By Dave Adkisson
Greater Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce
There are a gazillion books about leadership and there are nearly that
many definitions of the word. For an operative definition, I suggest that
a leader is someone who creates and implements an agenda for change, or
facilitates the creation and implementation of an agenda for change.
A few observations:
1) Leaders come in all shapes and sizes. In our culture, it is easy to equate leadership with those portraits of white males we see hanging in important buildings. But leadership comes from unexpected sources.
Consider this example: a young college student’s mother dies, and a friend across the hall decides the friends in the dormitory ought to do something to show concern. So she knocks on some doors and raises enough money for flowers. Then she organizes a few other students who are willing to carpool to the funeral.
She wasn’t elected or anointed "Leader". She just saw a need, felt some motivation to do something, and did it.
Anyone who gets excited enough, mad enough, irritated enough to react and organize others to act is performing leadership, whether consciously or unconsciously.
2) For a variety of reasons and circumstances, sometimes people who are more comfortable following the pack are elevated to lofty positions within a company or elected to positions of political responsibility. They can soon find people expecting leadership from them and being disappointed.
On the other hand, people without titles or executive suites can exert leadership and change entire cultures. Gandhi did’nt hold a political office. Jesus did’nt direct his movement from a corner office on the top floor.
Leadership and success should’t be confused. Mother Theresa lived and died a poor woman, with just the clothes on her back. The only hint of worldly success was the notoriety that found her late in life. There are millions of others who have expressed leadership in valuable ways and who were never successful by the standards of our society.
History generally remembers leaders who have succeeded. But there are many leaders who perform a valiant service to their fellow men and women, yet never succeed in their cause. How many times did a citizen in the Soviet Union express his/her yearning for freedom and get snuffed out before that flawed political system fell?
3) There are no "born leaders". Sure there are physical attributes (good health, innate intelligence, physical stamina, etc.) that might be correlated with leaders, but leadership is primarily a human skill set that consists of learned abilities: the ability to communicate, a grasp of the desires of a community, willingness to work long hours, and the ability to understand a set of issues and react appropriately. These are skills honed through formal education, social interaction, and lessons learned through success and failure.
4) Leadership is often a function of timing. There is a theory of leadership called the Zeitgeist theory. Zeit is German for "time" and geist means "ghost" or "spirit", and it refers to the spirit of the times, the convergence of exigencies that create a unique moment of opportunity for leadership.
Martin Luther King, Jr., according to his biographers, was initially reluctant to take on responsibility in the civil rights movement. He had pursued his education at Boston University and wanted to return to the South to be a preacher. But his oratorical skills, his personal charisma, and his political skills propelled him into the role of spokesman and leader of a massive social movement. What if he had returned to the South ten years earlier? Or ten years later? Someone else would have been tapped by the moment and history would have unfolded in profoundly different ways.
5) Leaders cause resistance. Just like the law of physics that says that for every force, there is an equal force of resistance, leaders encounter comparable forces of resistance. Certainly some causes are wildly popular, but more often than not, leaders who cause significant societal change incur the wrath of their fellow citizens. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Yitzhak Rabin all demonstrated courageous leadership in uncertain times of social upheaval, and they all shared the fate of an assassin’s bullet.
6) Leaders have vision. That doesn't mean they are clairvoyant and can see how everything is going to turn out. Leaders have some general sense of where they are and where they want to end up, and the general direction to get from A to B. They can’t foresee every step and every barrier, but they are motivated enough to strike out in pursuit of their goals.
There are a lot of theories about leadership, but I believe the phenomenon of leadership revolves, in great part, around passion. Passion is what it takes to get someone up from the comfort of his/her surroundings and start moving toward a better day. Passion is what motivates someone to move out in front and say, "Hey, we need to get going! We need to fix this problem! We need to work together to achieve this goal!"
That passion is available to all of us, at different times
and different settings in life. The question of leadership will always
be: Will we act on it?
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