A Lectern For Leadership - AP:48

Leadership.  What does that mean to you?  To many this word means authority.  The one in charge.  The boss.  Leaders are expected to demand the right solutions.  To provide the best outcomes.  To fight the greatest threats.  We cheer and sometimes beg for good leaders.  Believing it is the stagnancy of comforts or lack thereof that has brought us our current grief.  Unfortunately, none of these beliefs are what make up leadership.  Instead, the aforementioned is a childlike cry for a parent.  For someone else to push away the darkness and to do it - quickly.  These juvenile demands are not shared by all.  There is a mature want for leadership - but what does that mean?  As John W. Gardner writes in his book On Leadership, “When we ask a question countless times and arrive at no answer, it is possible that we are asking the wrong question - or that we have misconceived the terms of the query.”  Real leadership is like the sail of a boat.  It can be guided, it can be improved and it should be repaired.  It moves, not demands, the innovations that can solve our problems.  This is not the instruction we receive when we labor.  When we work at our lives or at our job. The laborer has been instructed that their leader is part of a hierarchy.  That he himself has a leader.  This does not make a leader, it makes a manager and a manager is just another laborer.