Wikipedia defines a leader as a person who can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task. The leader may or may not have any formal authority. S/he is somebody whom people follow, who guides or directs others.
Your definition may well be different.
What does leadership mean to you?
In putting together an exciting research study on the future of Millennial leadership with Deloitte and Universum, I have come up against the challenge of defining a true leader several times. Does our target leader have to manage others? Does s/he have to have a certain level of education? Are traits more important, or are skills?
For our purposes, we settled on defining a leader as someone who had been out of college at least three years, who currently works for an established organization, and who supervises direct reports. However, this got me thinking. There is so much talk about leadership today, and yet what leadership means to one person could mean nothing to another.
Lost in the weeds.
This is particularly dangerous when your organization wants to teach leadership as a value to upwardly mobile young professionals. Without a concrete and mutually-agreed upon definition, how will talent know what to work towards, and how will your people be objectively evaluated on their readiness and performance? It’s all fine and good to direct people to informative reading, but if those recommendations don’t match up to what’s sought-after in your organization, your people will be operating at cross purposes.
For more on what leadership means to different people, read on at Intuit's Fast Track blog.
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