During a conversation about positional leadership Richard Barrett said, “Reminds me of a Seinfeld joke. He pointed to professional sports teams and asked about team loyalty. The players change, the coaches change, and sometimes even the stadium changes. So, the people are really loyal to the logos on the team uniforms, just a pile of laundry. Maybe positional leadership is just laundry leadership?”
I like that—laundry leadership. Great term.
So what’s available instead of laundry leadership, especially these days when so much of the laundry is dirty?
Why not organizational leadership? Leadership that percolates from every nook and cranny of the enterprise driving …read more

I had a recent conversation on the final post from a series last summer regarding supposed differences between ‘leaders’ and managers.
The reader said she was confused and asked whether managers needed to be ‘leaders’, too.
I think that my responses will be of use to others, so I’ve rounded them out below to increase access to the information.
It would be lovely if there was a nice, clear-cut answer to the ‘leader’/manager thing, but like a lot of these types of questions it depends on whom you ask.
There are two distinct schools of thought. One believes that leaders and managers are …read more