Barack Obama, Margaret Thatcher, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela… If you are asked to define leadership, you will probably name one of these big names in politics or Silicon Valley. You won’t be wrong but you will miss the point. “Leadership is less a matter of being than of doing,” underlines Christophe Genoud, author of Leadership, agility, happiness at work… bullshit! Put an end to fashionable ideas and (finally) revalorize the art of management (Vuibert, 2023).
Vincent Giolito, professor of strategy at EMlyon business school, makes a distinction between management, “a device for formal influence on people”, and leadership which is based on “informal influence mechanisms”. The first is bureaucracy and hierarchical power, those who evaluate the work of their subordinates. The leader is characterized by the influence and interactions he will have with the “followers”. If the two can be found united in one and the same person – “what we expect from leadership is that it is embodied by managers”, supports Vincent Giolito – we can however take leadership without being a manager, without the existence of any hierarchical link. In a company, it can be the employee who stands out in a meeting by expressing an idea with charisma.
In politics, leadership can also be embodied by personalities who have never won power. Two interesting examples are given to us by former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin in his book Leadership for all (Michel Lafon Poche 2023): Jacques Delors “true European leader, who missed out on the presidency of our Republic”, and Philippe Seguin, “who missed multiple steps towards power but of whom those who claim to be him remain numerous” .
This is all very nice, but what do we need leadership these days? Covid, Ukraine, labor shortage, loss of meaning at work… “We are in a time of very strong transformations, analyzes Vincent Giolito. Faced with management entangled in its bureaucratic rules, slow to change, leadership embodies and implements the day-to-day running of the business.” If leadership leads to a certain number of people being ready to follow you, beware of overconfidence. A good leader must learn to be wary of what the American Adam Grant, expert in organizational psychology, calls the “inner dictator who governs our thoughts”. Or the egoic reflex which consists of refuting or dismissing any argument or proposition which would contradict our strongest beliefs. For the best-selling author Think Again (Alisio), there is no leadership without renewal of his thinking. A statement that Emmanuel Kant would undoubtedly have supported in his time – “We measure the intelligence of an individual by the quantity of uncertainties he is capable of supporting” – or the Nobel literature winner George Bernard Shaw, co-founder from the London School of Economics – “There is no progress possible without change; and those who do not change their minds cannot change anything.”
Change in the service of progress is a great idea, which does not necessarily go without saying, as Jean-Pierre Raffarin points out: “Leadership is not a value in itself since it can be put at the service of bad causes or develop their own excesses.” Examples in distant or recent history – any resemblance to a peroxide-blonde ex-president is purely coincidental – are legion. Let’s give them a name: Jacinda Ardern. Pandemic, volcanic eruption, Christchurch attack… During her five years in power, the former New Zealand Prime Minister revealed herself as a brilliant crisis manager, embodying in the eyes of the whole world a vision of modern leadership, motivating and empathetic, setting a course and owning up to its flaws. To the point of letting go of the reins of the country, because she “no longer had enough energy”. “I’m leaving because such a privileged position comes with great responsibility. The responsibility of knowing when you are the right person to lead, and also when you are not.”