The Agnostic Nature Of Leadership

Positive Psychologist & Leadership Coach who ensures positive behaviour development and authenticity for leaders. Vinesh Sukumaran’s Work.

The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley originally coined the term agnostic to refer to people who consider themselves to be clueless about various issues that others perhaps take a definite stand on. As a positive psychologist and leadership coach, that’s precisely what I’ve observed about that sought-after quality of leadership. If leadership had a life of its own, I’m pretty sure it would be subject to this kind of agnostic ignorance. By itself, leadership couldn’t care less about who it bestows itself on and therefore is, to a large extent, agnostic. Here are a couple of instances where this plays itself out.

Leadership is gender agnostic.

Just this one idea puts a lot of debates to rest: debates about who makes better CEOs, who can start and scale companies better, whether the leadership positions in certain domains are dominated by leaders of certain genders, etc. Of course, it’s completely possible that certain industries are and have been dominated by certain genders because of the legacy in certain industries, trends and expectations from the market, where the key organizations in an industry are headquartered or even because of the mindset of the founders.

In any case, I think that idea is passé. There are more and more organizations today that are realizing the fact that leadership, in the end, is a combination of specific working styles, behaviors, preferences and competencies. A lot of these can be learned, and certain people have a proclivity for certain styles of leadership. Yet much of this has more to do with a person’s genetics, cultural influences, past experience or sometimes even chance events more than gender.

Leadership is position or designation agnostic.

“Leading without title” became a bit of a buzz phrase some years ago. It essentially refers to people’s ability to lead irrespective of their position or designation in the organization. It also alludes to the fact that the leadership qualities that you demonstrate—and specifically, the things that you do—overshadow your span of control, your level of authority, the size of your team or even whether you’re part of a team or organization.

A lot of us have had the experience of being part of a team or at least witnessing a team where the designated manager or leader was just a formality. The actual leading of the team and the power in the system lay with someone else who demonstrated those leadership qualities. What this implies is that leadership is a performance sport. Superior leadership has more to do with your caliber to perform than with your position or designation.

Leadership is qualification agnostic.

I’m using the term qualification rather loosely here. The question really is “What qualifies you to become a good leader?” Some organizations think it’s your educational qualification. While this is a good starting point, the industry is flooded with examples of people who are great leaders in a field but have educational qualifications in a completely different field. Some companies still give importance to tenure. There’s no doubt that your number of years of experience or tenure in an industry or organization teaches you great lessons, but to use tenure to decide promotions into leadership positions is as bizarre as saying that the older you are, the better a leader you’ll be.

There are still other systems that entrust leadership positions to people who’ve held such positions in the past. While this is a much better idea, there’s no guarantee that because you’ve been a good leader in the past, you’ll certainly lead effectively in the future. It also discounts the role of emerging leaders or new leaders who sometimes showcase stellar leadership. That brings me to my final point.

Leadership is consistency agnostic.

It’s exactly because we think leadership is a consistent phenomenon that something like this makes it to the news: A senior leader of a well-known organization takes over as CEO of another organization, and a couple of years later, it goes bankrupt or has to sell out. The leading player of a sports team is made the captain and his own leadership ability and performance drop. A Hollywood star whose personal leadership quality inspired people across the world, later, with one small slip of the hand, sabotages his entire career and reputation.

While it’s true that leadership is a performance sport and past leadership can be a good indicator of future leadership, none of this is a guarantee. In fact, a safer idea to work with is that in the realm of leadership, at the end of every demonstration of great leadership, your clock is set back to zero. You’ve just got to demonstrate that great leadership all over again the next time an opportunity to lead shows itself up.

I hope that gives you a sense of how inclusive leadership is and how essentially anyone can become a better leader. The word agnostic was formed from the Greek agnōstos, meaning “unknown” or “unknowable.” One of the definitions of the word agnostic is not believing in something or only being open to believing in something once adequate evidence is seen. So maybe those are good insights to walk away with: that leadership is inclusive, it’s not bound by definite black-and-white rules and the true test of great leadership is being able to see evidence for the demonstration of that leadership through results, performance or any other kind of evidence.

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