Why Our Definition of Leadership Matters

We humans have a curious relationship with definitions. We crave them. We want to know what something is, to draw a line around it, name it, and make the uncertain feel a little more certain. Or, sometimes, to undermine it.

If you’ve been anywhere near leadership development over the last few decades, you’ve seen the endless search for the definition of a great leader, as if somewhere out there exists the perfect mix of qualities, behaviours, and competencies that will finally settle what leadership really is.

Overshadowed by a long legacy of command-and-control and all the toxic associations with “bosses,” it actually matters that we pause and ask: what do we mean by leadership now? 

For me, that answer is informed less by the past and more by the future.

What kind of leaders do we need if we want to live well, to thrive, and to see the changes in the world we say we want?

Maybe the point of defining leadership is not to find the right definition. Maybe we need definitions for a more human reason: to give shape to something we are trying to understand, practice, and become.

Here are a few that have shaped the field:

• The Leadership Circle Profile doesn’t offer a single sentence. It offers a map: a spectrum from Reactive to Creative leadership, linking inner assumptions to outer behaviour.

• Researcher Brené Brown offers a sentence: a leader is anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people, ideas and processes and has the courage to develop that potential.

• Gallup talks about leadership through the lens of influence: the ability to move people toward something meaningful, built on a clear understanding of your own strengths.

• The Center for Creative Leadership defines leadership by its outcomes: leadership is the process that creates direction, alignment, and commitment so that a group can achieve shared results.

  
  

None of these are “the one true definition,” and you can lead well for years without ever articulating your own. But the moment you’re in a real conversation about leadership, coaching someone, giving or receiving feedback, deciding who to promote, or trying to build a culture, a working definition suddenly matters.

Not a perfect one. A useful one. One that fits this moment in time for you and your organization. Otherwise, two people can use the same word and mean two very different jobs.

Think of these four lenses as different angles on the same mountain. None of them are wrong. And underneath the differences, they keep pointing to a few shared truths.

1. Leadership is not the same as expertise

This is why organizations keep making the same costly mistake: they reward the best individual performer with people to lead, and then watch the team underperform.

Being excellent at the work and being excellent at growing other people through the work are not the same competence.

The Center for Creative Leadership is explicit about this: leadership is a social process, what people do together, not a solo trait projected outward. The best salesperson is not automatically the best sales manager.

If you’re looking for actual leadership potential, there’s a better clue than past performance: many organizations (ie. Korn Ferry) point to learning agility, the willingness and ability to learn from experience and apply that learning quickly in new, unfamiliar situations.

Over years of assessing senior leaders, they’ve found that learning agility often predicts long-term success more reliably than raw intelligence or formal education, and that highly agile learners progress faster in their careers.

Common threads in this work:

• Past performance in the current role is a weak predictor of success in a bigger role. It tells you what someone could do yesterday, not whether they will grow into tomorrow.

• Learning agility is usually described through dimensions like mental agility, people agility, change agility, results agility, and self-awareness. Self-awareness shows up again and again as especially critical.

• High learning agility is relatively rare, which is why it’s treated as such a differentiator in succession planning.

• It isn’t the only factor, motivation, curiosity, character, and context matter too, but it consistently appears as one of the more powerful ingredients in executive success.

  
  

For a leader, the takeaway is simple: your expertise got you here; your capacity to learn will determine whether you can lead from here.

2. You can’t chameleon your way into it

You can study a leader you admire. You can borrow their language, their posture, their decisiveness. You might even be able to perform that version of leadership for a while.

But under pressure, only what is actually yours holds.

Brené Brown’s definition helps here because it quietly removes title and status from the equation. What’s left is you, and what you’re willing to take responsibility for. Gallup makes a similar point from another angle: effective leadership is rooted in knowing what you naturally do well, not in copying what works for someone else.

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken” ~ Oscar Wilde

When you lead mostly by imitation, you’re not leading, you’re performing. And performance, especially for those of us who grew up over-adapting to survive, is a fast track to exhaustion and a slow erosion of self-trust.

Leadership that’s sustainable over time has to emerge from a more honest place: your real strengths, your real limits, your real values, your real questions.

