5 Reasons You Should Never Call Yourself a Leader.

Are you a leader or a manager? My guess is you are a manager. Because leaders are few and far between. It is a really sad mess we've ended up with in the whole leader/manager semantics. One definition of a leader according to the free dictionary is a "person who leads". That is obviously a ridiculous circular statement. Here's my 3 cents worth of why you should adamantly oppose the term leader when it comes to your or your direct reports' formal titles:

Alexander the Great (Wikipedia)

1. A leader is born, a manager is trained

I have been hiring and managing people for the better part of my life and once in a blue moon I have met people with a certain star quality that seems to attract other people. I have yet to achieve an understanding of the mechanisms surrounding this phenomena but that doesn't mean it isn't there. If you think back through your career and your interactions with people I'm pretty sure that you can come to think of someone that has had that weird effect on people around them. 

Management on the other hand is a skill, a profession, almost everyone can, with the right training and experience, become a good manager.

To drive it home: I hate sports analogies but do you honestly think that anyone could become a Tiger Woods, a Usain Bolt or a Lionell Messi? If you do you are more than welcome to continue calling managers leaders.2. Impossible standards imposed, not fair


The word leader invokes a certain picture in your head, admit it. It is an elevated position, slightly aloof, almost ethereal. We are just human and I think that the imagery of the leader is fairly hard to live up to.

3. Diminishes the manager

This is probably my biggest issue with the whole leader / manager labelling. You are being called a leader which imposes impossible standards upon you and makes you feel inadequate whilst you are an excellent manager and as such could be very proud of your contribution. Alexander the Great was a true leader but he was a terrible manager  (at least as far as we know), it seems leaders generally make for really really bad managers. If you start seeing leaders and managers as two different roles, with different talents and skill sets you will have come a long way. The title Master of Business Administration or MBA is implying you have mastered a craft. I have yet to see a curriculum that contains an MoL or Master of Leadership and truth be told; I wish it will never see the light of day.

4. Ridiculous associations (oh, great leader) 

In my world when we meet, and you call yourself a leader you will come across to me as probably a bit conceited, arrogant and/or not so bright. I don't know if it's some dimwitted HR-person (I'm not saying HR people generally are dimwitted, just this particular one) or better yet a management consultant that instigated the use of leader but it has definitely permeated the organisational vocabulary to pretty ridiculous levels. Look around you in your organisation and make a note of the people that have leader in their title and on their business card, then read through the points above again, I rest my case. Or, look at North Korea.

5. Leader is an honorary description

Very similar to the title "don" in Latin languages, leader, although not expressed in so many words is also something you cannot ascribe to yourself but only hope for others to call you. Personally I have as much respect for a true leader as I have for a really good manager, both are needed to make an organisation truly great.

Final caveat: Obviously there are numerous words in the English language that contains leader such as leadership and group leader, those have in my opinion transformed into slightly altered states although I would argue that people management and group manager well could replace those two.