Leadership: How To Be a Real Leader… Plain and Simple

I walked out and shut the door behind me, then, I sagged… just a little.

I headed to my desk, put both hands on top and sighed, “oh.my.god I’m not sure how much more of that I can take…”

It was a quiet statement. A knee-jerk reaction really. It just came out in a breath…

There was a moment while I collected my thoughts and summoned the energy I’d need for the rest of the day and then, I heard it… it was quiet but clear…

“Yolo, if you leave I can’t stay, I’m leaving too…”

Leadership.

It’s incessantly discussed and written about. You cannot go a day without seeing an article or post on Facebook or LinkedIn.

The headlines are sensational, designed to get your attention, designed to make you feel lacking. Of course you want to be a great leader, you know you need to be one because your organization expects it, society expects it, your boss expects it…

An unscientific Google search of “leadership” results in 3,700,00,00 hits. Yes, you read that correctly, 3.7 BILLION results.

It’s a big deal.

And yet, I have been flummoxed, irritated, and generally confused for years about all the leadership hoopalaha.

Before we go any farther let me explain this bit…

I have never strived to be a leader… good or bad. It has never been on my radar of things I should probably do. Never.

And, it had never been an issue. No one had ever said anything to me about cultivating it.

Since I was a kid I’d been told I was very leadery…

I honestly figured it was because when they asked for volunteers my hand always went up. When they needed someone to lead the soccer team I said, “I’ll do it.” I just figured it was because I was willing to lead things or picked to lead things.

I vividly remember being a Girl Scout cadet leader. As a cadet level Girl Scout I had been chosen to lead our group. It was a one year deal according to the rules but when the year was up the parents who were troop leaders asked if I’d be willing to do it again. I thought that was cool and I was of course proud to do it. That’s pretty much what I thought leadership was.

I figured why worry about something if you haven’t been told you need to, especially if no one has said, “you’re really bad at that.”

So I didn’t give much energy to the whole leadership thing.

I would, however, see those sensational headlines and become curious…

“The One Thing You’re Sure to Struggle With as a Leader”
“The One Thing That Great Leaders Understand”
“The Most Successful Leaders Do 15 Things Automatically, Every Day”
“What Great Leaders Do”
“Things Exceptional Leaders Do Every Day”

I mean look at those headlines! But after reading them I was always left thinking… isn’t that what everyone should be doing?

Add to that all the leadership theories and styles…

Transactional
Servant
Transformational
Contingency
Situational
Relationship
And more…

I didn’t fit into any of those boxes… nor did I want to. It was too much for me to spend time learning about it all because… I didn’t see the need.

But that all changed the day a supervisor said that they “lacked confidence” in my leadership abilities.

I was stunned.

There were no specifics. Just that statement. And, I immediately thought, “I better fix that.”

My next thought was… “How?”

Therein lies the rub.

After hours and days and weeks of researching leadership, buying books, reading said books, searching the interwebs, and reading articles, I was no closer to a “fix”.

Enter Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall.

And… it was perfect.

It was filled with all the arguments I’d made myself about leadership but their arguments were laced with research to support the very obvious thing I’d learned years before when that one woman spoke up…

“Yolo, if you leave I can’t stay, I’m leaving too…”

Leadership isn’t a box full of skills just waiting for you to master them and become a great leader.

Not at all.

Leadership is about having followers.

A leader without followers isn’t actually leading anything… they aren’t actually leaders.

Remember the no-confidence-in-my-leadership-abilities supervisor? Well, I thought to myself, would I follow this supervisor?

My internal answer… “not even into the bathroom.”

And folks… that’s how we measure leadership.

Leadership isn’t a checklist of skills, it’s the ability to lead others and to have them follow because as Buckingham and Goodall so eloquently state, “The only determinant of whether anyone is leading is whether anyone else is following.”

It seems so obvious. And yet… what we read over and over in all the books and articles is that you need a box of skills.

