I know this will sound very outlandish, but at its core, leadership is about managing and controlling people. Wait… wait. Before you throw your fist, hear me out.
If you look at leaders, all they try to do is influence people’s behavior. A CEO wants employees to execute a strategy. A coach wants players to follow a game plan. A president wants citizens to support policies. Leadership is about getting people to move in a particular direction.
And if you dissect it, you will see that for such an ambition to even be bought into, let alone achieved, the leader must, in fact, control the people.
The distinction here is how they do it.
Bad leaders rely on force, fear, authority, and even threats. Good leaders, however, rely on incentives, culture, trust, vision, and persuasion. Manipulation with different flavours.
What drives all this is pressure. Every leader faces it. Pressure to deliver numbers, keep shareholders happy, maintain a strong reputation, grow the business, and produce results quarter after quarter. The higher the position, the heavier the burden.
That pressure shapes leaders because they know that when things go wrong, the blame stops with them, and they are often the first to face the axe.
Let’s look at football for example.
When a team is losing, the coach is usually the first person to go. Not the striker who missed the penalty. Not the defender who made the mistake. Not even the goalkeeper who conceded the goal.
The coach gets fired.
At first glance, that seems unfair, right? After all, coaches don’t score goals. Players do.
But football clubs understand that leadership matters.
You can have talented players and still lose. You can have average players and outperform expectations. Just look at Leicester City winning the league against teams with bigger budgets and bigger stars.
A leader’s job is not to do the work. A leader’s job is to get people working together toward a common objective.
That means understanding people, building the right team, setting standards and creating belief. Knowing when to be firm or harsh, if you will, and when to be flexible. Knowing when to push and when to listen.
When things work, the team gets the praise. When things fail, the leader gets the blame.
That’s the burden of leadership.
It is good, therefore, that before we judge leadership, we strip away the idealism and examine how leaders gain or lose influence and make decisions. Whether they are running a country, a company, or a small team, all leaders push for results.
But sometimes, they fail miserably for being bad at their job.
