What I Mean by Organizational Leadership
Seeking more precision in muddy waters
The word leadership gets used…a lot. Google “leadership” and you’ll get 6.9 billion results. As my husband pointed out, that’s one result for most of the world’s population. What’s more, the wiki entry notes that it’s a “contested” word. We use the word loosely. (Me too).
For instance, a while back I received an invitation to a leadership retreat with no other mention of the word leader or anything about guiding or leading others. It looked like a really great yoga retreat. (I’ve been to a yoga retreat and it was wonderful.) Perhaps the goal was to be the “leader” in your own life. I recently saw an article about dating leadership. I’d never heard of it before and didn’t know what that meant though I was intrigued. This isn’t to gatekeep or say that these uses are wrong. It’s that the word leadership on its own is so ubiquitous it can feel unclear. There are so many uses and situations where this word might apply.
It’s no wonder we’re confused about what leadership means.
As I’ve written about before, it’s an imprecise word. There are many ways and contexts to be a leader. Leadership shows up in businesses, communities, neighborhoods, schools, non-profits, sports teams, even your book club. To wit, one of my first jobs was to recruit and manage adult volunteers to lead Girl Scout troops. Those troops were then organized into neighborhoods with their own leadership structures. So, leadership is present in just about any context you can think of. While there might be some general principles that apply in many of these situations, the context matters. What it means to be an effective leader in one environment might differ wildly in a different one.
There’s more to consider. Leadership refers to both those with a conferred title and those who rise from the crowd without a formal one. I think of this as a distinction between implicit vs explicit leaders.
Implicit leaders are those who lead without an official title. It’s that first-hire engineer with tons of institutional knowledge and respect from their peers. It’s the product manager who everyone listens to when they speak. Despite the lack of explicit titles, these people have influence inside the org. These folks are critical for any company. What they say and how they act matters.
Then there are explicit leaders or titled leaders. These are the ones with positional authority, the ones we tend to refer to when we use the term leader. Explicit leaders need to work hand-in-hand with implicit leaders to move important initiatives forward, create a well-functioning culture and a place where people want to open their laptops and join a Zoom call.
I use the word organizational leadership to describe these titled leaders. This is what my work focuses on.
When I say organizational leader, here’s what I mean:
In a business context, particularly in the tech industry
A conferred title (for me, org leadership begins at Head of or Director roles though they might be a manager depending on the org)
Spends a great deal of time thinking about how to communicate a decision or direction to multiple audiences
Thinks about the needs of a variety of stakeholders (often outside their functional area)
They need effective partnerships with people from other disciplines to be effective in their role
Recognizes the implications of a decision across the organization
Understands how to make decisions and take action in the face of complexity
Sees nuance rather than simple solutions or seeing things in binary (good or bad, right or wrong)
Aligns people across organizational lines toward a larger objective without using positional authority
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention the word strategy. This, of course, is a critical part of the role but much like the word leadership, the meaning of strategy is quite muddled and imprecise itself. A topic for another day.
This is what I mean when I use the word leadership. To be more precise and clear, I’ll be using the term organizational leadership more. I hope this has been useful. I’d love to know what you think of when you come across the word leadership.
In case you’re curious, there are 5.9 billion results for the word “leader.”
I love helping companies develop organizational leaders and create robust systems of support. Here’s how I can help.
If you’re looking to create expectations around what good leadership looks like at the company, please get in touch. I have a leadership competencies model that’s been used with hundreds of leaders. I can also customize one for your team.
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