The role as leader is temporary

Hi everyone, here’s another short post. Today I want to share with you something that very few people realise about leadership.

In previous posts, I’ve discussed the fact that people only follow leaders when they want to achieve something. And we kind of pick and choose leaders depending on what we want to achieve.

This means we have to rethink what it means to be a leader.

When people think of leaders, they often think of a person who has certain influence over a group of people that is more or less static over time.

This is important. It means for example that we expect managers to be leaders at work between 8 and 17 every weekday.

A president is expected to be a leader every day until he or she hands the role over to someone else.

But here’s the problem.

If people follow different leaders depending on what they need at a certain point in time, then we can’t see managers and presidents as leaders. At least not all of the time.

People are only leaders when others choose to follow them. The rest of the time they are decision-makers. Nothing more, nothing less.