What we want from leadership, and how
What different types of leaders should do to make the most important things happen.
In the past, I’ve thought about leadership across three different sectors: social leadership, economic leadership, and political leadership. I think this is probably fair enough. Social leaders are those who influence our culture, economic leaders produce our technology, and political leaders our institutions. Importantly, they are defined by what they do, rather than how they are perceived: a political leader is a political leader because they influence their society’s governing institutions, not because they won an election. This would just make them a politician.
Of course, we also want a lot more from these leaders. We want social leaders to foster good morals and economic leaders to supply the right goods and services. From political leaders we demand redistribution, and from all of them we seek reassurance. But I would argue that if you have the right culture, technology, and institutions, this all follows. Leadership is a question of reaching those ultimate objectives, and what we should demand from leaders are ideas on how to reach them.
The problem is how to do that well: ultimately, how to nurture important ideas. I touched on the concept of an idea lifecycle in April:
“A leader who is brilliant at coming up with ideas is the one we think of as a visionary. Someone like (the pseudonymous) Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator(s) of Bitcoin, or Vitalik Buterin, who co-created Ethereum (the two major blockchains and cryptocurrencies).
Meanwhile, communicators are known for engaging a group. Education for women and tackling the climate crisis are not new ideas, but Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg are known for making them a lot more appreciated.
By contrast, the people who implement those ideas can come across as simply putting together pieces that other people already produced … but if nobody puts the jigsaw together, you’ve just got coloured paperboard in a bag.”1
The problem is how exactly leaders in political, social, and economic arenas navigate these steps. Specifically, leaders in different areas should approach this lifecycle in different ways and should pay particular attention to different stages.
Social leaders and the communication emphasis
Most obviously, social leaders lean heavily on communication. Malala and Greta are not intellectual heavyweights, nor is it easy to point to their tangible accomplishments… except with recourse to the people they have inspired around the world.
That’s essentially the point: social leaders are meant to be people with conviction who imbue others with their views and values. It’s worth stressing that social leaders need not be advocating for something in the public eye – you could also do something as secluded as writing a book – it is just that these social leaders are the most obvious influences on what we value, as a culture.
But to say that social leaders need only communication skills seems uncharitable. Indeed, it obscures just how broad ‘communication’ is: social leaders not only give ideas popularity, but turn disparate ideas into popular, coherent, and concrete agendas. The best of them popularise full-scale ideologies, lenses through which we view the world. Malala and Greta may not be intellectual heavyweights, but they are not just lucky.
Achieving any of these three goals is no mean feat, because the success of social leaders is contingent on a particularly high number of other players, including. They must pay attention to the range of ideas that society is willing to consider (this is the Overton Window, and some ideas fall completely outside it, like removing all government funding for education). To an extent, social leaders also have to navigate other influential shapers of public opinion; it would be foolish to argue that social leaders can simply bend public opinion to their will — this is a competitive game. Last, in addition to navigating the Overton Window, the most successful manage to shift it to some degree.
And what of political and economic leaders? It is helpful to be a little more concrete about who exactly falls into this category.
Social leaders are quite easy to spot: anyone influencing social opinion in the direction of a specific goal. Inherent in the ‘social’ dimension is the fact that if they are successful, they will typically be well known.
Political leaders and the jack-of-all-trades
Classifying political leaders is harder, not least because many politicians play the role of social leaders (and not the role of political ones). But the work that really matters in politics is how leaders influence governing institutions; the broader environment in which policies are made, beyond the specific policies themselves. Being a politician does not make you a political leader, and you can be a political leader without being a politician; you could also be a civil servant, or perhaps at a think tank.
This hints at the balance that political leaders should play across the idea lifecycle. For starters, we should expect them to have a greater role than social leaders in developing the ideas that influence how their society is governed. As well as being a vessel for the ideas of others, they are expected to have ideas of their own. As British Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher played important roles developing the ideologies upon which their governments were based: Tony Blair played a large role in developing New Labour as a political brand and framework; Margaret Thatcher co-founded the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974, an influential right-wing think tank to this day.
