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What is leadership, anyway?
Like motherhood and apple pie, everyone agrees that leadership is a good thing. But what exactly is it? And what skills do you need to be a good leader? This is not an academic question: the fates of entire nations, of businesses large and small, and even of sporting teams depend crucially on good leadership. Perhaps more importantly, your career progression from now on almost certainly depends more on your skills as a leader than it does on any specialist expertise.
It's true that the role of a leader depends to some extent on the context. Leading a political party is not the same as leading a business or a football team. Nevertheless there are four key qualities essential to all kinds of leadership.
The first of these is to challenge the status quo. If you merely accept things as they are, you might be a very competent manager; but you won't be remembered as a great leader. Winston Churchill challenged the status quo throughout his long political career. As the head of the Navy during the First World War, he challenged the established view that the British warships should be coal fired. When he suggested a conversion to oil, which would give the ships an extra few knots of speed, admirals retorted that this was 'completely against the traditions of the Royal Navy'. 'Rum, sodomy and the lash are the traditions of the Royal Navy', Churchill replied, and he got his way with the changes. On becoming Prime Minister in 1940 most of his cabinet wanted to make peace with Hitler. If Churchill hadn't challenged this too, the course of history would have run very a very different path.
Challenging the status quo is also a driver of progress in business. Herb Kelleher, the man who challenged the idea that air travel was an expensive luxury item, created the first budget airline and made a great deal of money in the process. He's the man we should thank for Easy Jet and Ryan Air.
Churchill didn't just challenge for the sake of it – he had an end goal in mind. It was a big and ambitious goal – to win the war and eliminate Nazism from the face of the earth. Another name for a big goal is a vision. The second quality of a leader is to be able to articulate a vision.
Nelson Mandela is a great leader, and he had a very clear vision for a genuinely multiracial South Africa. Richard Branson has a very clear vision for companies within the Virgin Brand, which is to take on big well established players – whether in music, air travel, railways – and to show that small companies can have fun beating the big ones by providing genuinely better customer service.
Vision is important, but it's tricky to get it right. A lot of organisations, particularly in the public sector, think they've got a vision when what they've actually got is hallucination. Vague statements of aspiration won't do; a vision has to be clear and exciting and achievable. Many aspiring leaders fail this test.
During his time as Labour leader, Michael Foot was good at articulating a vision for his party. You couldn't say that the 1983 Labour manifesto wasn't good on the specifics. In was so specific, so detailed, but also so many millions of miles away from what most voters wanted that it earned the nickname 'the longest suicide note in history'. Having a vision isn't enough – you have to be able to win commitment to it. This is the third essential leadership quality. Foot's rival, Margaret Thatcher, was extremely good at winning commitment - at least from the people who mattered. It was as if she could look right into the heart of Middle England's Mondeo Man, who held the electoral keys to so many marginal constituencies. In the workplace too, the leaders you will remember are those who are able to win your commitment. How do they do that? Is it just charisma, or do they have some secret techniques for winning people over?
Somewhat surprisingly, charisma is not an essential leadership quality. In a 2002 survey of business leaders Henry Tosi and his colleagues at the University of Florida found that charismatic business leaders were no more likely to be successful in business than uncharismatic ones (although they did tend to receive a higher level of financial remuneration than their anodyne colleagues). To win commitment you have to be willing to get to know people as individuals, and to show that you know what makes them tick. As a business leader, Richard Branson does this superbly.
In the 20th Century, if you challenged the status quo, articulated a vision and won commitment to it, you could probably be a pretty good leader, however dubious your personal values and conduct. John F Kennedy, the US president who took the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, but somehow brought it back again before it teetered over the edge, is generally thought of as being a pretty reasonable leader. But when it came to his personal life – how can I put this tactfully – he found it pretty difficult to keep his trousers on. But at the time, few people knew. Most contemporary newspapers refused to print any stories about JFK's philandering. Contrast this with Bill Clinton's relations with Monica Lewinsky in the late 1990s. Even if the newspapers hadn't published the story people would have found out through the internet anyway. A good question to ask when faced with an ethical dilemma is: how would I feel if everyone concerned knew about this? Given the rapid and ubiquitous communication technology of the 21st Century, they probably will.
So in the 21st Century, the fourth essential leadership quality is to do the right thing: to have a clear set of ethical values and beliefs and to live by them. When Nelson Mandela was finally released from gaol in 1990, one of his very first acts was to visit Fidel Castro. A poor decision, given the importance of Mandela's growing relationship with the US and Europe, to visit a discredited communist dictator? When the young ANC activist was first thrown into prison on Robben Island in 1964, the only world leader to offer public support in those early days was Fidel Castro; Mandela felt that on his eventual release, travelling to Cuba to say thanks was merely doing the right thing. It's actions like these which make Mandela one of the few truly trustworthy political leaders of the 21st century.
In order to illustrate the four key leadership qualities – challenge the status quo, articulate a vision, win commitment and do the right thing – I've tended to use political leaders as exemplars, partly because they are so well known. What about you? Are you a leader? Do you need to be?