What Is Leadership?

What Is Leadership?
Leadership isn’t about a word in your title, a certain salary band, or any specific trait like charisma or extroversion. There are a lot of great definitions of leadership out there, especially by those who embody it.
In the Entrepreneur’s article What Really Makes a Good Leader?, the author, Travis Bradberry, shares a quote by Peter Drucker: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers” as well as one by Bill Gates :”As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others”.
And he also gives his own: “Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a greater good.”
Source
Another interesting quote on what being a leader means is one from Dwight Eisenhower. He said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he/she wants to do it.” That sentence encapsulates all the elements of what leadership is.
Leadership is an art — which means there’s no right way to do it. Leadership is an attitude, an intuition built over time.
And because there are multiple ways of getting to one outcome, you can be creative about it.
Leadership involves “someone else,” even if they don’t have to be direct reports or people who have a financial or social obligation to do what you tell them to do.
There’s always a purpose, something that needs to get done. There’s a goal at the end, and you and someone else are working together to achieve it. And finally, to what John Maxwell said, “leadership is influence.” That’s the last piece of the puzzle in Eisenhower’s quote.
We’ve known for a long time that internal motivation is the strongest driver of behavior.
Getting people to do things (and having them go above and beyond) doesn’t come from authority or power. It comes from the ability to socially influence them — to show them why something is important or meaningful and light a fire within them to contribute to that.