Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Leadership Without the Title: What Michael Useem Got Right
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Leadership Without the Title: What Michael Eusem Got Right. Here we go. I want to start with a question. Not a rhetorical one. An actual question I want you to sit with. While we talk today. Are you leading right now? Not are you a leader on paper? Are you leading today in whatever seat you're in? Michael Yusim has a line I think about often. He said leadership is not a function of position, but of action and disposition. Slow down on that a little bit because it's easy to nod along and move on, and this one deserves more than a nod. He said leadership is not a function of position, but of action and disposition. Here's the leadership moment. Early in a lot of careers, there's a person who's not the manager, is not the department head, doesn't have the title, but when something goes wrong, people look at them. Not because of where they sit on the work chart, because of how they've shown up over and over when nobody was grading them for it. That's disposition. It's the accumulated evidence of how you act when it's inconvenient, when it's unrewarded, when it would be easier to stay quiet. Now here's the common misread. People hear leadership isn't about position, and they translate it into something soft. Something like everyone's a leader, titles don't matter, just have a good attitude. That's not what you seem as saying, and it undersells the point. Disposition is not a personality trait. It's not just being nice or positive. It is a pattern of choices, consistency under pressure, taking ownership of a problem before someone assigns it to you, telling the truth when the comfortable thing would be to soften it. That's hard. It's not soft at all. Here's the reframe. Position is something an organization gives you. It can also take it away. Disposition is something you build, one decision at a time, and no org chart can grant it or revoke it. If you're waiting for the title to start a Acting like a leader, you have the sequence backwards. The people who get the title are usually the ones who were already leading without it. I'll add one more layer here because it's relevant to a lot of you listening. We're in a moment where more and more of the routine thinking gets handled by tools. Drafting, summarizing, first pass analysis. It's not a threat to leadership. If anything, it clarifies what leadership actually is. The tools can produce an answer. They cannot tell you which answer is right for your team in your context, given what you know about the people involved. That's judgment. That's disposition. That's the part that was never about the title to begin with, and it's the part that no tool replaces. Here's what I want you to carry forward. Think of one place in your work right now where you're waiting for permission. A decision you could make, a problem you could own, a stand you could take, if only you had the title that would make it official. You probably don't need the title. You need the disposition. And the honest news is that part has always been available to you. Leadership is not a function of position, but of action and disposition. Position gets handed to you. Disposition gets built by you in the small moments that nobody's watching. Start there.