What Is Leadership?

What is leadership, really? Is it the power to bully people into action, or the talent to coax the best out of employees? Does leadership inspire or intimidate? What are its limits?

Leadership can mean different things to different people, though it ultimately aims to bring others together to achieve a greater purpose.

What Is Leadership?

Leadership is a process or set of behaviors used to align individuals toward a shared goal. Leaders exist across various organizations, groups and teams, and direct members to achieve results that often wouldn’t be able to be done alone. 

In the workplace, leaders can be found managing employees, maximizing team efforts and setting forth strategies to drive business growth.

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Why Is Leadership Important?

Leaders provide guidance, direction and vision for teams. They are in charge of defining goals and making critical team decisions, which can affect the day-to-day responsibilities of the rest of an organization. Leaders also play a key role in motivating teams, building trust and communication standards as well as establishing an organization’s culture.

To further understand leadership, Built In talked to six tech leaders to discover how they define leadership and how their careers have helped them shape that definition — here’s what they had to say.

What Do Leaders Do?

1. Leaders Inspire

“A good leader has the skills to share personal experiences, enabling and inspiring growth of others,” Olga Kupchevskaya, vice president at MyEtherWallet, told Built In. Leaders, she continued, use clear vision, a strong sense of accountability and effective communication to encourage their team to succeed. 

Leaders are determined to produce the best work and won’t let challenges discourage them. And leaders are not afraid to ask for help, because they’re eager to learn and grow. “They aren’t afraid of people being better than them; rather, they take pride in discovering new ways to succeed,” she said. “In the end, we’re all learning to be better at something.”

2. Leaders Make Tough Decisions

“Leadership is about making bold decisions, sometimes tough and painful ones,” Andres Garzon, CEO at Jobsity, told Built In. 

He offered an example from his own career: He had sold a huge project to a VIP client and was chosen to be tech lead on the product. 

In a meeting after the first deadline, he fired a programmer “because he didn’t take deadlines seriously,” Garzon said. When people complained to Garzon about the pressure and his style, “I told them, ‘If we don’t make the deadline, all of us will be fired, not only him: what do you guys prefer?’” The talk helped the group feel aligned with the goal and got their attention, he said. 

At the first demo, the client was impressed with the results and told the team she’d never seen so much progress on a project in such a short time. He at once got internal reassurance that his decision worked, and credited the team for the results. “At that exact moment, I became a leader,” he said.

3. Leaders Keep Learning

Amber Oler, vice president of customer success at Revver (previously eFileCabinet), has learned from her mistakes, using failures to teach herself about leadership. 

In one instance, Oler failed to take the right path with two employees because she felt intimidated and was answering to two leaders with conflicting needs.

“That was a hard one to recover from,” she said. Oler stepped out of the leader role to improve communication, seek coaching skills and learn to manage conflict. “The change taught me to stop trying to be right and start trying to learn,” she said. “A successful leader can’t know everything.”

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4. Leaders Empower

Before he landed in the position of chief scientist at 84.51°, Andrew Cron viewed the post as “more of a commander of a team, the person who always found a way to get things done in the right amount of time while maintaining high quality outcomes,” he said. “That’s still part of leadership, but more important is empowering the right groups of people to work cross-functionally, as a single unit, toward a big goal.”

When 84.51° took on more people to handle more work, Cron applied this and realized: “We can’t scale to the next level through people alone.” Instead, leadership will need to invest in systems and processes that enable talent to work more quickly and minimize duplication. 

It will also need to provide teams the strategy and support to stop work. “It’s incredibly easy to start new projects, but extremely hard to end them,” Cron said. “It is critical that we empower our people to make the calls to let go of some initiatives that don’t have the impact we need to scale.” 

5. Leaders Nurture 

“Leadership in a corporate context is bringing together incredible talent and bringing the best out of that talent,” Ronnie Kwesi Coleman, CEO and co-founder of Meaningful Gigs, told Built In.

As the company grew, the three co-founders started focusing more on team building and less on doing everything themselves, and Coleman realized the best results came from nurturing a capable team. 

“When we found the right people and got the best out of them, they could do better than I could, and it would allow me to do what I’m best at and what’s important for the team and the company,” he said. “The more I matured as a leader, the more I realized I needed to just find the right people for the job and help bring the best out of them.” 

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6. Leaders Find Balance

Adam Judelson, president and COO at mePrism, calls leadership a precarious balance: If the leader is too authoritative, team members will take back individual control and abandon the leader. If the leader operates purely as a consensus builder, they’re effectively facilitators and the group might not achieve its highest potential.

Leadership also conveys the ability to focus. “Leaders must ensure that the group knows what it’s working toward; this scope frees the mind and our emotional selves to do our best problem solving,” Judelson told Built In. He offers construction as a metaphor: “You supply nails, wood and hammers, but you must also inspire the group to build a house.”

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