Sophia Wushanley | What’s so special about leadership?

Another Look | Either “leadership” is a misnomer or it’s not the quality we should all be striving for

By Sophia Wushanley 09/15/14 11:00pm

O n e th ing you can count on being asked in an interview for almost anything is what leadership means to you. Sometimes it’s qualified as “good leadership” but sometimes not. Sometimes your interviewers cut right to the chase and ask you to explain how you are a leader, and could you please provide an example of a situation in which you were a leader, and how did it turn out and why. And I presume the reason this seemingly definitional question about leadership is ubiquitous is that there is a truly infinite array of acceptable answers.

You might think that leadership must involve, you know, leading people, but not so. Dwight Eisenhower said, “the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity,” while Colin Powell asserted that, “leadership is solving problems.” Tony Blair went so far as to say that leadership is “the art of saying no.” None of these descriptions of leadership seem to necessarily involve leading people. What’s more, they are strikingly different for a set of statements about what is ostensibly the same concept.

My aim in pointing this out is not to make a point about linguistic sloppiness, but to ask what might really be going on here. We seem to have expanded the definition of leadership to account for countless other good qualities that seem to bear little relation to the act of Getting Other People To Do Things, and this points out something significant that we all know, but weasel our way out of admitting by deliberately misunderstanding the question.

The fact is, there’s nothing inherently good about leadership according to the narrow — I’d be inclined to say “real” — definition of the term. Influencing other people to do things is only good insofar as we exert a positive influence on them.

Plenty of astoundingly skilled leaders have been terrible people. Cults, for example, almost always get off the ground thanks to a leader so astonishingly charismatic that he or she manages to convince large numbers of people to give up their former lives and follow blindly.

But this example is not typical, and the fact that evil people can be leaders too is not my primary reason for being disturbed by our distortion of the term “leadership.” The trouble with making leadership the umbrella term under which we lump many other admirable qualities is that it renders these qualities merely instrumental to the underlying goal of having power and influence.

My worry is that the fetishization of leadership encourages us to forget that there are plenty of qualities we ought to be striving for that are valuable entirely independent of the possibility that they might make us better leaders. Having integrity or courage or thoughtfulness or the ability to solve problems are important irrespective of the amount of influence they might buy you in society, but in a world where “leadership” is the quality we highlight on our resumes, those things fade into the background.

Our fixation on leadership worries me because it implies that the be all end all of a successful life is to have the greatest possible influence over the greatest number of people. “Leadership” has become one of those words that our brains automatically categorize as a Good Thing, and our conflation of the terms “leadership” and “good leadership” makes us believe that influence itself is the goal, rather than just a good first step to effecting positive change in the world.

This cultivates a culture in which we all vie for positions of responsibility because it’s “good to be a leader,” regardless of whether or not we believe we’re the best person for the job. Now, the rejoinder may be made, “but that’s not what good leadership is,” and that would be right, but it’s still leadership.

Leadership in the leanest definition of the word is amoral, and the other qualities we like to say make people good leaders, such as integrity, are commendable whether they’re exhibited by someone influential or not. We should all strive to act with integrity, determination and thoughtfulness because it makes us better people — not because it makes us “leaders.”

Sophia Wushanley is a College senior from Millersville, Pa., studying philosophy. Her email address is wsophia@sas.upenn.edu. “Another Look” appears every Tuesday.

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