Are you leading, demanding or bending?

In my previous post, I barely touched the subject of leadership. From my experience, however, IT administrators are probably first in line to claim that they have noone to lead. Particularly in small organizations, where there there is nobody below them in the hierarchy. I disagree with this notion.

Everyone is a leader in one form or another. The IT Administrator's leadership is expressed through their knowledge of IT, and it is observed through people seeking assistance and direction from the IT Administrator. So even if you're not officially leading any people, you are still leading the way of the organization's use and knowledge of IT. Even when your superiors set policies, people will still be looking for you when they have problems that need to be solved.

Leadership is often confused with management and power. However, some of the most well known leaders were people with no power at all. Instead, they inspired people around them. The question is, how do we apply this in the IT world?

Let us have a look at the perpetually returning tech support questions of how to do something in Word. In my experience, the near-constant support to solving the same problems again and again does not inspire workers to learn. Instead, it inspires them to call you again. So the question is, how do you inspire someone to learn?

Since I, as most IT administrators, do not have any education in pedagogics, I'm uncertain if there really is a simple answer to that. After all, everyone are different and thus have different triggers and buttons. Learning these triggers and buttons, and then relate to them, is a key to inspiration. Which brings us back to the many attempted definitions of leadership.

Studies have shown that a common trait amongst the most successful leaders is constant learning. They learn about their fellow coworkers, about their business, about everything they touch. This knowledge is then expressed with an enthusiasm that inspires coworkers to follow their lead. They break new barriers and lead the way, the others follow.

But give this a little thought. If the leader's lead is based on information learned from coworkers, then everyone are actually part of the group's leadership. While it is mostly expressed by this one person, the leadership is more of a bidirectional relationship than a job in itself. Management, on the other hand, is an uninspiring job that behaves like sand in everyone's eyes if it is not coupled with leadership.

So stop being a manager now, and become your organization's IT Leader!

This article was inspired by the first 20 pages of The Leadership Manual by Hilarie Owen, Vicky Hodgson and Nigel Gazzard, ISBN 0-273-67551-6