Do you think that your ability to build relationships with people is the essential trait you must have to be a leader. This is a myth. The ability to build relationships applies to a particular concept of leadership which you can buy or question as you see fit. If you regard leadership as occupying a position of power over people, then relationships are critical, of course. You could, however, see this as management. Where the meaning of leadership is reframed as the position-independent act of challenging the status quo to promote new directions, to show a better way. To show leadership of this sort, relationships help but they are not essential.

Content is King

The better your idea the more likely it is that opportunists will jump on the bandwagon with little leadership influence from you. In some high tech and science-based industries, there is a great demand for “evidence based” decision making. In this context, to show leadership you need hard evidence, a compelling business case. If you have irresistible facts behind you, relationships are secondary.

Leadership Redefined

There are numerous instances of leadership that have nothing to do with being in charge of a group but, if you examine them carefully, you will see that they all involve “showing the way” for others:

• Martin Luther King led the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw segregation on buses.
• A new customer service employee influences colleagues to serve customers better just by setting a compelling example.
• Innovative knowledge workers convince their bosses to develop new products, just as the developer of PlayStation led Sony management.
• Market leading businesses, like Apple, are followed by competitors.
• League leading sports teams are emulated by their followers.

Leadership so reframed is an occasional act, not a role. Anyone can show some leadership, even without being in a management position. Your leadership doesn’t have to be a grand vision of a radically different way of living with the potential to revolutionize life on the whole planet. It might be a very small, local change that you feel a need to promote, let’s say in the way certain files are organized in your office. How you convince people depends only on what it takes to convince them. You can’t say in a vacuum that it will take a great vision of a new filing system or an inspirational speaking voice. It might only take a short argument that states the benefits clearly and calmly for reorganizing some files.

OK, so you can see the need for lots of changes where you work. What’s stopping you from promoting them? This boils it down to courage. This is really the only essential leadership trait.

Developing your Leadership Courage

The key to developing your courage to lead is to start small. It takes much less courage to compete for a first line supervisory position than it does to be President of your country. Similarly, you don’t need to lead civil rights marches like Martin Luther King to challenge the status quo. Whatever job you do, you will have ideas on how it could be done better. Do you have the courage to make suggestions for improvement to your boss? If you do, then you have sufficient courage to show some small scale leadership in your own local environment. The amount of courage you need to question existing practices also depends on the way you express your challenge. If you speak aggressively in a meeting with your boss and colleagues, you need to be very courageous. However, if you have a quiet word with your boss alone, it is not so risky. Even here, you could be confrontational or you could take a low key approach and simply ask your boss what he or she thinks about a certain idea you have. If your tone of voice is one of asking for advice rather than aggressively saying the boss is wrong, then you don’t need to be quite so courageous.

Leadership Requires Challenging the Status Quo

All leaders have a better idea. They want to change the world. It takes leadership confidence to stick your neck out. To be a leader, you need to build your confidence to question the way things are done. The easiest way to start is to make quiet, non-confrontational suggestions and see how it goes. You need to see these actions as showing leadership, even if they are on a very small scale. Once you have gained some confidence on small issues, try scaling up to larger matters. If you think a particular stand you want to take is high risk, try it out on a friendly audience before you go to your boss or other prominent stakeholders. With subtle influencing skills, built mainly on using clever questions, you might even get your target audience to think it was their idea.

Like Martin Luther King, you can show leadership every day in all sorts of ways by suggesting a better way or even just by setting a good example. You don’t need to be in charge of the people you are trying to lead to show this sort of leadership.  Large scale courage is heroic, but it isn’t necessary for everyday acts of leadership.

Most conventional leadership traits are either management traits or situational influencing skills. For example, in some situations hard facts are essential to influence people. But to influence people in Arab countries or Japan, you need to build relationships with them first. Managers need good relationship skills to for effective employee management, but relationships are only a situational influencing factor for leadership conceived as an occasional act of influence.