A few thoughts on leadership.
While spending time in the military, I had a lot of time to think about what leaderships is, since I always had a problem with the Army’s own ages-old conception. Real leadership is in fact about making meaningful connections with people. There is a school of thought people have subscribed to, that leadership is somewhere in the field of controlling loyalty.
Anyone who has a foot in reality knows that such a notion is naive: at some point, reality makes it clear that you can’t pretend to have that control.
What I got to thinking today is about what you can have: a true connection with some motivator that drives loyalty. What is that motivator, and what does that connection look like?
That motivator is vested interest. On an important level, leadership is about something very simple: captains make decisions because they are the only ones going down with the ship. True leadership starts with that commitment, because then loyalty is no longer about being controlled, it’s about having control. The control is over a decision: either I stay on this ship and support its success, or I get off now before I sink with it. When people realize that someone has more vested interest in a task than they do, that there is someone besides themselves who is responsible when the ship goes down, they realize why they aren’t the leader in the first place. The ones who understand and want that responsibility become leaders themselves.
Thats a model much more aligned with true motivations than any system of ranks and medals. What a shame that too many people out there never get past that first conception of being able to control people in the first place.
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Tags: leaders, leadership, management, motivators
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