3. Listening is not optional. It’s the job

If it’s always you, and you’re always right, you’re not leading, you’re presiding.

The Leadership Circle model draws a sharp line here. On the Creative side of the spectrum, leaders are oriented to purpose, systems, and people. They see others, take in what they see, and adjust.

On the Reactive side, leaders are more absorbed in protecting themselves, their image, their control, their sense of worth.

People who know their own worth don't need to win the conversation; they're free to understand it.

A leader who cannot be told anything new isn’t leading a team. They’re managing an audience.

In practice, this means that listening is not a “nice to have” soft skill you add once the real work is done. It is the real work, because without it you can’t access the information, intelligence, and reality check you need to make good decisions.

4. Reacting is reacting. Creating is different

This is at the heart of the Leadership Circle Profile, and it’s one of the easiest distinctions to gloss over.

Reactive behaviour can absolutely look like leadership. Or, more precisely, it can look like the behaviours we’ve historically (and often wrongly) associated with “strong leadership”: confidence, decisiveness, even charisma.

The difference is not visible from the outside. It lies in what is driving the behaviour.

• Is this decision coming from fear, or from clarity?

• Is this control, or stewardship?

• Is this compliance, or genuine commitment?

  
  

Self‑awareness is the practice of bringing our unconscious beliefs to the surface and at least asking whether they are still protecting us, or, as so often happens, causing us to react to things that merely resemble earlier threats.

• Parental expectations can leave us with a perfectionistic inner driver.

• Growing up with a highly critical parent can shape us into adults who distance, withdraw, or become critical and arrogant ourselves.

• Parentified children often become chronically compliant leaders because a part of them still believes they must satisfy others to survive.

  
  

We scan for these old patterns so intensely, out of fear, that we end up reacting more than we creating.

As Jung put it,

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

That’s why self‑awareness is not a “soft add‑on” to leadership; it is the skill that makes all the other skills honest. Without it, you can’t reliably tell whether you’re responding to the reality in front of you or to an old story about who you need to be to stay safe.

5. People‑pleasing and arrogance are not opposites

It’s tempting to imagine a spectrum with “people‑pleaser” on one end and “domineering boss” on the other, and then to aim for the middle.

But that’s not a real axis.

Both people‑pleasing and arrogance are, at their core, self‑referential. The people‑pleaser is managing others’ perception of them by disappearing, smoothing, over‑accommodating or being passive.

The arrogant leader is managing others’ perception of them by dominating, controlling, over‑asserting.

In both cases, the leader is primarily focused on themselves, their image, their comfort, their safety, not on the person in front of them or the reality of the situation.

The work isn’t to find the midpoint between those two. It’s to get underneath both and lead from a different place: grounded enough in yourself that you can actually see and serve what’s needed.

So why does a definition of leadership matter?

None of the four sources above agree on a single sentence. But they do agree on the shape underneath:

Leadership is not a trait you have. It’s a relationship you’re capable of, with yourself first, then with what is true, then with the people in front of you.

A definition won’t make you a better leader on its own. But a clear, honest working definition can do something powerful: it can show you where you’re aligned with the kind of leader you want to be, and where you’re not.

If you pause for a moment and scan the five ideas above:

1. Leadership vs. expertise

2. Leading from what is actually yours

3. Listening as core work

4. Reactive vs. creative

5. People‑pleasing and arrogance as the same problem, twice

   
   

Which one is most uncomfortable to admit, right now, in your role?

That’s usually where the most useful definition of leadership begins, not in the abstract, but in the place where your current way of leading no longer fits who you’re becoming.

Invitation

If you’re reading this as a leader and recognize yourself in these patterns, or you’re in the middle of defining leadership behaviours for your organization, I’d love to partner with you.

This is the work I love most: working with senior leaders as an executive and leadership coach to sort what’s reactive from what’s real, and to scale what’s truly needed.

If you’d like a space to think out loud, test what’s next, and look more closely at how you are leading (and being led from the inside), I’d be glad to talk. Reach out if you’d like to explore coaching together.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!