Ŕ¶Ý®ĘÓƵPeople have studied leaders for centuries. To study leaders is to analyze the characteristics of individual people who demonstrate the ability to gather a group of followers. However, the study of leadership is a relatively new discipline dating from about the year 1900. To study leadership is to inspect the interactions a leader has with his or her followers. Both areas of study require one to define a leader. What is a leader?
Answering this question is not as easy as one might think. Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus write, “Decades of academic analysis have given us more than 350 definitions of leadership” (Leaders). One of those definitions comes from Webster’s New Student Dictionary, which defines a leader as “a guide; one who goes in advance; one who serves as a channel for others; one who directs on a course or in a direction.” While this gives clues to what a leader is, it is a bit cumbersome.
One well-respected author on leadership, Oswald Sanders, said a leader is simply a person with the ability “to influence others” (Spiritual Leadership). This is the definition that today’s leadership expert John Maxwell prefers, i.e., leadership is influence. Such a simple definition means that just about everyone is a leader in some capacity, (e.g., a mother who influences her children, a teacher who influences his students, or a coach who influences his players). The advantage of this definition is that everyone is a leader. The disadvantage of this definition is that everyone is a leader! To some degree, if everyone is a leader, then no one is a leader – this definition is too simple to have much meaning.
To say that a leader is able to influence others is a good beginning. Yet, this definition brings up the question “For what are the followers being influenced?” Ted Engstrom, a highly respected Christian leader from last century, provides a partial answer when he defines a leader as a person who has the “ability to make things happen” (The Making of a Christian Leader). Engstrom’s definition suggests that true leaders make things happen, or another way to say it is leaders create movement. Thus, a mother or teacher or coach is only a leader when he or she causes followers to move, i.e., something must happen in the followers’ lives.
Perhaps the clearest understanding of a leader comes from leadership experts Bennis and Nanus, who note that a leader has “the quality of influencing others to move in a new direction often characterized by vision and change” (Leaders). This definition is what Christian leaders are all about: