The meaning of leadership was once simple and clear. There were two fundamental pillars: (1) being the person in charge of a group and (2) showing the way, providing direction. There is another meaning that we tend to ignore: market leader, leading in a golf tournament or leading a league in team sports. The latter meaning is awkward because, although it ties in with the second pillar – showing the way  – it has nothing to do with being in charge of a group.

Lately, the second pillar has been crumbling away. Level 5 leadership, as developed by Jim Collins, explicitly dispenses with the need to provide direction. The main difference between his level 4 and 5 leaders is that the former promote their own ideas for new directions while the latter draw them out of others. Level 5 leaders are humble for good reason. They realize that the world is now too complex for any one person to have all the answers. By dumping the second pillar, Collins satisfies our need to view people in charge as leaders.

But suppose we choose the other option: retain the second pillar – providing direction – and dump the first. What concept of leadership emerges with this move?

Leadership Reinvented

If we retain the criterion of showing the way, providing direction, then level 5 CEOs are doing something other than leading when they draw new directions out of their teams. This facilitative activity is a managerial technique, not leadership.

But it won’t be easy to relinquish our need to associate leadership with high office. Larger than life CEOs like Jack Welch are as much media darlings as movie or rock stars and sports heroes because we would love to be them. Most of us don’t stand much chance of Hollywood or sports fame, but we can aspire to climb the ladder where we work. Also, the word “leader” has a glamorous, heroic connotation so it is no surprise that we link leadership to being an executive.

It is time to break this connection. Business is increasingly like guerilla warfare – new  directions, and hence leadership, come from anywhere, even outside the organization. To develop this idea, it helps to notice how many kinds of leadership involve showing the way without the leader being in charge of those who follow. In addition to market and sports leadership, there is:

• Leading by example – working in a sufficiently smart way that colleagues, who don’t report to you, admire and emulate your actions.
• Martin Luther King’s demonstrations against segregation on buses led the Supreme Court to rule such discrimination unconstitutional. They clearly did not report to him. This is leading from the sidelines. Al Gore’s green leadership is of this type also.
• A knowledge worker convinces top management to develop a new product, like the employee who convinced Sony to develop Playstation in spite of their stance that Sony wasn’t into toys. In such bottom-up leadership, senior management does not report to the lower level innovator.
• Microsoft follows the lead of Netscape, Google and Apple by developing copy-cat products. Leadership can come from outside an organization.
• In a meeting, every participant who expresses views on a subject takes turn showing leadership by promoting a different solution to a problem.

If we want only one general theory of leadership, we need to restrict it to the successful promotion of new directions. Leadership sells the tickets to the journey; management drives the bus to the destination. This is true even where occasional further injections of leadership are needed to resell the merits of the journey. Conversely, if we follow Jim Collins, we must say that there is one kind of leadership for complex businesses while, in many other contexts, it means something different. Confusing.

Recast along these lines, leadership:

• Has nothing to do with managing people.
• Is an episodic act, not a position (no one has a monopoly on good ideas).
• Fits in with our knowledge driven age because the power to lead is shifting from personality to the power to devise a better way – content is king, as we say.

Management Reinvented

Management got thrown on the scrapheap in the late 1970’s and early 80’s when we needed a scapegoat to explain why U.S. business succumbed to the Japanese commercial invasion. Instead of eliminating managers, we just needed to upgrade management. Leadership promotes new directions while management executes them profitably. Management is like investment: it seeks the best return from a range of resources. But modern managers are not mechanically controlling. They are empowering, nurturing, facilitative coaches who excel at developing and motivating people. Both leaders can managers can be inspiring – one moves us in a new direction while the other motivates us to work harder.

The bottom line is that CEOs can both lead and manage, but because of complexity, most of their time is spent managing.

The main advantages of this reformulation are:

• Greater sharing of the leadership load throughout the organization
• Fuller engagement of all talent who can now be leaders too.
• Better understanding of what executives are doing when not leading.
• Clearer differentiation of management from leadership.

Looking back over the history of thinking about leadership, our focus on high profile business and political leaders is understandable because of our psychological need to look up to such people but we have produced a narrow, distorted concept of leadership as a result. Our knowledge driven era is a war of ideas where a new vision of leadership is mandatory.