John Maxwell has said, ““If you think you’re leading, but no one is following, then you are only taking a walk.”
Now look, I’m not the leadership guru John Maxwell is. But I take issue with his comment. Mostly because it is wrong often enough to make me pause and object.
Good leaders define reality, as Max De Pree famously said. But sometimes the process of defining that reality is remarkably lonely. A leader can be on a very long solo walk before anyone realizes she’s onto something. What looked to begin as a lonely ramble through the woods ends up being an entirely new course for others to follow.
Now for most of us most of the time the Maxwell axiom is good advice. You don’t want to be so damn stubborn you fail to realize that your followers have given up on the path you’ve chosen.
But what if you never had any followers to begin with? Or what if your sense of where you are going feels so right that you don’t mind if you arrive alone … and only then have the “proof of concept” that leads to others following the trail you blazed?
Years ago I used the word Freestarter™ to explain this idea. Some of us — the artists, the prophets, the writers, the visionaries — actually need to be on that long solo walk to work out exactly where we are headed. Nobody follows, most look at us as random oddballs. But many of us chart an entirely new course.
Want an example? D’Aun and I worked for years on “creation care” in relative obscurity. And then, to our surprise, lots of people realized our path was a good one.
So were we leaders? Well, no not at first. But yes, eventually.
Maxwell’s line is of course completely relevant in many organizational settings. If you are given responsibility for a team at work (or anywhere else) and head off in a direction that nobody follows … you aren’t leading. So I get that. But that’s just one leadership context.
My point here? Leadership is multi-varied and contextually sensitive. Figure that out first, then you’ll know what leadership actually looks like in your situation.