Leadership As Service

  Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

The best leadership is often exercised by people without positional power. Outside the official hierarchy of delegated authority, it is not about extracting things from people — it’s about service. While this type of leadership can involve explicit direction, the main role is that of a catalyst, and it takes a bit of a rebel.

This is excerpted from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 3^rd Edition (Addison-Wesley Professional; 2013).

Leadership on the job is rare, but talk about it is ubiquitous. Companies talk about it all the time. The talk is usually about the adroit exercise of organizational power to accomplish a given end. It’s managers who lead. Managers are sent off to leadership training to enable them to better use their authority to direct those who work for them.

In this view, leadership is something that happens down the hierarchy — leaders at the top, followers at the bottom. You are led by the person who is above you on the org. chart and you lead those whose boxes on the chart lie under yours with lines directly down from your box.

Leadership as a Work-Extraction Mechanism

One of those dreadful “motivational” posters tells us, “The speed of the leader sets the rate of the pack.” This kind of leadership is a work-extraction mechanism. Its purpose is to enhance not the quality  of the …

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