In a Russian fairytale from my childhood, a king is seeking to do away with a soldier whose very beautiful wife has caught the king's fancy. After a couple of failed attempts where the soldier comes out triumphant, the king finally homes in on a properly impossible task:

The stakes are high: if the soldier fails this assignment and returns without the solution to this puzzle, he is to pay with his life.

In the fairytale, this tests the soldier's resourcefulness and determination to the utmost. He fails the test, strictly speaking. The traditional story has him stumble into the paradoxical, magical answer when he's all but given up.

I am reminded of this story whenever I talk about leadership. I am putting the finishing touches on a talk for University-level students on Leadership for Careers, and I'm looking for a way to tell them this:

With often a lot at stake, the task of leading in an organisation can be as ill-defined as the king's assignment for the soldier in the fairytale.

On my shelf is a chunky book reporting on current research on leadership [1] which illustrates this point. The book's many chapters bring to mind the old Indian story of nine blind men with an elephant:

The book reports on the many approaches to leadership in current circulation. I've chosen a few, to give you a flavour:

• authentic leadership
• servant leadership
• adaptive leadership

Each one has a handle on the truth, most likely. Yet a synthesis that brings together the many elements of the elephant is still outstanding. The book freely admits that, to its credit.

The upshot is that
1) It remains a task for each person individually to figure out how they can *do leadership*.
and
2) If you find yourself feeling bewildered by the contradictions of attempting to lead, or to pick a path for yourself (aka self-lead), be assured that you're at least in step with the times.

Thankfully, there are ways to make leadership tangible, and to hone *your way of leadership*. I teach one way to do that at the ByHeart Tangible Leadership workshops. In the meantime, here's something fruitful to think about:

For a long time, attention in discussions on leadership was focused on those who lead, and how they are to do the leading. This left a major chunk of what happens in a lead-and-follow dynamic veiled, out of the limelight. It was almost as if those who lead could do that separately, in a bubble of their own. As if you could do good leading without any reference to how it worked out in practice (which involves the followers).

Even if all you change is give more attention to how your lead is being received, what effect it is having, this will already start to provide you with clues.

Whatever you become aware of will automatically trigger you to adjust what you do. This will naturally take you into new territory, where you can discover further refinements.

This process can start to define for you what might have started out as 'I'm attempting I don't quite know how to bring about I don't quite know what'.

And if you'd like a more structured or in-depth guidance on your leading or self-leadership, get in touch and let's figure out what would serve you best.

References
[1] Northouse, P.G., Leadership: Theory & Practice (Seventh Edition: International Student Edition), SAGE Edge, 2016