Great article! Implicit leadership is all about equipping and enabling people to do their job. This means no micromanagement, clear and consistent instruction and protection (as much as possible) from political and other interfering influences. If your team knows what they are working towards, have the tools to do it and look upon you as a steadfast and helpful leader you’ve got yourself a team people will want to be a part of.

Explicit Leadership sounds like what I would call management. You tell people what to do, and then they do it. Management requires the manager to get into the details of each and every thing. This, of course, causes managers to lose focus of the bigger picture.

Leaders, on the other hand, usually don't need to manage. They inspire people to self manage, so that the leader can actually lead.

Most managers are not strategic. Leaders, on the other hand, have the opportunity to actually be strategic. While the manager is back in the office making sure the variables in the program being written have the right prefix, the leader is out making a deal showing the software to potential customers.

Great article Mike!

The insights are right here, Michael, as you write, “There are two kinds of leadership; one depends on orders and supervision; the other depends on training and trust.” The references to TRAINING are important for leaders to consider.

All performance requires some form of learning, discovery, skill development, and assessment of processes to see if the performance is delivering results. The leader needs to be a teacher-trainer. The leader needs to know how to support learning by others so those other people can build successes.

I’m currently facilitating a course for Walden University exploring “Effective Teaching Using Learning Styles & Multiple Intelligences” related to classroom work by Teachers. Leaders in the workplace also need an understanding of how people learn, differences between learners and learning styles, and how to confirm if learning has resulted in desired outcomes.

A leader becomes a QUALITY RESULTS SPECIALIST as they look into teaching-learning activities as a core part of their responsibilities.

Now we come to the realization that many leaders don’t really think through their style of leadership - - they just do it. Now, it is necessary for leaders to discover what they may need to know about teaching and training.

Michael, while I strongly agree with what you have said, I don't think you have gone far enough. I've worked with numerous teams and organizations to apply agile methods. These methods have some pretty core ideas and you have hit one two of them: self organizing teams and planning to learn. However there are a number of other ideas:

- delivering valuable results frequently
- powerful communication
- testing everything
- measuring value
- and clearing the path or removing obstacles

(Full explanation of these ideas can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/3dp6t4 )

That last one is really critical and it is where leadership really makes or breaks an agile organization. A servant leader is someone who works tirelessly to remove the obstacles that are preventing teams from delivering valuable high quality results quickly.

A really simple example comes with approval processes. Many organizations love to "empower" teams, but forget that planning is not as powerful as doing. So they get a team together, let the team formulate a plan, and then the team waits while management reviews and approves the plan. In an agile organization, the team simply goes ahead and executes... and sometimes, they fail!!!

But with either failure or success, it is critical to allow for a learning process to take place, and this can only happen by allowing a team to go ahead and _do_ something.

The leader then becomes a follower unless he or she embraces the idea of servant leadership. This is the person who sees the direction of the team, hears their concerns, knows the organization and the competitive environment and can respond and sometimes anticipate to obstacles that the team is going to encounter.

Great article!
I agree with the manager vs. leader comparison, where the manager practices explicit leadership and the leader practices implicit leadership.

Leaders set direction, managers plan and budget.
Leaders align people, managers organize and staff.
Leaders motivate, managers control.
(don't remember where I heard this)

To me implicit leadership shares the same values as coaching i.e. creating awareness, taking responsibility, being committed and spreading motivation.