leadership

I don't want to be led. I want to be creative and do things that are dramatically new. Telling other people what to do feels almost evil to me. It deprives them of agency and confidence and it creates principal-agent problems.

And yet, I do admire some leaders: Obama, Merkel, Pope Francis, Elon Musk, NameRedacted, SuccessfulFriend. This is admittedly a weird list and certainly incomplete. Elon is a bit of a special case because he does seem to be a largely domineering kind of leader, and it's just admirable because it works out; he's so often right.

As I grow I want to be some kind of leader. Maybe not a manager. But I do want to be the sort of person that people want to follow, and who can help people achieve their goals.

A few concepts that appeal to me:

• Leadership as service:
  • In any group, decisions need to be made. Sometimes these decisions are difficult, highly consequential, and deserve substantial discussion and debate. Other times, there are a million small decisions like "when should we meet next?" or "where should we eat dinner?", where any answer is basically fine. You don't want to waste everyone's time deliberating on these questions. ExBoyfriend and I used to discuss what to cook or where to go out for dinner, and we soon realized that it was usually easiest to just designate someone to choose.
  • Whether the decisions are big or small, making them (ideally, making them well) is a service to the group. It allows the group to move on: to actually go to dinner, or on bigger things, to disagree and commit.
  • It's also a burden on the leader. The leader takes responsibility for the choices made. By doing so, they remove some of that burden from the rest of the group.
• Empowerment:
  • A leader's job isn't to tell the people under them what to do. It's to help them figure out what to do. It's to coordinate the group to try to give people more agency than they'd have if they were working alone. That sounds paradoxical and to some extent it is. But conspiracy is a thing for a reason. Working alone is not always the ultimate freedom; it can also be very limiting.

It should be acknowledged that leadership is also limiting to other people. By asserting command and control of a group, you're forcing everyone else in the group to practice non-leadership roles. And by trying to bring the group together, you're pushing people to give up the work that they personally have the most passion for and ownership of. These can be more or less true in any given case, and they don't negate the good things about leadership and the ways in which leaders can help people grow. But they're always in the mix. I've had both of these thoughts about NameRedacted and other managers at Google.