And to be clear you do need skills. You don’t have to master them all. You do need to know what they are, how to use them, how to cultivate the ones that work best for you. But to master them all and then say, “I’m a great leader because I have this box of skills” simply isn’t enough.

Not by a long shot…

I was tasked with efficiency. My marching orders were to come in, assess the office management, figure out what needed to be fixed, refine processes, make things better, evaluate, and then, make recommendations or take action.

The business was a landscaping company. The business owner was a white man who had never gone to college, he was as blue-collar as they come. He didn’t have a “fancy degree”… yes, that’s what we heard weekly.

The problem was that he was under the impression that being boss meant you could do whatever you wanted without consequence.

I had walked into his office to discuss his actions. He had, in front of the entire office staff (mostly women) stated to one of his landscaping crew members that he was giving him a raise for no other reason than he knew he had a wife and kids and that since he was the primary family caretaker he understood what this crew member needed… more money.

My concern as I watched this unfold… discrimination. I knew that what was happening was an act of discrimination placing men with families more deserving of higher compensation than the women with families and the single mothers.. who also watched this entire episode unfold.

In his mind he was being generous. Showing all within earshot just how generous and understanding he was…

I tried to explain to him how his words could be cause for concern. I tried to explain that he needed to have these types of conversations in private.

Of course being the narcissist that he was, he couldn’t understand my concern. He told me that everyone completely understood what he meant and that they would all respect and admire his generosity.

Oooooooo boy. I just nodded. I had done what I could. I knew it wasn’t in my job description to police this stuff, I just felt like it was my responsibility to say something because I knew better.

When I walked out of his office I was a little deflated. I was hopeful that nothing would come of it… but what if it did?

It was a lot to think about.

So, I walked to my desk and tried to summon the strength to push it out of my mind. I was, after all, a little angry.

I knew there were women in that room that needed help. I had played secret Santa when one woman couldn’t buy anything for her seven-year-old daughter for Christmas because of medical bills. I understood what many of these women faced.

I also knew in that moment that I wouldn’t last forever under those conditions.

With both hands on top of my desk I sighed, “Oh.my.god I’m not sure how much more of that I can take…”

It wasn’t loud… in fact, I don’t think I realized I’d said it out loud.

But then it came… “Yolo, if you leave I can’t stay, I’m leaving too…”

Jeez…

I was ready to kick myself and then…

“Me too, you can’t leave.”

It, too, was quiet but clear.

“Yeah, me too.”

What?

After the fourth voice chimed in, “yup, me too, I’m out.”

I stood up straight and spoke, “Whoa, whoa, whoa… come on now, no one is going anywhere. It’s fine, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. Just a little tired that’s all…”

“I mean it, Yolo.” The closest gal, the single mother who had spent every last dollar she had paying medical expenses to recover from a botched surgery, wouldn’t drop it.

I said the only thing I could as tears threatened… “Yeah, I know, thanks. Now, back to work chica.”

That’s when I knew what it meant to be a leader.

I also understood, in that moment, that it isn’t just about a box full of skills, it’s about responsibility; a responsibility I needed to take seriously.

Whether or not I’d ever worried about being a leader, I was one.

But it wasn’t until that day that I realized just what being a leader meant and it was a little scary.

What I did and said became an incredibly powerful tool, one that I knew I would not be allowed to ignore.

Those women would have given up their jobs for me. Jobs they needed to feed their families.

On that particular day I hadn’t actually led anything; I hadn’t done anything special. It was all the little things I’d done up to that point.

I’d advocated for those women, I’d been hard but fair, I’d had to fire some of them, some were new hires, I gently corrected, I took the beating from customers when it was more than they could handle given their skills, I cleaned the kitchen with them when necessary, I pushed for raises, I did their jobs when they were out sick… I did what I expected of them every day.

Buckingham and Goodall call their ideas “freethinking” leadership.

I call it being a good human being every single day.