Over the last few weeks, I read with much interest a discussion among members of a particular LinkedIn group where they attempted to define the single most important attribute to leadership. For some participants, the most important trait was integrity; others felt that awareness was the key to effective leadership. As I perused through the various answers – and there were many good ones – it was clear that a consensus was unlikely to be reached over what characteristic is the most critical to the role of leading others.

Naturally, this wasn’t the only time where there’s been some challenge and debate surrounding the quantification of leadership. One only needs to look at when discussions are started over how to define leadership to notice how blurry the boundaries are in delineating this particular role. It doesn’t take long for such exercises to cause more confusion and debate over how we should view leadership than they do to help clarify the concept of being a leader.

The difficulty that seems to persist in defining or quantifying this particular function got me thinking about whether we should be looking at leadership as more of an art than a science. In other words, that we should view leadership as something that is understood more through the eye of the beholder, and how it’s perceived being very much dependent on the environment in which it’s presented. Click here to continue reading »”Is Leadership an Art or a Science?”