Why should anyone be led by YOU?

Following on from my blog last week about marketing in B2B boardrooms, I’ve been thinking more broadly about leadership and what is needed in today’s fast-moving, fundamentally changing B2B world. And what we, as marketers, can learn from the leadership debate.

What makes a great leader? Clearly, there’s no easy answer to this question; I found 85,692 books on the subject on Amazon in English alone. On Google I found pages and pages and pages of blogs, courses, training and articles on the ‘7 traits, 10 qualities, 5 skills, 16 characteristics’, etc, of great leaders.

But the best book I ever read on leadership was ‘Why Should Anyone Be Led by YOU?’, by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. The book is dedicated to ‘all those who strive to lead organisations’ but it’s a very interesting read for anyone who aspires to leadership or currently leads a team, a function, even a single project. And it’s relevant too for marketers, many of whom are positioning their organisations as market leaders or their people as thought leaders.

The subtitle of the book is ‘What it takes to be an authentic leader’ and its main premise is that great leaders are ‘authentic’ leaders. They know who they are, where their organisations need to go, and how to take their followers along with them.

What I really like about this book is its use of entertaining and real examples of leadership in practice, which served to underscore the point that there is no formula for leadership. And even though the book was written 8 years ago, when I reread it I found the authors’ position around authenticity really resonated with me.

Because just like our customers - who want to buy from people and organisations that they like to do business with, whose values align to their own, who they can build long-term relationships with, and who they can really feel connected with on an emotional level – we want leaders who we feel are worth following.

This sounds obvious, that a great leader is someone we want to follow. But I often see those who are aspiring to leadership - or are in fact leaders of a function, team or project - focus on what they think leaders do, not what their followers want or need from them.

Does this sound familiar? If you’ve been following my blog you will have come to realise that a big theme of mine is that marketers - and marketing as a function in most B2B organisations - are too focussed on what marketing does and not on what their businesses (or customers) actually want and need.

In a world where our customers are now looking for authenticity in the organisations they do business with, marketing has a real opportunity to provide leadership for our B2B businesses by helping them move from ‘selling’ to ‘engagement’. Because this is the new battleground for marketing: to engage with our customers in meaningful and inspiring ways that will linger in their hearts and minds long after any sales promotion or marketing campaign is over.

And for me, this is what leadership is really all about: the ability to engage, inspire and communicate in compelling and authentic ways that make us worth following.