The Leader Title Should Be No Hiding Place

It’s time to take the word “leader”- when used as a title — out of circulation in the workplace.  It’s hazardous to productivity and good morale and everything else that’s positive we want to encourage at work.

This is a topic that’s generating some interest these days.

Justin Bariso’s post Why You Don’t Want To Be Called A Leader points out the differences between having the title of leader and actually engaging in leadership behaviors.

And Sarah Elkins’ recent article – Top 3 Leadership Traits…blah blah blah – asked why so many articles are written about leadership, and why so many people are interested in reading them.

In earlier days, workers had to prove they could actually do a job before the company would entrust them with the responsibility for managing that kind of work by others. The manager’s main job used to be showing others how to do the job they had already done. And a manager came in with the credibility earned from excellent performance in the very work he’d been newly charged with managing.

In more recent times, managers and execs are increasingly responsible for the work of people whose jobs they’ve never done. So, their going-in job credibility has become less predictable.

Plus, managers’ interactions with the people they manage have changed radically. The verbs that describe the roles and responsibilities of today’s manager are less clear than showing-and-telling: motivate, inspire, influence, monitor, coach, mentor, counsel, enable, evaluate, promote, cheerlead. Managers are searching for clarity and guidance in how to do these things, all the while exhorting folks to innovate and take risks and do things faster, better and cheaper.

Still, if leadership is a good thing and workers ought to let their “leaderly” actions do the talking, what’s so bad about calling someone a leader?

The problem is that as soon as someone becomes “knighted, ” everyone else gets stuck with the defeated feeling that they’re expected to regard every action — good or bad — by this new “leader” as good leadership, coaching or mentoring. But everybody knows that just because someone’s in a management position doesn’t mean everything they do is good leadership. So some of these other people spend good company time second-guessing and sharp-shooting those actions, just to prove the person with the title doesn’t deserve it.

Which adds up to a lot of wasted time and energy as well as hard feelings. Good relationships and productivity suffer as a result.

So, what may have started out as an informal, shorthand way to describe people who tended to exhibit constructive and helpful actions in the workplace has evolved into the creation of a we-they culture with make-believe roles or “titles-for-life” that set some people apart from — and above — others designated as “followers,” “team members,” and — wait for it — “mentees.”

Everyone at every level ought to be judged on leadership by every action, every day, moment by moment, rather than let some have the “pass” afforded by the “leader” label, while others are locked out of the “Leaders’ Clubhouse.”

Examples of good — and bad — leadership, coaching and mentoring and all the rest can be found at all levels, performed by almost anyone at any given time. And people in managerial positions in the organization ought to make it their own priority to be on the lookout for great leadership moments, when and where they happen.

People who already have good reputations for demonstrating good leading, coaching and mentoring behaviors should be eager and ready to give up the shelter of the label and prove every day they can do it, and others should be encouraged to step up and show they can do it too!