D. D. S. Dobson-Smith - Leadership Is a Behavior Not a Title: Your Pocket Guide to Being a Leader Worth Following

My first crisis of confidence in my work life came shortly after I started work ing.

I was a college professor in the UK and, in fact, I was the youngest college professor in the UK at the time. I taught hospitality management, and one of my courses was on public house operations. There was a mature student in that class named Howard who was born on the same day in the same year as my mum. He had owned his own pub longer than I had been alive. As I handed Howard an assignment that I had graded with a C, I caught a look in his eyes, and I thought to myself, This doesnt feel right . I was doing my job as a college professor, and yet something about it just didnt sit well with me.

So, I decided that I would go out into the world and get more life experience under my belt, telling myself I would eventually return to academia. I searched the job market for jobs in human resources (or personnel management as it was called back then), because I thought that was as close as possible to academia while being in the corporate world. And I got a job with Marks & Spencer, the British retailer, as a personnel management trai nee.

In one of the stores I worked in, I had to manage a woman named Diana who had been a personnel supervisor for twenty - five years. Meanwhile, I had only been a trainee for six months. Instantly it felt like the situation with Howard, the mature student in my class, was repeating its elf.

Here I was again in a position of hierarchical power with this brilliant woman who was old enough to be my mother and who had been doing her job for twenty - five years. What the hell did I have to offer her?

In that moment, I suffered another crisis of confidence, the second coming so soon on the heels of the fi rst.

I went to my manager, Simmone Page, who was head of HR for the store, and asked her, What should I do? I cant tell someone my mums age how to do her j ob!

Simmone kindly said to me, No, you cant possibly tell her how to do her job from a management perspective, but you can be there for her. You can create the conditions for her to be successful. You can remove the roadblocks that are in the way, and you can use your position to make things easier for her to do her job. You can believe in her. You can help her when shes having a hard d ay.

She took a beat before continuing. Stop trying to master the technicalities of her job, because thats not your job. Your job here is to be a lead er.

That was the moment when I had to begin letting go of my own ego.

And that conversation started to sow the seeds that have grown into this book you now hold in your ha nds.

A lot of us carry around this idea in our heads that if we are in a leadership position, we have to know all the answers. And we have to have the right answers; we cant get things wrong. We have to be the paragons of virtue, or we have to know best, as it w ere.

In actuality, the opposite is true. If we want to create spaces where people can be their best, where they can feel like they belong, and where they can have their energy released to do great work, then its not about being a manager. Its about being a lea der.

But what does that mean, really? What is the difference between leadership and management? (A difference which, as the title of this section would suggest, does exist.) Lets first look at what being a leader is not .

A 2018 article in Forbes shares a statistic that highlights the real crisis in leadership. Drawing from a 2016 Gallup poll, the author of the article identified that 82 percent of managers and executives are seen as lacking in leadership skills by their employees. This means that employees report that more than three - quarters of all managers do not do a great job of leading them. Gallup also estimated that this lack of leadership capability was costing US corporations alone up to $550 billion annua lly.

The article also goes on to quote a report from Deloitte, which approximated that $46 billion is being spent annually on leadership - development programs around the globewhich are not work ing .

Leadership training is failing. And why is it failing? Well, likely because its trying to teach the wrong things. As Javier Pladevall, the CEO of Volkswagen Spain, has said, Leadership today is about unlearning management and relearning being hum an.

Thats why I wrote this bookbecause the world is wasting money on trying to create great leaders instead of trying to create great humans. Its not enough for a leader to talk about their good intentions. They have to place equal attention on their impact as they do their intentions. Showing up and behaving like a decent human being is what is going to turn this crisis aro und.

In 2021, we saw the beginnings of what has since been termed the Great Resignationa serious uptake in resignations across the USand in fact around the world. With everything thats happened since early 2020the pandemic and the social justice crises weve been experiencingpeople have been asking themselves some deep, existential questi ons.

From a professional perspective, people ask, Am I doing what I want to do? Im spending time breaking my back, potentially putting myself at risk, and making sacrifices to earn a salary. Is it paying o ff?