in contact with. It’s like getting a 2-fer or a 3-fer out of one hire.

OK, so we all agree, leaders = good. I find however that most people disagree on what leadership is and where it comes from. There’s the “are leaders born or made” question or the “leadership vs. management” question or the “can leaders be taught” question or the General Patton model of leadership vs. the Vince Lombardi model of leadership. Just reading the wikipedia entry on leadership gives you a sense as to how many conflicting concepts and models are out there.

But the article gets it right: in its most distilled form, leadership stems from self-knowledge and integrity. The integrity part is pretty simple; people won’t go the extra mile for people they don’t trust. But the self-knowledge bit is less intuitive.

Why does leadership stem from self-knowledge? A few reasons:

- Knowing yourself means you know what fulfills you which makes you confident in your own decisions. This in turn inspires confidence in others.

- Self knowledge implies you have embraced your own weakensses and gaps in thinking. This gets you halfway home to surrounding yourself with people who complement you rather than compliment you.

- Self knowing people are authentic, and other people trust and enjoy being around authentic people. Bill George, a fantastically successful CEO, wrote a book just on this topic.

I think the software industry does worse than most when it comes to identifying and cultivating leaders. I suspect this is because:

1. Our industry is more fixated on tenure and knowledge (e.g. “must have 10 years experience managing engineering teams that develop analytic supply chain software”).

2. Our industry is made up of mostly logical deductive thinkers who, understandably, tend to find this self-knowledge stuff a bit suspect and new-agey.

If you can get past the Tony Robbins speak, there’s a lot to be mined here. As it’s built entirely on people, I’d like to see our industry cultivate its Joel Spolsky of leaders.