# Getting Leadership Wrong

I've always been a fan of Peter Drucker. He spent 65 years rejecting the idea that leadership is about personality or charisma. In his article "What Makes an Effective Executive," he identified eight practices that made executives effective—regardless of whether they were extroverted or reclusive, generous or controlling.

But why do those practices work? Because they're all expressions of the same underlying posture: putting the organization's needs ahead of your own. Drucker focused on the how. This article focuses on the why.

Leadership isn't a fixed behavioral model—it's a posture to serve. At its core, leadership is about moving people, systems, and industries toward something better. How that happens is contextual, not defined by a playbook. Instead of measuring operational traits, we should recognize leadership as intent expressed through whatever method fits the moment.

That's why attempts to standardize leadership consistently fail, and why definitions remain divided—because the variable being measured isn't the one that matters.

**Great leadership is about serving others.**

### The Posture vs. Model Distinction

Understanding leadership as posture rather than model explains why leadership development programs often feel hollow despite their rigor, and why some people lead effectively without ever reading management theory.

This framework also resolves what appear to be contradictions in leadership. The same person might be directive in a crisis, collaborative in strategic planning, and hands-off with experienced teams. These aren't inconsistent "styles"—they're different expressions of the same underlying commitment to moving people toward better outcomes.

This also suggests that leadership might not be as teachable as we'd like to believe. You can teach frameworks, communication techniques, and strategic thinking—all of which are useful. But the intent to serve? That's more fundamental. It's either present or it isn't, though perhaps it can be cultivated rather than taught.

### The Nice Person Problem

Being kind, caring, or thoughtful doesn't make someone a leader—it makes them kind, caring, or thoughtful.

The confusion arises because leadership involves caring for others, but it's not the same as simply being nice. Leadership requires that care be directed toward movement—toward progress, growth, change, and better outcomes. You can be incredibly thoughtful while maintaining the status quo, avoiding difficult decisions, or prioritizing comfort over progress. That's not leadership. That's just being complacent.

Consider how mainstream business advice perpetuates this confusion. An Inc. Magazine article on professionalism advises: "If someone else has done well, use the meeting to give them a shoutout. That's one of the ways you become a great leader."

That's not leadership. That's being encouraging—which risks making underperformers feel inadequate, resentful, or disconnected.

Authentic leadership in that moment would ask: Why isn't everyone else performing at that level? What do they need to get there? Praising the high performer doesn't move anyone forward—they're already doing well. The function of leadership is to elevate underperformers, understand their barriers, and push them toward better outcomes. But that's harder. It requires identifying who's underperforming, having difficult conversations, holding people accountable, and doing actual work. Much easier to give a shoutout, get some applause, and call yourself a leader. Nothing changes, but it feels like leadership.

As one executive discovered after making necessary changes in her organization: "I wasn't hired to be liked. I was hired to do right by my organization." The lunch invitations stopped. Former colleagues no longer included her name on the sign-out sheet.

It stung.

But she knew the harsh reality—when you do what needs to be done to get results, you won't be liked very much by some people. Change freaks people out. It makes people mad. Great leaders know this going in. They sacrifice being liked to focus on achieving concrete goals, making hard decisions, and creating change. What makes them great isn't that they enjoy being disliked—it's that even though they find themselves alone, they do the hard stuff anyway. Because in the end, their ultimate success isn't about how many people think they're great. It's about whether their organizations are.

Being direct, challenging people, calling things as they are—that's not opposed to leadership. That is leadership. The alternative—letting people stay comfortable below their potential or allowing the industry to settle for less than it could be—isn't service. It's neglect disguised as diplomacy.

### The Misidentification Crisis

We've diluted the term because we don't know how to identify what it is.

It's easier to measure niceness than intent. Easier to promote the person everyone likes than the person driving progress. So organizations default to proxies—charisma, likability, tenure, confidence—and call it leadership.

Leadership is functional, not ceremonial. It's defined by what it does—moving things forward—not by what it looks like. But we've confused the appearance with the function.

