During my career, I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to other people about their careers, and these conversations almost always come around to the question of leadership. Whether I’m talking to a young person looking to move into their very first leadership role, or a VP looking to advance to SVP, I’m always curious about the individual’s motivation—why that person wants to become a leader or wants to take on more leadership responsibility. I’m curious because I’ve found that how people answer these questions provides a good clue to what kind of leader they are, or will become.
Interestingly, many people have difficulty explaining why they want to lead. Virtually no one says, “I want to make more money” or “I want to have more power,” although I’d be surprised if those factors weren’t involved in at least some cases. The answers that do finally emerge seem to fall into several broad categories.
The first is the idea that leadership is a right. The people whose motivations fall into this category are basically saying “I deserve to move into this leadership role because…” What comes next varies, of course. They deserve more leadership responsibility because they’ve made their numbers, completed their MBA, been in their present position long enough (or too long), etc. Often this attitude seems to have an undertone of “I’ve always been a leader…in school, on the playground, on my basketball team, etc.” Again, the idea, even if it’s never expressed in so many words, seems to be, “I have a right to lead.”
A second category, which somewhat overlaps the first, is the idea that leadership is a rite, as in rite of passage. The idea is here is that the person has passed the various tests and met the various requirements to advance to greater leadership responsibility. The tests and requirements may sound a lot like those mentioned above: i.e. the person has held a certain role for a certain period of time, or completed a certain academic degree or leadership development program, or met some particular performance goal.
A third category is what I call leadership as a privilege. People whose motivation seems to fall into this category say things like, “I feel I can provide greater value to the organization if I was offered a broader role.” Or, “I’d like to share and leverage what I’ve learned on XYZ project or in XYZ assignment.”
I must say that the idea of leadership as a privilege resonates more with me than the idea of leadership as a right/rite. In my experience, the leaders who’ve had the most positive effect on their organizations have thought of leadership in this way. Not that these people are completely selfless, but on the whole they put the organization ahead of themselves. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and they’re careful not to take advantage of their position power at the expense of the people around them. As a friend of mine once said, “They don’t take up all the air in the room.”
Some of the leaders I’ve been privileged to work with take the idea of leadership as privilege to another level. These are the servant leaders, or those who aspire to become servant leaders. They want to lead so that they can be of greater service to others.
In his 1970 essay entitled The Servant as Leader, Robert Greenleaf defined the servant leader’s role as “making sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served,” noting that: “The servant-leader is servant first[…]. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.”
Why do I want to lead? That’s the question we all need to think about very deeply. The answer we come to will be critical to the kind of leader we become. The traditional command and control leadership model is grounded in the idea of leadership as a right or a rite. In far too many cases, leaders who operate on the basis of this model and this attitude fall into what I consider the serious mistake of focusing less on bringing out the best in the organization and its people and more on their own position power and prestige.
In premier companies like Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Zappos, Toro, Nordstrom, Kaiser Permanente, and many others, the leadership model has changed. In these companies, servant leadership has emerged as an alternative to the traditional command and control model. In these organizations, the leaders see their roles as a privilege—given to them by the people they lead, and in a very real sense, shared with those people. These leaders believe— and act as if—they have to earn the privilege of being a leader every day.
All of which raises the question: “Why do you want to lead?” The implications of that question, and how you answer it, are huge, for your career, your personal life, and equally important, for the success of your organization and its people.