Following the leader
Leadership is tricky.
It's easy to get wrong.
It's easy to take the wrong assumptions from finding a willing follower and believing that their adoption of you means anything in particular for your greatness. That's not it at all.
We could all do with someone telling us that we're only mortal.1
I think of the ventures I've gone on, the people I've followed, the activities I've participated in. Most of the time some gregarious personality stepped forward and beckoned the rest of us to follow toward the completion of some task.
That's fine. I don't mind letting someone else take the helm and fit in where I can.
But sometimes, and far too often I'm afraid, I've seen the leader mistake the support of their followers for a misplaced belief that we're joining in because of them.
That's the case sometimes, but not always.
I think back to one activity I was involved with, where it became clear that everyone was working together for an end result that we all believed in. Yes, it took one person to organize, encourage, facilitate, and ultimately lead. But the thing we did became more than any one person. It wasn't theirs as much as it was mine, or any other individual in the group. It was a collective thing we worked toward, poured our sweat into, and ultimately we all felt the reward of work well done.
That type of thing is magical. When a whole team pulls together, feeling a connected purpose. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's worth every moment of energy.
The challenge then, with leadership, is to not mistake the team's collective interest in accomplish a task for some misguided power trip. It'd be too easy for them to think that the endeavor was theirs, that they earned the accolades and the reward of a hard thing done; when in fact it happened because of collective minds coming together and bending their will toward defeating entropy.
I'm not discounting leadership, and its importance and value when done right. The best leaders I've worked with are ones who encourage me to be better than I thought possible, to push more than I knew I could. But at the end of the day they had no hubris about the results, and rightly understood that a hard thing done is only as a result of the willing efforts of both the led and the leader.
If you take the opportunity to lead, to help make something amazing happen, just remember that the best results come from believing in those around you, and helping them see the impact they made.
Shining the light on yourself takes away from the beauty of others feeling like they have a place to make an impact.
- This may be a legend, but it's been said that Marcus Aurelius had a slave follow him around, and whisper in his hear that he was only a man; a reminder of who he was, despite being at the height of his power as a Roman Emperor.