Defining the Term ‘Leadership’?
Leadership is ultimately the ability to lead a person or group of people in a coordinated effort to achieve a goal. Sound familiar? I am sure it does. Whether it’s the character in a movie, the CEO of the SaaS technology company, his CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), or the Manager of the HR team you have seen and experienced management, which will have been well or badly performed. However, have you considered that leaders exist everywhere in the organisation? (See Fig 1 below.) Below these more senior roles mentioned, there are more entry-level leadership roles such as the New Team Lead but there are also roles within teams such as the Project Manager, Consultant, or Customer Success Manager who have to perform leadership responsibilities in their day-to-day roles with customers or stakeholders. Then, even more indirectly, there are those people of influence with no leadership responsibilities assigned to them, yet they seem to steer and influence the decisions of others despite the lack of a higher position on the company org chart.
This means that leadership is both a role with its duties and responsibilities and it is also a behaviour that impacts others through the leader’s personality qualities and soft skills. As Inspirea wants to create great leaders we have created this article to help you explore how leadership is demonstrated at different role levels.
The content of this article should be used as a framework of reference whilst being mindful that organisations may shape roles differently according to their needs. Why use this framework? Well, the following summary is useful to have a grounding in the types of roles that exist and how they differ from each other, but it is still then recommended to look at your organisation to see how this has been modified to their specific needed.
Figure 1: Example organisation hierarchy. IC = Individual Contributor (an individual without any management responsibilities), Snr = Senior, C Suite Member = any executive role such as COO, CMO.
The types of leader
Investors/Owners (Board of Directors): The members of the Board of Directors supervise a business’ activities providing governance and oversight of the business activities (e.g., ensuring it acts responsibly). These members are likely to have founded businesses and/or invested in them so that they have shares (if available) and/or partial ownership making them invested in the business outcome. They may do this for more than one business.
Executive (e.g., COO): Oversees high-level strategic planning and decision-making, aligning departments to achieve organisational goals. They are responsible for company-wide operations and performance and will report to a ‘board of directors’ if such a group exists for that organisation.
Director: Leads a specific department or function, setting its strategic direction and ensuring alignment with company objectives. They manage senior managers or teams.
Manager: Oversees day-to-day operations of one or more teams, ensuring goals are met and providing guidance to employees. They report to directors or senior managers.
Team Lead: Guides a small team in their daily tasks and projects while often contributing directly to the work. They act as a liaison between the team and management, and they support and monitor individual team member performance, although they do not have full line management responsibility (e.g., approval of training budget). They report to a manager.
Individual Contributor with leadership responsibilities: Coordinates and oversees specific activities or projects within a team, ensuring alignment with goals and timelines. They may exercise leadership by guiding team efforts, facilitating collaboration, mentoring and making decisions, but without formal people management responsibilities. They report to a manager or team lead.
Individual Contributor: Executes specific tasks or projects within their area of expertise, without direct managerial responsibilities. They report to a manager or team lead.
A Case Study
Let’s use a case study to explore how roles across an organisation may use leadership qualities. We start with Senior Developer Jon Bloggs at company MadeUp Inc. who is a fictionalised character that has been encountered many times in the real world day-to-day work of the Inspirea team.
Senior Programmer Jon
Senior Developer Jon has 20 years of experience and is a trusted ally of the team and company.
Jon’s team lead announces a meeting with their manager to discuss a new communication platform for the team that will allow better visibility for the managers. Jon has seen this type of activity before and jokes to the team about the last time this happened and how disruptive it was. His attitude has already shifted the mindset of the rest of the team. He hopes that the senior leadership team understands that the day-to-day job needs to be the priority.
Despite his concerns, Jon sits down willingly at the meeting and listens attentively to the overview of the new tool and why it is important to the management team. The information provided is very high level but explains that the change is required for better management reporting, but does not seem to support better development or serving customers better (or in other words, for his work, which reasonably in his opinion is what matters). Jon raises his hand in the Q&A and fearing the worst says, “This will disrupt our development and impact our customers. I think it’s a bad idea but I need to know more about it.” Nods go around the room and Mira, the brand spanking new developer just out of training who knows nothing of new technology stack launches in companies, sees Jon as someone she respects and one of her own. She nods too. Jon influenced Mira. The senior leaders (i.e., the manager and their peers) now have to work harder to convince the teams to move to the new platform because the team see the project as a disruption rather than a benefit.
