What is Leadership, Really?
Full Article
What Are We Looking For?
You’ve been impacted by leadership, either inspired by its presence, or disillusioned by its absence. Either positively or negatively, leadership leaves an imprint on you. But what is leadership, really? There are volumes of content dedicated to developing this singular quality. None of the ideas you’ll encounter here are novel, but as we look through the kaleidoscope of leadership, shouldn’t we know what we are looking for so we can recognize the real version when we see it? The vision of becoming a Well | Rooted person carries prevailing themes of leadership.
Do you know the difference between authentic leadership and the appearance of leadership? Why is it so important to the world? What are its consequences—healthy or unhealthy? Is it for everyone or not? It feels important to level-set on what it could mean to impact others, individuals, the people we directly interact with, our families, and, hopefully ourselves.
The idea of leadership has been defined as the ability to influence others - specifically in a particular and necessary direction. Often, this challenge of influencing others, teams, business, etc. could easily be seen as - coercing people toward a particular outcome. It is often distilled down to possessing the ability to take people to a desired destination - whether a professional or a personal one.
Investing and Uncovering
There are outcomes and endpoints involved, but we believe there is a deeper purpose to leadership. If you ask most leaders, they will say helping people grow and develop is at the heart of leadership, but oftentimes it is just a means to an end. Developing people is usually missing from most organizational structures. What if the essence of leadership is not about taking people someplace, them following you or your influence on them, but rather investing yourself in a way that creates space for others - to uncover and realize their full potential rooted in who they were meant to be?
This could feel nuanced, but authentic leadership must have others as its central focus - people living out who they are meant to be will produce healthy outcomes. When focusing on investing and uncovering, we are able to see through results-first leadership. Through investing and uncovering, it’s easier to contextualize the ideology of “leadership is for everyone”. It’s a world where charisma, high intelligence and proven outcomes are measurements for actual leadership. Pause and think - if charisma, influencing to a common goal, outcomes, intelligence and having followers makes you a successful leader – then Hitler, Stalin, Keresh, Manson, etc. were highly effective leaders.
The example is a little cheeky, but it reveals a sobering reality we have to confront. We have to wrestle with what we allow to be called leadership. What is effective leadership? Who are we elevating into leadership positions? Thus, it is imperative to confront our own internal battles to ensure we are leading from a healthy place. We need to cease settling for mediocre leaders, or even worse, bad leaders who can do a job really well.
If a leader is anyone who invests for the pure benefit of seeing others uncover and step into who they are meant to be, then you can quickly see how anyone can be a leader. ANYONE. Yet, if we are honest, we find few people rarely are. In 20+ years of leadership, I have seen direct contributors demonstrate what leadership ACTUALLY is with clarity, effectiveness and organic results in a way that defies organizational titles and self-help book leadership. None of this is positioned to propose results, skill, intelligence, business acumen, expertise, etc. are less valuable - on the contrary, they only launch authentic leadership to meteoric heights. You can have both - you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other - it’s what it takes to be Well | Rooted - join us.
Stay Rooted ~
