Real Leaders lead, even when they aren’t around

In a now famous address at Rice University in 1962, President John F. Kennedy said "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Leading is not about managing, it is about inspiring. Real leaders inspire their teams, even when they are not in a leadership role. President Kennedy didn’t build the rockets or lead the team that went to the moon, but nearly six years after his death, the first manned mission landed on the moon.

Leading isn’t micro-managing

We have all had those leaders who feel they need to control every detail. Some of them are even descent managers. The problem is when they are gone, nothing gets done. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins refers to these as level 4 or effective leaders. As long as they are around, things move smoothly, and companies run as they are designed to. When they are gone, things tend to fall apart.

In his book Team of Teams, Gen. Stanley McChrystal shares his wisdom on leading. "The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.” Looking at the entirety of the operations that he led, the thing which stands out the most is how he pushed decisions to the lowest level possible and expected individuals to be leaders.

Train your replacement

Everyone wants to feel like they are irreplaceable, but the reality is, while we do bring our unique flavor to what we do, the world went on great without us for millennia, and by all accounts will continue after we are gone. In order for a leader to grow, another leader must be trained to step up and fill their shoes. Leaders must always be thinking to their future, which should always involve who can they bring up with them, growing a team of leaders.

One of my better leaders asked me once what I wanted to do next. It was ironic because he had been in his current role less than a year, and he had just hired me. Through a number of conversations I realized that he was trying to develop me as an employee, but also giving me a chance to be a leader. Over time, the assignments and feedback he gave me, enabled me to prepare for the time when he would promote, and I would be prepared to take over for him. He lost nothing by training and preparing me, but rather he ensured the culture he had worked so hard to create would live on through the leaders he brought up with him.

Stand back and watch your team succeed

One of the most important parts of leadership is being able to step back and let the team do what you have hired and trained them to do. It does no good to have a great team if they can’t make decisions when their leader isn’t there. Leaders who don't empower their people, who never take vacations, or sick days, or time to develop themselves as leaders, have effectively failed.

A few years after leaving the Army, one of my IT Operations managers, a former Marine helicopter pilot, was often no where to be found, took regular vacations, but somehow always knew what was going on. During a performance review I asked him how he could take so much vacation, and where he was. He told me that his job wasn’t to manage us, he had hired us for a reason, but his job was to remove obstacles and let us do what he hired us for. When we couldn’t find him, he was talking to other managers, making sure that when we needed a resource, we wouldn’t be left waiting. He never got in the way, but he was always making sure we were successful.


Leading is not about managing, it is about inspiring. Leaders aren’t simply those who hold a title or a position, but rather those who choose to lead. The best leaders are those who lead, not manage. They develop their teams, giving them opportunity to succeed, and treating every failure and every success as a chance to grow. In his book Tribes, Seth Godin reminds us, "The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.” President Kennedy painted a picture, and inspired many generations. Be the leader you can be, inspire, paint a vision, and don’t get in the way of your teams success.