Let’s go through this case study step by step to see if you can spot the way leadership was utilised in this case study.
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Correct answer:
There are three leaders. The manager (by role), the team lead (by role) and Jon (no role, but demonstrated through his actions).
Leadership is ultimately the ability to lead a person or group of people in a coordinated effort to achieve a goal. Some people are formally required to do this as part of their role and others demonstrate their leadership through soft skills.
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Correct answer:
The manager’s objective is to have a highly effective team. This means they need to:
ensure the team is operating effectively to meet the customer’s needs
to be on budget
to support the team in building quality code to avoid issues down the road
to give the team the resources it needs to excel.
Therefore this manager has a sub-goal to have better reporting so they can see what needs to be done to facilitate these objectives.
What isn’t made clear by the manager in their presentation to Jon is that the better reporting will help them to understand how the team is performing so they can support the team be more effective at supporting the customer. We explore this more below.
The Team Lead’s objective is to guide, support, and coordinate their team to achieve shared goals efficiently and effectively.
Jon’s objective is to write great code to support his customers.
A deeper look at the manager’s behaviour
One of the skills of a good leader is to use empathy to put themselves into the shoes of the people they lead. The manager in this case study communicated the change from the perspective of “management needs better reporting” not “as a developer you need the management team to know what is working or not so we can better support you in removing friction from your work”. Did they use empathy here? I think not as well as they could have. This means that although they are supporting their objective of having a highly functioning team by giving it the best tooling, they are not supporting this objective by undermining understanding across the team which causes misunderstanding and pushback. Learn more about the soft skills of a good leader here.
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A deeper look at the team lead’s behaviour
The team lead’s objective is for the team to operate effectively, hit goals, and support the business objectives. To support this the team lead needs to work alongside management in communicating process or tooling changes to the team and then to help influence and motivate the team to make the changes needed to improve. Their role is also there to help facilitate the manager’s work through communicating back into management what is happening on the ground.
In this case study, the team lead correctly shared a preliminary snapshot of the change coming before the manager’s presentation (as is often required as a normal part of a change management plan). However, they did not feedback to their manager how the team reacted to this discussion. This means that the team lead did their duty of communicating the change but did not support management by sharing that Jon was concerned that the change was a distraction from their great development work. If the team lead had shared this, their manager could have been better prepared during the presentation. The team lead could also have stepped in during the manager’s presentation Q&A to share the message that reporting is useful for them acting as an advocate on behalf of the manager.
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A deeper look at Jon
Jon wants to develop great code and he also wants his team to be able to do the same, so his objective (whether formally assigned or something he aspires to) is to allow his team to develop great code.
Why can Jon be considered a leader here? Well, when the change is announced he voices the concerns he has that the new change will have a temporary and possibly unnecessary detrimental impact on developing great code. Due to the trust the team has in him, his experience and his articulate message Jon influenced the team. This means the team is now less likely to move towards the goal management set out of bringing in a new tool, and they are instead more likely to coordinate with Jon around the thought that this is a bad idea. This influence is leadership because ultimately leadership is the ability to lead a person or group of people in a coordinated effort to achieve a goal. This is often described as ‘soft power’. Soft power refers to the ability to influence others and achieve desired outcomes through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or force which is what a formal management position can use if necessary through their position of power in the hierarchy org chart. It often involves shaping preferences and opinions by leveraging cultural, ideological, or diplomatic means. It is a very useful concept to understand and is possible through soft skills such as influence and communication. Learn more about the soft skills of a good leader here.
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We have covered two aspects of leadership in this article: the role itself on the org chart hierarchy and the ability to use soft skills which leads to soft power. There is one other aspect of leadership which is how individuals use their qualities (personality) to exhibit leadership and be good at leadership. To excel in leadership you need all three aspects to work in unison.
Similarly, all of these roles need to use these aspects of leadership in different ways to excel and it is worth a leader understanding this so that they can coordinate best with the other types of leadership. For example, if a manager understands individuals in their team may be great at influence which gives them soft power they can plan ahead to have this individual on their side before communicating to the team.
Why not explore our other blog articles to learn more about leadership?