We all have this mental model of what we think a great leader is and the component parts that make up the kind of person people want to follow. When I think "leader" my mind instinctively thinks about strong, chisel-jawed, bold personalities unafraid to take risk, but the reality of leadership and the people who make the best leaders is much more subtle and a whole lot less glamorous. So lets take a few minutes and explore some of the myths of leadership that say to be a leader…

You must have a strong, outgoing personality.

There are really effective, really great leaders out there who thrive on social situations and love being the center of attention, who are driven towards success with a borderline obsessiveness that is reserved for the great men and women of history. But these kinds of people and personalities are only a single facet of the kaleidoscope of leaders; some of our truly great leaders have been extremely private people with little love for public appearances or even being a leader. Probably most famously, George Washington was one such person. By all accounts he was a quiet, thoughtful person who would much rather have been at home reading than leading troops into battle or becoming the first President of the United States. When you take the other two myths of leadership into account you start to realize that being a loud, boisterous, know-it-all type person can work against your ability to lead because its all too easy to miss opportunities for input from your team or focus on the wrong things. Introverts can be leaders, too, and often make some of the best ones.

You must know — or pretend to know — everything and make all the decisions.

Go watch an interview with Elon Musk and you'll get the distinct impression that he knows everything about electric cars, rockets, tunneling, social media, and whatever else he's involved in these days. He seems competent, well-versed, and capable of discussing technical details of each thing he's talking about. And yet there is a vast ocean of knowledge behind each company that he will never be able to grasp because he simply doesn't have the time to become an expert in everything — no one does. And that's okay! While the illusion can certainly make it seem like leaders should have the answers to every question and be able to anticipate every scenario, the reality is that leaders don't always have the answers or even all of the information. You can either try and make up for this lack of context by working insane hours, reading everything you can, and making poor decisions in the dark, or you can do what the great leaders do and rely on their people to make the most informed decision. Instead of making imperfect decisions, its the leader's job to create an environment where those who can best make the decisions are empowered to do so. This is something that can be exemplified by the career of General Patton in Europe — he trusted his officers and NCO's to read the situation and take the initiative if they saw an opportunity. In his mind, the wrong decision was making no decision. Effective leaders would rather their people make decisions, take risks, and try new things and fail instead of doing nothing — doing nothing is the worst possible outcome.

You have to care about nothing but winning.

Between 1964 and 1975, the UCLA Bruins men's basketball team won 10 national championships, making them the most successful and most powerful NCAA basketball team of all time (a record that still stands today). While these Bruins teams had an extraordinary amount of talent, a lot of the credit for the turnaround of UCLA's program and its sustained success can be attributed to one man: John Wooden. Coach Wooden was not your typical basketball coach — if there ever was an antithesis to Bobby Knight, its Wooden — he didn't believe in raising his voice, never swore, and never focused on winning. That may seem odd for one of the most successful and most revered coaches of all time, but he never saw winning as the ultimate goal of the team. In fact, "winning" is nowhere in Wooden's own definition of success:

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

As he defined it, success is actually a very inward-focused metric, not an external one. You and only you can truly know if you are successful because only you know if you did your best. Wooden took it a step further, too, and continued to frame success as a set of behaviors or actions that build on one another. If you've watched Ted Lasso then you're probably already familiar with the Pyramid of Success, which sums up these behaviors:

As a leader, success comes from two places: personal, inward success of knowing you gave your best to accomplish whatever goals or tasks set out in front of you, and challenging those around you to achieve their own success. That's the secret to how UCLA was able to dominate NCAA basketball for so long: the focus was never on winning, and certainly not winning at all costs, but rather the focus was on each individual player maximizing their own skill and continuing on their own journey so that when they came together as a team they knew that each and every person on the court had given their absolute best. The genius of Coach Wooden wasn't his basketball know-how, it was his understanding that the success of the team can only follow the success of the player. This is the key takeaway for anyone in a leadership position: focus on maximizing your people and the rest will take care of itself.

Have any other myths about leadership? I'd love to hear them!