Leaders Need Rebels.

You don’t pull over for a police officer because of their leadership.

You don’t pay your water bill because of the leadership qualities of the CEO of the water utility company.

You didn’t attend school for a dozen or more years because the government led you.

You didn’t sit up straight with full body listening because your teacher was a leader.

A person with positional power doesn’t, by definition, get people to do things the person otherwise wouldn’t because of their leadership. This is one of the great myths of organisations who bang on about the subject, even christening roles as ‘leadership positions’.

If Leadership is persuading a person to do something or go somewhere they otherwise wouldn’t have done or gone - then Leadership most often appears in opposition to, or the absence of, positional power.

Sure, a person holding positional power can still display leadership qualities. Just as a person can ignore the lift to their tenth floor office and choose to take the stairs. Or cycle to work instead of driving. Or wake up at dawn and go for a ten kilometre run. The longer a person seeks or holds positional power, the more any leadership muscles or tendons they may have had, atrophy. Why make all the effort that fills libraries of books on Leadership - when you can just tell people what to do?

Anyone can direct a person whose mortgage or ego or sense of self-esteem relies on being paid this fortnight.

Which is why people with leadership aspirations, or who hold positional power yet consider themselves leaders, should welcome the Rebel.

The Rebel - the person who says ‘Your way is wrong - mine is better’ - is like weights on the gym floor. The Rebel is the resistance that builds leadership muscle. The Rebel forces the leadership aspirant to draw on deeper, more nuanced dormant strengths - or to begin doing the reps to build them. The Rebel speaks the words most others are often thinking. The Rebel reveals the weaknesses and flaws and inefficiencies in the path the aspiring leader wants others to take. The Rebel asks ‘Why?’ If you can’t answer in a way that leaves the Rebel at least to ponder, you have no business calling yourself a Leader.

If you don’t have a Rebel - you should create one. Like the Catholic Church did in the advocatus diaboli - the devil’s advocate - whose job it was to argue against canonisation of a candidate for sainthood to reveal any flaws before the crowd did.

Sure, I don’t want a Rebel in the cockpit of my international flight. I do want them in the seat controlling the flight simulator.