What is Leadership?

"The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization." - Fred Fieldler and Martin Chemers in Improving Leadership Effectiveness

What is your view of leadership?
What makes a good leader?

I talk to CEO's who consistently say they know what their people need to do, so why can't they do it?
I also hear things along the lines of "I pay great money to have great leaders, so why can't they lead?"

A lot of times the inability for people to lead is wrapped up in our definition of a leader, and we are defining and hiring based on faulty assumptions of what leadership actually is.

4 Faulty assumptions:

Some people believe being a great leader is possessing certain attributes. Often the same attributes the hiring manager or supervisors value, like great people skills, fun to work with, charismatic and motivational, high energy, smart, or even someone with a big company name in their history profile.

Some people believe that being a great leader means that you were promoted from a position as a "Super worker" in your company to a new position of "Supervisor" only to find out that "Super workers" don't often make great "Supervisors."

Some people try to train leadership into their supervisors or managers thinking that if they could just attain these certain personal attributes than they would become a great leader.

While others, having tried all the above with little success, determine leadership is born and not made. Some have it and some don't.

But what makes someone a great leader is his or her ability to set goals and ACHIEVE DESIRED RESULTS - nothing more and nothing less.

And that type of leadership is a system of developing people to get the results the organization needs. It can come in all shapes and sizes, all styles and personalities, and it guarantees success in the organization.

Leadership is no longer about possessing certain personal characteristics, but about setting goals and achieving desired results.

- Jon Bohm