Is the heart of leadership in the details?

About a week ago I got involved in a discussion in the comments of a Scott Gould post about leadership.

NOTE: If you haven’t checked Scott out then you should. He along with Andrew Ellis organises the Likeminds conferences and community, which is making big waves in the social media space.

In Scott’s original post he explained that he was struggling to understand how much of leadership is in the details. A really interesting conversation with many contributors followed.

Thinking about the question and the comments, I pitched in with my two pennies. Here’s a summary of the exchange that Scott and I had:

On the question: Leaders: Is It In The Detail? I think it is and it isn’t. Why? Most great leaders have a vision of what they want to achieve and a real feel for what that will look like. However, many will see the vision through a slightly blurry screen as they may not have the technical ability or knowledge to see all of the details but will ‘know’ when something is right.

Further, if we split the discussion into two broad parts: the destination and the journey. Many great leaders have a detailed vision of what the destination looks like and have ideas about how to get there but they employ people ‘better than they are’ to help with the journey in the understanding that we all need to be flexible, work and learn together to achieve our destination.

So, yes, there will be detail in the focus on the destination but, I believe, only on elements of the journey and how we get there.

For me, thinking about this some more, I think it’s a bit like the being a film director where he has to be obsessive about the end product but surrounds himself with experts to be able to deliver his vision.

What do you think? I’d be interested to get your perspective on this.

Originally published on www.adrianswinscoe.com

Thanks to torres21 for the image.