I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a leader. As I reflect on my career and the experiences I’ve had with leaders and as one, I keep wondering, what does it mean to lead? How does one develop their leadership style or skill?
Leadership is usually the amalgamation of many desirable—and yet undefinable—qualities. Good leadership may be replicable, but great leadership is hard to dissect and study what makes it so.
Leadership is what someone brings to the table from their life experiences and a response to the current environment. Even if you study and understand all the parts, an ethereal component of that moment makes the rest hard to replicate with success elsewhere.
Perhaps leadership is best defined by adaptability and the ability to sense what is around the corner without having a line of sight or proof. Maybe leadership is the willingness to be brave—and with that bravery, the willingness to be wrong. Leadership is unique to the person stepping up (or forced to step up) to lead.
Many companies thrust people into roles, expecting great leaders to emerge, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. And in many cases, those expectations are rarely met.
Management Is Not Leadership
So often, leadership is conflated with managing. I’ve lived enough to have had great managers who were not leaders. I’ve also met great leaders who did not hold impressive titles but whose abilities were desirable to those who manage great swaths of individual contributors.
You will rarely see someone great at management and leadership, but those who do are like ducks swimming in water—we rarely see all the work behind the scenes.
I’m sure everyone has a story or two about a leader who was a terrible manager or a great manager with no business being designated or appointed as ‘the leader.’
That got me thinking—how did we conflate these two things? It seems we expect two wildly different skill sets to coexist in a single person, which may be frustrating and overwhelming to someone who may be strong at one of these abilities but not both.
I’m sure there are one million answers on Google that help define & delineate each role, but for me, I see the two as such:
- A manager is a hierarchical role utilized for traditional people management (performance reviews, development, approving PTO, etc.) and exists in a set ratio to the number of individual contributors in things like sales or operations organizations to ensure day-to-day functions run smoothly and there is no single point of failure
- A leader innately takes on the responsibility to articulate a vision that inspires & rallies people to think or behave differently, sometimes even against their natural inclinations or impulses, for the promise of a better way of working/living that benefits them individually (or entices them to be part of a more significant evolution/change for the greater good)
One might argue that leaders may be more closely aligned with titles such as ‘director’ or ‘VP’ or similar. But I’ve still worked with plenty of individuals with those titles who had no understanding or appreciation of what it means to lead.
The problem is that so many organizations place an expectation that as people move up in the organizational hierarchy, they should flip a switch and become great leaders.
An article in Fast Company points out this trend, referencing a Gartner survey showing that one in five managers “would prefer not to be people managers, given a choice.”
Managing people is a pain. Reviews are laborious, and performance management is arduous. Management is typically the buffer between people doing their jobs and HR or executive leadership teams rolling out policy changes without concrete explanations.
What I like about what the author, Neena Newberry, discusses in the article is that organizations shouldn’t just be dumping all leadership training on managers. There’s a significant difference between what training looks like in terms of ‘leadership’ skills vs ‘management’ responsibilities within an organization. By separating the two, you a) build learning & development around leadership skills regardless of roles and level (e.g., public speaking, storytelling in presentations, empathetic communication) and b) make the move into management more seamless, especially as people decide if and when they wish to move into a management path.
Over the course of my career, I’ve seen many organizations slash L&D budgets, eliminating company-specific learning in lieu of subscriptions to Coursera and LinkedIn Learning, which is the most generic training you might offer. While better than nothing, these types of resources don’t help people navigate their organization or learn their business better in preparation for moving up the ladder internally.
As a result, you’re also pointing people to often-times terrible training by people who may not be wholly qualified to instruct or teach but have figured out how to monetize content creation for their purposes. (As always, buyers should beware of snake oil peddlers.)
This may also explain why many companies are often dissatisfied with their middle-management layer. Sure, they’re fantastic at VLOOKUP, but their newly acquired skills add no value if they don’t understand your business goals or operations better than when they started. And no publicly available course will bridge that gap in understanding your business, much less making connections with people in the industry to learn from.
How I Learned to Lead
I’d be willing to put money on the fact that I was awful when I led my first team. I thought it was my job to act as air traffic control. I thought management was about doling out work and seeing my team as a support system for what I wanted to accomplish.
