Suffice it to say the widespread use of leader as a synonym for seniority bothers me — perhaps even more now that I hold the designation myself.
I started this website, in part, to hold myself accountable. In middle school and high school, I was enrolled in a program for emerging peer leaders. How did I come to participate in this program? Beats me, really. But when the educational industrial complex fixes a label to your chest it can stick for quite some time. So I took the classes, year after year, until I graduated. Then I put leadership behind me, a discarded subject in which I no longer had an interest, like math. Or so I thought…
It’d be more accurate to say that the skills I practiced in those classes followed me everywhere, silent and subtle, like currents flowing through and around my interactions with the world and its people.
Leadership hardly came up in those classrooms. Not the word, at least. Not directly. Instead, we participated in exercises to teach us empathy, communication, mediation, understanding, and patience. We learned how to solve problems for our peers. We learned self-awareness. We learned to be listeners before speakers. Most importantly, we learned that to be a leader one cannot simply assert oneself as a leader, that the outward display of ‘leadership’ can often be the most unleader-like quality of them all.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have learned this at such a young age. And when years later an early mentor of mine told me that his confidence waned most after meetings where he had to do all the talking — “It’s not a good sign,” he said, “when you’re the smartest person in the room” — I heard the echo of that familiar position: be wary of the spotlight, for it blinds as often and as effectively as it demands focus.
I look around me now and I see a lot of people waving the banner of leadership for themselves. Some of these people are genuinely good at their jobs, smart as fuck, and do indeed lead. But just as many don’t seem to be doing any leading at all, a great deal don’t communicate well, many seem more interested in the label of leadership, or the rank, or the resume line, or the salary and lifestyle, than the work itself, and many don’t seem to hold dear the same sense of duty I learned as a young person — that to be a leader means to think least and last of yourself.
— YTL