What is leadership?by Derek Lidow Leadership is an overused term and few people define it the same way. This means that two people talking about leadership are usually talking about two different subjects – so, of course, they disagree. I use a definition that is easy to remember and also useful for easily measuring if someone is being successful as a leader. “A leader is someone who makes everyone around them feel that they will be successful.” It is critical for someone aspiring to leadership that they realize that a leader is something others call you, it is not something you can call yourself. Inside an organization you can call yourself the boss and if you are the person with the ability to hire and fire people, everyone will agree with you. The leader of a startup does not need to be the boss or CEO of the startup. A great and well known example is Steve Jobs. As soon as Apple was able to raise its first outside capital, Jobs gave the ultimate title of Chairman of the Board of Apple to Mark Markkula, who then hired Mark Scott to be the CEO. Steve Jobs was given the title of Vice Chairman of the Board and Vice President, neither of which meant anything specific. What made Steve Jobs the leader was that it was his vision of how computers could be designed to appeal to novice users. Everyone at Apple sought out Steve Jobs’ input before putting together any projects associated with making personal computers more appealing. It was understood that getting his advice would greatly increase chances of your being successful at Apple. As you probably know, Steve Jobs, even though he was Apple’s visionary, was forced out of the company in 1985, and even after leading efforts to design and introduce the first MacIntosh computer to the world. By that time, the people on the MacIntosh design team considered Steve their leader, but the new CEO John Scully and the Board Chair, Mark Markkula no longer felt that Steve Jobs would make them successful in their jobs, so he left. Bosses can fire leaders. Of course, if a boss fires the person with the vision for success and there is nobody with an equally powerful vision of an alternate path to success, then the company will suffer, which is what happened. Nobody after Steve Jobs left had a compelling vision for how Apple’s personal computers could continue being number 1 in the market, and the company nearly went bankrupt before bringing Steve Jobs back. If you want to become masterful as a startup leader check out Sprints 7 to 17, and ultimately create your own Personal Leadership Strategy that we help you create as the exercise of Sprint 17. With gratitude, Derek and Ben P.S. If you like what we’re doing, please consider recommending this newsletter to another person you think would benefit from us. It really helps us build out our free content platform.
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