We tend to think of leadership in the form of some chap, often in a suit, commanding authority over a country, a corporation, a community.   He has been imbued with positional power to at least influence or more often dictate the destiny of individuals in his charge.   The satirists often have a field day, ridiculing pomposity, lack of authenticity, intelligence and invariably a general sense of grandiosity.   It would seem we humans have always on some level struggled with authority, particularly authority that appears to lack any sense of humanity, authenticity and realness.

In 1954, in Calcutta, a group of disgruntled workers chucked their leader in the furnace.   When I grew up, my father spent an entire evening (or was it a week?) in side splitting laughter when his boss, having his car brakes checked, mindlessly stepped from a ramp 12 feet in the air, and broke both his ankles. On a London trading floor, a rainy January day in 2007, a group of employees mimic their boss's walk, laugh behind his back saying he has a wishbone rather than a backbone and unbeknown to him, have nicknamed him the "smiling assassin".    "Can't wait to meet him" I think.

Coaching an individual leader often involves helping the person gauge the extent to which there is a gap between the intentions of his behaviour, and the impact of his behaviour. Not only might the coach gather feedback on the leader, but the real work begins when you start to bridge the gap from feedback such as: "He doesn't listen", "He's cold and distant", "only focuses on his favourite part of the business", "ignores sales because he's a trader by background", "he's a bully" and so on. In my work I find it absolutely critical to explore a leader's values: what does he stand for, what would he fall for?   Every action he takes rests upon his guiding theories (not facts) about life; what he believes about the intentions of others, the way women should be treated and so on.   And if the leader is one of the many I have sat with who are described as "poor listeners", exploring what that might be about and why it is so hard to give others a voice.     

To be a leader requires not only knowing your governing theories of life, but what matters to you.   As one teacher put it to me as a twenty-something young woman "Don't tell me what you do for a living, tell me what you ache for?"

Real leadership involves noticing what you ache for and doing something about it.   Ignoring what you ache for will require you to be a fake, and nobody wants to be around a fake other than other fakes.

Real leadership involves not going too far against yourself so that you become cut-off and disconnected not only from others but the real source of your vitality and energy - yourself.