Management Leverage Blog

I first saw this video on Jeet Blog. I have since seen it around several other places (here is the original TED talk). The general message is that this guy is a leader, as

1. he has “the guts” to stand alone and look stupid
2. he wasn’t a leader until he had at least one follower

And I can’t really disagree with any of it.

I can’t help but wonder, however, what we could learn  if we took the discussion in other direction.

This leader is one type of leader. He is front in center–a classic LAME (Look AT Me, Everyone!) leader. Even those who aren’t dancing, can’t help but watch him. As crazy as he looks, he has a certain charisma, albeit possibly drug induced.

Thanks to the media, this video is not inconsistent with how many think a leader should behave. It may be a caricature of reality, but it rings true.

And it is. Some very effective leaders are LAME leaders. Steve Jobs and Herb Kelleher come to mind here.

But there are other styles that are equally effective. And if you only consider the charismatic to be leaders, then you may never reach your true leadership potential if you didn’t happen to be blessed with the charisma gene.

Who else could be a leader in the video?

1. The Participative Leader: Maybe the girl in the white skirt and yellow top dreamed up the entire stunt, fully delegating responsibility to the first dancer as to where, when, and how to dance in order to get the most people to join him.
2. The Servant Leader: Maybe the videographer charged the dancer with the stunt and posted the clip on YouTube in order to help him achieve his dream of appearing on Dancing With The Stars (see Steve Farber’s post for a wonderful example).
3. The Situational Leader: Maybe the real leader is actually working the crowd, adapting his or her style from participative to autocratic (and everything in between) to the style to which each individual dancer is most receptive, beginning with the very first dancer.

Who else could be a leader in this video?

Edit: Rosa’s new post puts us smack dab on the same page

Those who practice random acts of leadership will never inspire many to follow.

My post yesterday about LAME (Look At Me, Everyone) leadership inspired a record-breaking number of retweets (only 4, I know but hey, that’s my record right now), so I thought I would expand on my thoughts a little.

The quote was inspired by a Peruvian student of mine who attended a class I taught at a University in Guatemala. Listening to his comments, I realized I had not convinced him that leadership can be learned.

Data wasn’t going to convince this guy. He stubbornly clung to his argument. One can learn to be a manager, he said (as if a manager was somehow half a leader), but not a leader. In one of those blinding revelations for which I cannot take credit, I realized that his notion of leadership was charismatic leadership (which also proved to me what I had already suspected—he had not been listening to my oh-so-intriguing lecture).

And he was right. You cannot learn to be charismatic.

But

1. Charisma is not sufficient. Do you know any charismatic people who are not leaders? Might there be something else necessary?
2. Charisma is not necessary. Some leaders are charismatic. That’s not new information, I hope. But most great leaders are, in fact, humble (Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership is a good place to start here if you want more information).

You may not have the right stuff to become a world-class, biography-worthy  leader. But you can get a lot better than you are now. Unlike common sense, leadership is a series of behaviors, and behaviors are learnable.

Though my student’s efforts to pay attention in class were consistent with the efforts he made to become a better leader, I finally convinced him that leadership is a series of learnable skills. He just never learned many of them.

Learning to lead  is humbling work. Most simply don’t make the effort.

Those who think that leadership cannot be learned, tend to think great leaders are charismatic leaders.