Everyone can be a leader not everyone can be a manager

Hello and welcome to the travelling introvert. Today I'm going to talk about leadership. I was talking with a client the other day and it was a group of managers who were in for some leadership training. And the first question is what makes a leader a leader? And this led to like a 45 minutes discussion and conversation between what makes a leader different from a manager or from an influencer.

 

Some things that came up right now is that how being a manager is considered to be old school and very rigid, and more about giving people tasks, and how a leader is like the new cool kid on the block. But people really couldn't identify what makes being a leader different. One person was like, well, a leader is someone who gets followed. People follow you if you're a leader. Which led to the conversation about, okay, so there's a bunch of people on Instagram with thousands of followers.

 

Does that make that influencer a leader? And they were like, well, not necessarily that's an influencer, it's a little different. Okay, so what makes a leader a leader? And they were like, okay, well, people have to trust you, all right? Don't people trust their managers?

 

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. So there starting to be a degree of separation between what makes a leader a leader and a manager a manager. Then we started to talk about inspiration. Leaders inspire people. That's something that they all agreed on, that they are inspired by leaders, but they themselves did not feel that they were inspiring, yet they consider themselves to be leaders.

 

And yes, different people will inspire different types of people because not everyone inspires everybody. You will inspire someone who aspires to be like, you right, but it is a form of leadership. And then there was the question, can everyone be a leader? And they were like, huh? So then I flipped it and said, can everyone be a manager?

 

And they're like, no, no, no. Good. Managers gives tasks in a clear way with timeline, expected turnaround. They answer questions, they give examples of what done looks like.

 

They explain why it's important managers do a very specific thing. Okay, all right, so very clear definition what a manager is and very specific people can be managers, but not everyone can be a manager. Yet so many people are in management area or roles who shouldn't be there, according to a lot of people. But leaders, anyone can be a leader because anyone can inspire someone else.

 

And just because they don't know that they're inspiring somebody else doesn't mean that they are not a leader. Every one of us has someone that looks up to us. And it might not be everything that we do, it might be one thing that we did. That person is like, oh, wow, that was awesome. I'm inspired by that.

 

We might not know it. Most of the time we don't know because it's very rare someone comes up to and goes, you inspire me. And to be honest, if they did, I'm not sure how our reactions would be right. But everyone has the competency to be a leader, whether they see themselves as one or not. You're always a couple of steps ahead in your journey, whatever that journey might be.

 

Then somebody else, somebody will look at something you do and be like, oh, I want to do something like that. Someone will listen to something that you say and be like, oh, that really inspired me to go and do A, B, or C.

 

Thinking about the fact that anyone can be a leader should make you think differently about how you view other leaders and how you wish to inspire others or the people that inspire you. What do they do? What did they say? Who do they connect with? Who do they network with?

 

And what makes them inspiring? Why do you aspire to have certain traits of another human? So remember that it's not being a manager makes a good manager. The key trait that separates managers from leaders is to be inspiring, and you can do that by just being you. Thank you for listening.

 

This is janice@thecareerintrovert.com, helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.