Who leads?

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When do you become a leader?

I was recently asked this question while on stage, speaking at an event. Given that I was supposed to be speaking about leadership, I should have an answer ready, but I have to admit that I was flummoxed for a while.

I thought about all the formal thresholds that we cross in our careers: from individual contributor to team leader; from a team leader to a manager; from a manager of people to a manager of managers; up to someone who leads a function or a business unit. Did any of these constitute the boundary of leadership? Sometimes – but formal career progression did not feel like the whole answer.

Eventually I came up with the answer that, you become a leader when people start to follow you.

This might seem like a trivial definition, but I think that it is true, especially for a specialist field such as technology.

It occurred to me because I thought of all those other times in the career of a technologist when they lead the thinking of others, not because of their position in the hierarchy, but because of their experience and expertise. The time when the expert explains to a team that their solution won’t work – but that they have an alternative. The time when they help a business sponsor to understand why skipping the security reviews will expose their customer to harm. And the time when they help people to understand the potential of a new technology – and how it could transform their organisation. Each of these are leadership moments, when we establish trust and followership – even if the followers don’t realise it.

I also thought of all those times when we show an absence of leadership. When we don’t speak up about the failing project, because nobody wants to hear it. When we don’t challenge a design because we’re scared of conflict. When we don’t help the sponsor understand their technology because we think they won’t be interested. These moments are leadership choices too.

In our field, this form of professional, expert leadership is at least as important as formal, hierarchical leadership. (Years ago, I worked for an organisation with a useful framework of leadership attributes. Two of these were marked as predictors of future success, and stood out to me as particularly relevant for technologists. One of them was tolerance of ambiguity – the other was leading in the absence of positional authority.)

Answering the question When do you become a leader? also made me reflect that we don’t do enough to prepare people for this professional, expert leadership. This should not be a surprise: organisations usually don’t do enough to help people prepare for formal, hierarchical leadership. Training for line managers is notoriously weak in most organisations, and I have seen very few which help people truly prepare for leadership. There seems to be an assumption on the part of employers that if they’ve appointed someone to be a leader, they must be ready for it, and on the part of employees that they have to look as if they’re able to do the job from day one – all while struggling with imposter syndrome and frantically trying to figure out how to survive.

I have only seen a few organisations – consulting firms and those with Distinguished Engineer programmes or their equivalents – who explicitly prepare technologistis to operate as professional, expert leaders.

I believe that we should learn from these organisation, as well as from other, more established professions – and that the need is urgent. The growth of AI means that technology is growing more powerful and more complex every day. Although some have claimed that this growth heralds the death of expertise, I think that it makes expert, professional leadership will be more important than ever.

The first step in developing that form of leadership is to acknowledge that it exists.