It’s interesting how much the word “leadership” gets used these days.
Eagle Scout and Girl Scout Gold Award projects are leadership projects. Clubs teach leadership. Schools run leadership programmes. And with all of that use, the word has come to mean quite different things to different people.
The distinction that matters
For some people, leadership means telling others what to do. To me, that’s management rather than leadership.
True leadership is a question of influence, and influence is much harder to teach.
Anyone can learn management techniques. The mechanics of assigning work, tracking it and reviewing it are teachable in a fortnight. Influence is considerably more complex, because it rests on things you can’t install in a training session — trust, an actual relationship, a track record of telling the truth, and someone being genuinely persuaded rather than merely compliant.
Some of it can be taught. You have to be authentic, you have to have a vision, and you have to be able to communicate and sell it.
Which means leaders are, functionally, salespeople for their vision. To influence anyone you have to sell the idea. There’s a vision, or a nugget of truth, that other people decide they want to get behind.
Why this matters more in a small business than a large one
In a large company you can manage without leading for a long time. The structure carries you. People do what they’re told because the org chart says so, and because their next promotion depends on someone who reports to you.
A small business has none of that scaffolding.
Your team can leave on two weeks’ notice for somewhere that pays similarly. Your suppliers have other clients. Your contractors have other work. Almost nobody is there because they have to be.
Which means a small business owner who can only manage is operating with a fraction of the tools, and it shows up as difficulty getting anything to happen that requires discretionary effort from anyone.
What influence actually rests on
Four things, and none is a technique.
A track record of being right, or at least honest about being wrong. People follow judgement they’ve seen tested. The fastest way to build it is to be visibly accurate about small things, including the uncomfortable ones.
Reliability in ordinary matters. Whether you do what you said you’d do by when you said it. This sounds trivial and it is the foundation of the whole thing.
Genuine interest in what the other person wants. Influence isn’t persuading people to want what you want. It’s frequently noticing where their interests and yours already overlap, and pointing at it.
Willingness to be first. Do the unglamorous version yourself before asking anyone else to.
You’ll notice none of those can be acquired quickly, which is why influence is hard to teach and why the people who have it tend to have built it over years without setting out to.
The uncomfortable part
The original version of this post said that plenty of people want to be managers without being capable of the vision and influence part.
I’d put it differently now. It isn’t usually incapacity. It’s that management is legible and influence isn’t.
Management has a job title, a pay band and a clear description. Influence has none of those. Nobody promotes you for it, and you can’t put it on a CV in any convincing way. So people quite rationally pursue the thing that’s rewarded, and then find themselves in a position where it isn’t sufficient.
The fix isn’t to look down on managers. It’s to notice that the two are different skills, that most organisations only train and reward one of them, and that the one they ignore is the one that determines whether anyone actually follows you.
Particularly when, as in most small businesses, nobody has to.