While not wholly inaccurate, my approach was all wrong. I made it all about me. I assumed:
- People understood what my goals were and why I had them
- People were compelled to follow blindly
- People unabashedly followed a chain of command
- People managed themselves in the way I managed myself
So many assumptions. I learned quite a lot very quickly.
As mentioned above, I quickly bifurcated ‘management’ responsibilities from ‘leadership.’ I couldn’t use management activities or admin as a vehicle to lead.
I also learned that management is reactive, whereas leadership is proactive. I could respond to what people needed or wanted. Still, to empower them (and myself with more actual time to work), I had to proactively organize my team around a vision, define a purpose for our existence, and outline goals aligned with the broader business initiatives. Pavel Samsonov recently posted about this topic on LinkedIn, and I couldn’t agree more.
You can’t ask someone to run a marathon without telling them a) how long it is, b) what the route is (if one exists), c) what the finish line is, and d) what the weather conditions are. Without detail, people are running endlessly and question why they’re running in the first place.
I ran a poll on this a while ago on LinkedIn, and it was interesting to see that ‘vision/direction’ was what people valued most from leaders.
It also goes to show that what people want from a leader is someone they trust, who treats them with dignity and respect, and who is aware of themselves and how they present themselves among others.
As I’ve progressed and led teams of various sizes, I’ve always come back to the idea that my job is to give people a purpose and common terminology and align them to a singular vision that allows them to make progress in their role without me having to spell out ‘how’ to get there specifically.
I also make it a point to understand people individually—where they’re at, where they’re coming from, their communication style, their level of self-awareness, and their goals or where they want to go in their life/career.
But I’ll be honest—I’ve also managed individuals with whom I had difficulty connecting. In those situations, I realized I could only do my best and meet that person halfway. I couldn’t bend over backward to make one person happy when it seemed their dissatisfaction was beyond my control.
As a leader, I’ve found that when I’m reaching the end of my rope as a manager, it’s time to have a human-to-human conversation about what is and isn’t working and try to find a path forward. In many cases, the person is dissatisfied with where they are in their career, perhaps with the stagnation in their role within the organization, etc.
Where a manager may follow the path of a PIP, a leader goes one step beyond and tries to understand how to help the person in a broader sense. I’ve had conversations with individuals who wanted to transition out of the company, and, depending on the relationship, I made an effort to help those people move to the place in life where they wanted to be.
How to Develop Your Leadership Skills
Honestly, the best thing you can do is find people in your organization that you’re drawn to and spend time with them. Learn by observing and thinking about why people like them, how they engage individuals, how they speak, and how they conduct themselves—everything!
Watch great speakers and ask yourself what makes them compelling or why you like them.
And read. Or find podcasts. But don’t over-index on a lot of academic knowledge. Eventually, the best way to learn is to try yourself. Even if you’re not in a leadership role, where and how can you flex your autonomy and experiment with different styles or activities that allow you to practice leadership skills?
Part of that bravery is asking for and being open to feedback, especially if you find mentors or people within your current company or professional network who can support you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between leadership and management?
Management is a role – it involves hierarchical accountability, performance reviews, day-to-day oversight, and operational continuity. Leadership is a capability – it involves articulating a vision, earning people’s trust, and moving them toward something they might not have moved toward on their own. A person can be good at one without being good at the other.
Can you be a leader without a management title?
Yes, and the best organizations recognize this. Leadership shows up in individual contributors who move cross-functional teams toward alignment, junior employees who change the room’s direction with a well-framed question, and anyone who consistently makes people around them more effective. Title is a proxy for authority – not for leadership.
What do people actually want from their leaders?
Based on the LinkedIn poll referenced in this post – and consistent with what I’ve seen in practice – people most want vision and direction. Not micromanagement, not constant availability, not performance anxiety. They want to understand where they’re going, why it matters, and that their leader trusts them to figure out how to get there.
How should organizations develop leaders internally?
Separate leadership development from management training – they are not the same curriculum. Build leadership skills (communication, storytelling, strategic thinking, empathy) at every level and across roles, not just for people moving into management. And prioritize business-specific context that external platforms like LinkedIn Learning simply cannot provide.
If you want to talk through what this looks like for your company specifically, the first conversation is free. I’ll tell you honestly where you are in the build and what the most important first move is. Here’s an overview of how I work.