“Colonel Graff: You have a habit of upsetting your commander.
Ender Wiggin: I find it hard to respect someone just because they outrank me, sir.”
— Orson Scott Card
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Many leaders confuse necessary conditions for leadership with sufficient ones.
Titles often come with the assumption people will follow you based on a title.
Whether by election, appointment, or divine right, at some point you were officially put in the position. But leadership is based on more than just titles.Not only do title-based leaders feel like once they get the title that everyone will fall in line, but they also feel they are leading because they are in charge — a violation of the golden rules of leadership. This makes them toxic to organization culture.
A necessary condition for leadership is trust, which doesn’t come from titles. You have to earn it.
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Necessary conditions are those that must be present, but are not, on their own, enough for achievement.
Perhaps an easy example will help illuminate. Swinging at a pitch in baseball is necessary to hit the ball, but not sufficient to do so.
War offers another example. It’s necessary to know the capabilities of your enemy and their positions, but that is not sufficient to win a battle.
Leadership can be very similar. Being in a position of leadership is necessary to lead an organization, but that is not sufficient to get people moving towards a common goal. Titles, on their own, do not confer legitimacy. And legitimacy is one of the sufficient conditions of leadership.
If your team, organization, or country doesn’t view you as legitimate you will have a hard time getting anything done.
Because they won’t work for you, and you can’t do it all yourself. Leadership without legitimacy is a case of multiply by zero.There is a wonderful example of this, from the interesting history of the Mongolians. In his book The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, Jack Weatherford tells an amazing story of the unlikely, but immensely successful, leadership of Manduhai the Wise.
250 years after Genghis Khan, the empire was in fragments. The Mongols had retreated into their various tribes, often fighting each other and nominally ruled by outsiders from China and the Middle East. There was still a Khan, but he exercised no real power. The Mongol tribes were very much at the mercy of their neighbors.
In 1470 the sitting Khan died, survived only by a junior wife. There were immediate suitors vying for her affection because by marrying her the title of Khan could be claimed. Her name was Manduhai. Instead of choosing the easy path of remarriage and an alliance, she decided to pursue her dream of uniting the Mongol nation.
First, she had to choose a consort that would allow her to keep the title of Queen. There was one remaining legitimate survivor of Genghis Khan’s bloodline – a sickly 7-year-old boy. Orphaned as a baby and neglected by his first caregiver, he had been under Manduhai’s protection for a few years. Because of his lineage, she took him to the Shrine of the First Queen and asked for divine blessings in installing him as the Great Khan. They would rule together, but clearly, due to his age and condition, she would be in charge.
Although her words would be addressed to the shrine, and she would face away from the crowd, there could be no question that, in…
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