What is leadership? What are the qualities and characteristics of a great leader? Can anyone be a good leader?

What is leadership? What are the qualities and characteristics of a great leader? Can anyone be a good leader?

Like management or talent development, leadership is one of those concepts that we have an inherent knack for recognizing but have a tough time defining well. Part of this is because great leaders don’t all lead the same way or have the same experience. Some push their teams really hard, and others emphasize work-life balance and employee experience. Some are much more hands-on, while others delegate profusely. Great leaders can be engineers or salespeople, anyone from business school alumni to senior managers. But none of those leaders just started managing people and teams out of intuition. It’s an iterative process where you try something, make mistakes, and then adjust your style. As Vince Lombardi said, great leaders aren’t born — they’re made. So, from all of the great leaders and managers that have paved the way, what can we learn about leadership, the mistakes and success stories that make it? And what does leadership really mean in today’s world?

What Is Leadership?
Leadership isn’t about a word in your title, a certain salary band, or any specific trait like charisma or extroversion. There are a lot of great definitions of leadership out there, especially by those who embody it. In the Entrepreneur’s article What Really Makes a Good Leader?, the author, Travis Bradberry, shares a quote by Peter Drucker: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers” as well as one by Bill Gates :”As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others”. And he also gives his own: “Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a greater good.”

Another interesting quote on what being a leader means is one from Dwight Eisenhower. He said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he/she wants to do it.” That sentence encapsulates all the elements of what leadership is. Leadership is an art — which means there’s no right way to do it. Leadership is an attitude, an intuition built over time. And because there are multiple ways of getting to one outcome, you can be creative about it.

Leadership involves “someone else,” even if they don’t have to be direct reports or people who have a financial or social obligation to do what you tell them to do. There’s always a purpose, something that needs to get done. There’s a goal at the end, and you and someone else are working together to achieve it. And finally, to what John Maxwell said, “leadership is influence.” That’s the last piece of the puzzle in Eisenhower’s quote. We’ve known for a long time that internal motivation is the strongest driver of behavior. Getting people to do things (and having them go above and beyond) doesn’t come from authority or power. It comes from the ability to socially influence them — to show them why something is important or meaningful and light a fire within them to contribute to that.