What kind of a leader are you? 

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What kind of a leader are you? 

Or are you just a manager?

Sorry – trick question! 

Many people for many potentially good reasons make a distinction between leadership and management.

But I sat down with Richard J. Torseth recently for his 10,000 Swamp Leaders podcast to chew over two of my little blog pieces which gave the episode its title: There are Problems with Adaptive Leadership AND Consulting.

Part of what we talked about is ‘being a rebel against authority’ – creating a system, making life choices in opposition to existing rules and frameworks. 

We can do this for extremely immature or for extremely mature reasons (it can be hard to tell which it is), we can create beautiful, powerful things through this rebellion – and we can end up locked into a model which is one-sided, which depends on having the big dominant authority system to bounce off.

Adaptive Leadership – and Rick’s excellent book – say ‘leadership is a choice’, and I agree.

But I would say is ‘if leadership is a choice, authority is an obligation’.

The really effective and deep rebels are not allergic to the use of power and authority – it’s actually important to engage with it, so you don’t loop right back around and become what you hated.

If you are setting up your approach to organisation, management, leadership (or anything) through reacting to something, you have an obligation to think about the reaction to the reaction: ‘hmm, what will the next generation of rebels be *against*?’

If you rebel against consultancy as she is practiced, how can you continue to practice consultancy in a traditional world?

If Adaptive Leadership helps you to lead in a hot mess, how can you do it in a way that not only gets you through, but also does something about that mess?

Dive in if you’re interested, lots of links and threads and lots of connections and patience from Rick:

Benjamin Taylor: There are Problems with Adaptive Leadership AND Consulting

So… how would you define what kind of a leader you are?