The Leader's Solitude - Part 2
How does the non-existence of a leader affect the team's performance?
Note: This article is a transcription of my answer to a leadership question asked during the first episode of the La Forja podcast, which will be released soon.
How does the absence of a leader affect team performance?
I believe in one thing, I have always believed since I was a child, since I was a teenager, since I can remember, that there is something that is like natural leadership.
A lot is written and read about whether leaders are born or made. I don't really have the answer.
I don't.
There are people who say that leadership can be made, and I do not doubt that certain things can be made and certain tools can be used, but if I do not doubt that, in which I am not an expert, what I do not doubt for sure is that there are natural leaders.
There are leaders who are born and you can see that they are leaders from the time they are children, without them knowing it.
At five years old you are seeing children who are natural leaders. You see how they dominate a situation and people, without them wanting to do anything, are attracted to them and they are setting the pace of what is being done, but with a voluntary attitude.
People recognize that they are the people who are capable of setting the pace.
This is natural leadership.
So, here you are asking me about something that is also very common in the professional world.
It’s one thing to be a leader, it’s another thing to be a boss
To be a boss is to be given authority, potestas they call it, you have authority because you have been given power to exercise it.
But that does not mean that you are a leader.
The leader has auctoritas.
There is potestas and there is auctoritas.
Auctoritas is something that people recognize in a person, it is always voluntary, they recognize that this person is qualified and is good at making decisions that affect the group in general.
That for me would be the ideal leader, the leader we are looking for, where people recognize that he should be the leader, that he is prepared to be the leader, that he has the right qualities, and so on.
And then from that actoritas comes potestas, people listen to him, people trust him, it all comes voluntarily because he is recognized.
What fails a lot is that one person, who does not have the right qualities, imposes himself on another group of people.
He has the potestas, but he does not have the respect, he does not have the credibility.
For me, in that case, he does not have the leadership.
He will have forced followers.
I tell you that we can go to the pragmatic and operative definition of what a leader is, but for me that leaves out a lot of semantics.
I am not interested in that definition.
He may be a leader, because he is one officially, but unofficially he is not. People are simply following him because they have to obey him.
For me that doesn't last long, good people usually leave those places, those who have the possibility of leaving, leave.
That to me is not the definition of leadership.
The leader, to me, is one of the most important things that teams have, and you just said a very interesting thing: there doesn't just have to be one leader, there can be teams of many leaders who cooperate with each other.
You see this all the time.
For example, someone who is ascending, let's say, in a company hierarchy and ends up being the last leader of all the leaders, before he was also a leader.
The day before he was the CEO of the whole company, he was also a leader.
When he was a manager of his department, he was also a leader.
When he was a middle manager in his department, he was also a leader.
And when he had no one under him, he was also a leader.
What happens is that he has been climbing the official hierarchy in that way, but he always started as a leader as a person: he was assigned jobs, he took on work, he was proactive, he took it out, he pushed, he helped, he resisted... That is what I define as a leader.
If we have people who do not have these qualities, who have not been built from below, from the individual, and we put them to lead groups, I think there is a conflict and it is often observed in organizations.
In the end, I would summarize that since I believe that everything has to be voluntary and that this is what really lasts in the long term, you officially put something that does not work, such as a leader who has potestas, who has power because he has been given it, and it is rare that you see that this lasts over time.
These teams tend to lose people, they tend to lose the best people, because in the end people need to know that they are going somewhere, that there is someone who has a vision to go somewhere and that there is someone who has the capacity to lead that way.
Then, others sign up for that mission because they trust them, even other leaders, which is a very interesting thing that you mentioned.
Leaders work with other leaders and those leaders can enroll in a mission that they feel is good for them without having to be the ultimate leader of the mission, but they are leaders of their parts of the mission.
A good leader is surely also looking for other leaders to lead those parts of the mission and not to lead absolutely everything. Because if he leads absolutely everything, maybe there is a problem of self-esteem.
That is, if you are something, I am nothing. So, that's why I have to be everything.
For me, that is a bad leader.
The good leader for me tends to disappear, that is, he tends to make the other leaders of the team emerge, they have more and more role, they work autonomously and they coordinate to be aligned with the general strategy.
But the main leader has no desire for the limelight, he intends to protect his team and to remove stones from the road so that they can achieve their goal.
His ultimate success would be to disappear and not be known to anyone.
And those leaders, in turn, who also work with him, do the same with their own teams, they encourage people to take responsibility and do not make them invisible.
When you see someone making someone else invisible, surely there is a self-esteem or ego problem there.
And to me that's not a good sign for a leader.
So, I'll summarize this so I don't get too far off-topic.
I believe that the right people are the ones who should be leaders, those people work with other leaders, and there are leaders who work with other leaders.
Notice that I say "with" and I don't even say "for", because there are very horizontal cooperations where leaders, in the end somebody is going to have the last responsibility because otherwise it is also wrong.
Even if there is someone who at the end has to make the last decisions, 90% of the time they may be autonomous people who are coordinating because each of them are leaders and they don't need to be told even how to go to the bathroom, but they are very autonomous in their decisions.
I think that maybe I am describing it through my perspective, but for me that is a more ideal situation than a hyper-leadership that crushes everything and makes everything invisible.
Since I come from the leadership of the autonomous person who climbs upwards, I respect this person a lot and what I try to do is to make him a leader in his area, and that does not mean that you charge him with the responsibility of what does not correspond to him, but that he is a leader in his area.
And these good people are only going to be with a leader who respects them, treats them well and they are enrolled in a mission that they believe is worthwhile for their life, that has meaning and also, the way the mission is set up, with the respect they are treated, with the role they are given and the leader they have, they believe that the mission is well done and that is why they are enrolled.
That's the approach that I put on all this and if it's not like that, then let's say that for me, it starts to be less interesting.
Isn't it?