Naturally, political leaders – particularly those who are politicians – play the communicator role too, but in a modified form. We can think about communicators in two arenas, the public arena and the political arena. The public arena is where social leaders spend most of their time, and whilst political leaders operate here too, they are focused solely on a subset of the electorate, from which they ultimately only need a defined number of votes at defined times (public opinion polls are secondary to elections). By contrast, social leaders have more abstract objectives, in terms of the people they need to engage, when, and how.
Both types of leaders also operate in more political arenas, social ones “to navigate other influential shapers of public opinion” as mentioned, and political ones far more extensively. As hinted, this is the often zero-sum arena of key players who make or break the critical mass of support required to actually legislate or approve an idea. Effectively, political leaders engage in the public communication arena differently to social leaders, and less, and they spend more time communicating in a political arena, which is more important for them; these are smaller, more competitive, and more adversarial.
Implementation is more important for political leaders than for social ones. Here, implementing looks akin to nudging slightly, like a cruise ship, the direction of the state. Social leaders face a similar challenge to nudge the direction of culture, but political leaders do so in a smaller, more adversarial environment, whereas social leaders are more able to collaborate with others to divide the burden. To an extent, for a social leader, the work stops after the idea is communicated to the rest of society, which generates its own momentum. By contrast, this stage for political leaders is more the starting gun, and further resilience is required. Those seeking to influence a society’s governing institutions must be a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ figure in the idea lifecycle.
Economic leaders get good things done
Economic leaders are perhaps the least thought about and most plentiful of them all. They are identified by their work pushing the boundaries of what a society can produce. Essentially, they are developing better technologies and, as such, most business leaders and many academics fall into this category.
The most effective economic leaders, pushing the boundaries of what is possible, are very close to where ideas are generated, often playing a key role. Though there are millions of entrepreneurs, comparatively few of them work on developing ideas like these, not least those that are hugely significant. Inventing a new type of shoe, like crocs, is less meaningful than inventing a new type of lightbulb, like LEDs. But typically, those who move the dial on how productive a society’s technologies are place themselves very close to the original idea. To create a highly impactful technology, you need to understand very deeply how it works.
By contrast, communicating is far less important for economic leaders, and again it comes down to the arena in which their communication happens. Generally, social leaders all compete for members of the same group: society writ large, which is enormous in breadth, though there is enough space for many of them to be heard. Similarly, political leaders speak all to one group, though this time it is the small sect of people in and around government, where there is space for only a few to be heard. This makes communication less constructive and more adversarial.
By contrast, economic leaders face a very different arena because their arenas are largely in their own organisations, rather than a communal group. Each economic leader has an arena largely to themselves: their own organisation. Further, in these contexts, everyone is truly on the same team: they want the same things and already share the same values and priorities. By contrast, social and political leaders are trying to convince their audience to adopt new ones, as well as facing down competitors.
Economic leaders are also in a different environment when they implement ideas. In a sense, getting things done – innovating – is the lifeblood of an economic leader as communicating is for social leaders. Not fully, but implementing an idea successfully is what gives them momentum, making it of paramount importance. Political leaders also have to implement, but it is far less important because political leaders are often not expected to still be active when their ideas come to fruition; outcomes for political leaders (and social leaders) are far more abstract, vague, and longer-term.
Leadership is a model
There is one more important point: leaders are not people. Good leadership is a model, not a trait, and so just like individuals can be good leaders, so can communities. This also means that an individual or community is not bound by being any one type of leader. This isn’t the territory, it’s just useful to have the map.
The correct way to think about people, communities, and leadership is that people embody good leadership, and so can communities, as can the organisations of which they are a part.
Understanding the skills and arenas that different leaders should lean into developing and prioritising is a useful framework to have in mind when making choices, building an organisation, and accomplishing goals.
Next month, I’m going to explore how such organisations should be built, given these differences, focusing on building organisations that are united by a shared mission and culture, rather than economic incentives and formalised institutions. Here’s an introduction to what these organisations will look like in the 21st century, if you’d like to get ahead.