Leadership is a verb, not a title

There is a tendency, particularly in the kind of organisations I have spent most of my career in, to confuse position with practice. The org chart says you are responsible for a team. HR sends round a note when you get promoted. People stop pushing back as openly. None of that is leadership. That is the scaffolding around the role; what you do inside the scaffolding is the actual work.

The shorthand I use for myself is that leadership is a verb. It is something you do this morning, in this meeting, with the colleague who is having a bad week, on the decision that everyone is hoping someone else will make. The title is a hint that it might be your turn. It is not the act itself.

What it actually looks like

Three things, in order of how often I get them wrong. First, paying attention. Most of the leadership failures I have watched up close were failures of attention rather than failures of intelligence. Someone was off, and nobody asked. A risk was visible six weeks before it landed, and nobody named it. The technical decision was being made by people optimising for one thing while the business needed another, and nobody connected the two conversations. Attention is not glamorous and it does not show up in the headcount slide, but the gap between the leaders I respect and the rest is mostly that they were paying attention earlier.

Second, telling people things they would rather not hear, in a way that they can actually receive. The temptation is either to soften the message until it stops being a message, or to deliver it with the wrong amount of force and turn the conversation into a defence of feelings rather than a discussion of reality. Most of the time the right shape is plain language, no theatre, and a clear sense of what happens next.

Third, doing the small things you said you would do. The compounding effect of being someone whose follow-through is reliable is enormous, and I think people underestimate it because each individual instance is forgettable. After three years of working with someone whose word means something, you find yourself trusting their judgement on questions where you have no independent way to evaluate it. That is a kind of leverage no title can grant.

Show me your calendar and your one-to-ones and I will tell you what you are leading. The rest is decoration.

The empathy bit

I am suspicious of the word empathy in a corporate setting because it has been somewhat ground down by overuse. What I actually mean by it is closer to: behave as if the other person has a complete inner life, with constraints and concerns you cannot see, and act accordingly. That is not a feeling. That is a discipline. The leaders who do it well are not warmer than average. They are more rigorous about treating other people as full humans rather than as units of throughput.

And self-awareness, the third leg of the trio I started with, is mostly the willingness to be told you are wrong by people junior to you, and to update without making it about your dignity. Most senior people I know say they value this. A smaller number actually behave that way in the room when it counts.

None of this is novel. The reason I keep writing about it is that the gap between what we say leadership means and what we tolerate in practice keeps surprising me, even now. The verb has to be performed. It does not perform itself.