The functional question is simple: Is this person moving people, systems, or industries toward better outcomes?

If yes → leadership is happening. If no → leadership is not happening, regardless of how it looks.

Consider a painting company. The founder positioned himself as building something "remarkable"—a quality-driven company that people would say, "Wow, there's a great company" about. He measured success by remarkability: being noticed, admired, and talked about. He was friendly. He built a recognizable brand.

He also blacklisted 3,000 customers, by his own admission.

Nothing says "remarkable company" quite like 3,000 customers you refuse to work with again. That's not a badge of wisdom earned through hard lessons. It's evidence of systemic failure at the basic function: serving clients well. All the friendliness and remarkability in the world don't matter if you fail to deliver the experience customers need.

But from the outside, the company's owner appeared to be a leader. He had the appearance: confidence, visibility, and a compelling story about building something special. What he lacked was the function: actually serving people well enough that they'd want to work with him again.

This creates a problem. People who are nice but not leaders get promoted into leadership roles. They maintain harmony but don't drive progress. The organization stagnates. Then we create more leadership frameworks and training programs to fix what we think is a skills gap, when really it's a misidentification problem from the start.

Meanwhile, actual leaders—the ones willing to make hard calls and push for better—sometimes get overlooked because they're not universally liked, too direct, or make people uncomfortable with their standards.

The broad definitions of leadership aren't just academic confusion. They're actively harmful. They let us avoid the complex work of recognizing authentic leadership, which requires looking past surface behaviors to understand what someone is actually oriented toward.

Are they moving things forward, or maintaining comfort? Are they serving the mission and people's growth, or just keeping everyone happy?

### When Leadership Becomes Self-Service

When people without the right intent occupy leadership positions, the dysfunction becomes visible in how they respond to challenges.

The clearest sign that someone has abandoned leadership isn't found in their personality—it's revealed in their response to being questioned. When someone becomes defensive rather than curious when their ideas are challenged, they're no longer leading. They're protecting their ego. Instead of treating challenges as opportunities to strengthen ideas or discover better ones, they treat them as threats to be neutralized.

This self-protective stance creates dysfunction. When team members learn that challenging ideas bring defensiveness rather than dialogue, they stop challenging. When speaking up feels risky, people stay quiet. When questioning broken processes invites tension, those processes remain broken. The organization begins optimizing for the leader's comfort rather than its own improvement.

The result is an environment where people become more invested in not rocking the boat than in steering it toward better destinations. Innovation stalls. Problems that everyone can see remain unaddressed. The organization's energy shifts from "how do we get better?" to "how do we avoid trouble?" This isn't growth—it's managed decline.

The distinction isn't between confident and insecure leaders, or between different leadership styles. It's between people who are actually leading—serving the organization's progress and others' growth—and people who are simply occupying leadership positions while serving themselves.

Real leadership reveals itself in moments of challenge. Does the person lean in with curiosity or lean back with defensiveness? Do they create space for dissent or punish it? Do they celebrate productive disruption or suppress it? The answers show whether someone is leading or just protecting their position.

### What Remains

Strip away everything that looks like leadership but fails to perform its function—the niceness, the shoutouts, the charisma, the harmony-keeping, the behavioral models. What's left is intent toward moving people, systems, and industries forward.

That's it.

Leadership is functional—defined by what it accomplishes, not by what it resembles. The people who don't recognize directness as leadership are usually measuring by the wrong variable. They're asking "Does this feel nice?" instead of "Is this moving me forward?"

The question isn't whether people think you're a good leader in the moment. It's whether you're actually moving people and systems toward better outcomes. That's the only measure that matters.

We can't move an industry forward by holding on to what keeps it back. This requires letting go of comfort, tradition, and the very things that made people successful in the past. The people who cling to what holds the industry back might be friendly, thoughtful, and deeply experienced. But if they can't release those things to move forward, they're not leading—they're anchoring.

The paradox: The very things that got you here often become the things that prevent you from getting there. You either serve growth or protect comfort. You can't do both.