Leadership is Not a Given

Your title doesn't make you a leader. Your willingness to do what others won't does.

No kid dreams of becoming a leader. They want to be astronauts, singers, firefighters, or, in my case, the General Manager of the New York Knicks. Leadership isn’t something you think a lot about until much later, and usually when you find out you’ve been screwing it up.

And yet nothing matters more in business, politics, teams of any kind. It’s the variable that makes or breaks everything. So why, after a hundred years of talking about leadership, is the good kind still so mysterious and rare?

Because we’ve been thinking about it backwards.

We treat leadership like something that can be granted. You get promoted to “Senior Whatever” or “Chief So-and-So.” Or, you started a company and promoted yourself.

But either way, your title is tied to your technical skills or background, as if they naturally go together. So a brilliant engineer becomes a terrible manager. A charismatic salesperson becomes a mediocre VP. We keep making this mistake because we confuse the external (measurable) capability with an internal (not easily measurable) quality.

Early in my career, I was a senior leader without a C-suite title. The actual CEO was failing. The company was struggling. I had a choice: wait for someone else to shake things up, or do it myself.

I wrote an ultimatum letter to the Chairman.

“Here’s the situation. Here’s why the current leader isn’t the one we need. Here’s how I’d do it differently. If you agree, appoint me. If you don’t, that’s fine but I can’t stay.”

The chairman bristled but ultimately asked a trusted advisor: “I agree with his diagnosis, but how do I know he’s the right person to lead us?”

The advisor said: “Because he’s the only one leading.”

I got the job. I led us through the rough patch, built a strong team, and turned things around. I also fired people, pissed off the old guard, made enemies. No magazine covers, no nine-figure exit. But I learned something that shaped everything since:

Leadership is only, ever inner work. You can’t fake it, delegate it, or workshop your way into it.

No vision statements or charisma will make up for a lack of self-honesty.

Here’s what matters:

You can hurt people and feel it. You will fire people. You will disappoint people. You will make decisions that negatively impact good people. If you can do this without pain, you’re a sociopath. If you can’t do it at all, you’re not leading.

You don’t need to be liked. Want to be liked? Fine. But if that need changes your decisions, if you avoid the right call because people won’t like you for it, you’re following, not leading.

You can live with being misunderstood. Sometimes you can’t explain your decisions. Legal reasons. Strategic reasons. You provide context where you can, but you don’t need everyone to understand or approve. This will burn, and you do it anyway.

You decide without all the data. Anyone can make obvious calls with perfect information. Leaders decide when it’s ambiguous, when the data is incomplete, when waiting means failing.

You own the consequences. You’ll make a hundred decisions this month. Most will be right. A few will be wrong. One might be terrible. You don’t let that stop you from making the next one. As Churchill said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

These aren’t qualities someone can give you any more than they can give you a sense of humor. For some rare people they come naturally. For the rest of us, they’re forged through actually doing the work.

Here’s the pattern I’ve seen working with thousands of leaders: the ones who actually lead don’t wait to be crowned. When leadership is needed, they take it. While everyone else waits for the five-star review and the perfect conditions, they embrace the mess.

You don’t have to want to be a leader. But if you find yourself in a position where leadership is needed and you’re not taking it? That is your choice.

Take it or leave it.