Personal Leadership vs. Team Leadership

Why CEOs need both.

In the CEO masterclass I teach a few times a year, we cover the topic of leadership extensively. As you would expect.

But I’ve been thinking recently about a distinction within the concept of leadership.

When we say that word, we often mean a person’s ability to get big groups of followers to willingly follow their direction. For the CEO, this means communicating broadly to the team and marshaling them around your vision. This is what we might call personal leadership. It is built by the individual leader routinely demonstrating the 3 Cs:

• Credibility: Ensuring people believe that when you speak, it’s the full truth.

• Competence: Ensuring people respect your skills and your ability to lead the company.

• Caring: Ensuring people believe you put the interests of the team before your own personal interests.

The Other Type of Leadership

But there’s another mode of leadership that’s particularly crucial for the CEO. It’s what we might call team leadership: the CEO’s ability to bring together a cohesive executive team. This kind of leadership is very specific. Rather than being one-to-many, it’s one-to-a-few, the “few” being the executives or department heads who make up your company’s executive leadership team (ELT).

I realized the need to talk about this with CEOs when I identified a funny dynamic: It’s possible for all the executives on the ELT to trust the CEO but not trust each other.