Leadership Frameworks

One of the things I still struggle with is a proper definition for "Leadership".  To me, leadership means a lot of things and is an extremely large umbrella term that captures all of them.  Within a coaching context, there are tons of books that compete to describe the ideal characteristics of a good leader.  Anyway, I'm taking a class on Leadership, so I want to assess a few of the ideas as they come up and possibly relate them to ultimate.

The following definition for leadership is proposed:

"Leadership consist of the tools and resources you use to mobilize people to collaborate together to create something of social value."

To support this definition, there is some specificity around what is meant by "collaboration":

Collaboration: collective action among interdependent parties working towards shared goals.

There was also a good amount of discussion that since leadership consists of tools and resources, it is something that is trainable and improvable.

Overall, I think this is a pretty good definition.  It's vague enough to capture a lot of things but also has enough structure to be actionable.  I think collaboration as used here is still a bit vague, but it's basically proposed as the key to getting teams to achieve things "greater than the sum of their parts", and so I think it makes sense.  One small gripe I have with this definiation is it feels a bit transactional in nature, as it seems like you provide input x and then this team of other people can now collaborate, which seems to assume a basic hierarchy.  I don't know if this is a real issue or not, but this a blog, not a research paper.  Final note, I definitely am all about the growth mindset stuff in here.  Big fan of that part.

One other note I felt was pretty good was a discussion of what good leadership outcomes look like.  Basically it was presented like this:

Good leadership results in:

Decisions: Facilitates effective group decision-making

Influence: Influence others to adopt those decisions

Implementation & Motivation: Design structures to implement those decisions and motivate people to do it effectively

I think the best part of this for me was the last part, I found it interesting to think about leadership actions in terms of structures that maintain buy-in.  I think that has tons of obvious carry-over to coaching or captaining a team.