What is Leadership?
A journey of Influence and Impact
If you haven’t already read the Foreword, recently I have decided to share bite sized contents about leadership and things I have learned as my software journey has exposed me to a kaleidoscope of cultures and leadership styles. Before we can go any further, I think it is prudent to establish a baseline understanding of what I mean by “Leadership”. Leadership is the art of inspiring and influencing others, acknowledging that everyone possesses the capacity to guide, motivate, and contribute positively within their spheres of influence. In this piece I will touch on “Who are these leaders”, and also briefly cover the sphere of influence.
My Idea of a Leader
Let’s start with an exercise. Who comes to your mind when I ask you to think of a leader you know. This can be a person whom you work with (or have worked with in the past), someone who managed you directly or indirectly, or this person can be someone you look up to like an accomplished CEO in the industry. For me, it is a person I aspire to be one day.
Traditionally we associate leaders to people with authority over us. That cannot be further from the truth. A leader is not a person who has the authority to fire you and use that fear to drive your productivity. I am not saying such leaders don’t exist, they do in numbers, but that’s not the kind of leader we will talk about here. A true leader is someone who leads from the front, who has emotional intelligence and leads by empathy. Someone who is visionary but also adaptable and resilient. Now let’s go back to who you thought to be your favorite leader. You would find these characteristics present. Be mindful, a leader is also a human, it is important to not judge someone on their one-time mistakes, but on the things that they do well repeatedly.
As you grow in your career, you will be expected to lead. It can be a feature lead (for L3s), project lead (for L4s), team lead (for L5s) or as a manager/Staff+ (L6+). Did you notice that everyone is a leader? Growing in your career basically means increasing the sphere of your influence gradually. That’s our perfect segway to the final touchpoint for this letter today. What do we mean by sphere of influence, and does it prevent us from influencing beyond that?
The Sphere of Influence
People you influence can be someone who reports to you (direct reports or team mates if you are a TL), someone who leads you (your manager and others senior to you) and someone who is your peer. It is a 360° space and being comfortable leading in all directions is a very core competency you need to grow over time (that’s for another day). Idea is to be able to outgrow the prejudices about “Leading from the Top” and take actions. If you haven’t heard about the story behind “Amazon Prime”, it stemmed from an Engineer via an employee suggestion box (full story). Today Amazon has 100s of millions Prime members. It is a perfect example of leading up in its true sense. This is an illustration of leading up and increasing the sphere of influence. Leading has little to do with authority and a lot more to do with influence.
To close the chapter for today, I want you to walk away with one idea, Leadership has very little (ideally nothing) to do with the position you hold, it is more about taking ownership, feeling responsible and a bias towards action. Everybody is a lead, in some shape or form.
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Thanks for reading,