Why Leadership Can Be Challenging

We often confuse leadership with authority. We look to people in high positions and bemoan their lack of leadership. But opportunities for exercising leadership do not depend on position. Leadership can come from any place within or even outside an organisation. And the more authority you have, the more you risk when you exercise leadership. Leadership is challenging because you are rarely authorized to lead.

Every one of us operates within a scope of authority in our professional civic, and even family roles. Whether you are president of the United States, the principle of a middle school, or a teacher in a classroom, the people around you expect you to follow a set of behaviours. As long as you do just that – meet their expectations and stay within your scope of authority – you will receive praise and support. In other words, your scope of authority is a contract for services; if you deliver those services, whether by improving student test scores or by maintaining a quiet classroom, you will be rewarded.

Ironically, we often call people who stick to their scope of authority “leaders”. For example, a district superintendent, under pressure from teachers in one of his primary schools to do something about their hard-driving and sometimes abrasive principal, found a way to promote the principal out of her job. He believed that he had exercised leadership because he had eliminated the complaints and restored equilibrium. But he had also removed a principal with a 20-year track record of dramatically improving student achievement and retention in the poorest neighbourhood in the district, a feat she accomplished in part by pushing the teachers to operate beyond their current norms and expertise.

Leadership often means challenging your authorisation. When you do that, you often meet resistance. Sometimes that resistance takes the form of social isolation or personal attacks.

You may appear arduous to people when you question their values, beliefs or habits of a lifetime. You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Although you may see with clarity and passion a promising future of progress and gain, other people will see with equal passion the losses you are asking them to sustain.

Reference: Heifetz, Ronald. Linsky, Marty. (2004). When Leadership Spells Danger.  Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development