Leadership isn’t something you do to other people. Leadership is a relationship and the health of relationships depends on the behaviour of everyone involved. And the best way to change someone else’s behaviour is to change your own. So a good starting point for a leader is to ask themselves the questions, ‘What behaviours do I want in other people and how do I behave to encourage those behaviours?’

This points to one of the fundamental building-blocks of leadership which is self-awareness, ‘How and why am I currently behaving?’ Following on from this, the behaviours a leader is trying to encourage could be described as ‘good followership’. You can make your own list of what constitutes good followership; mine would include, commitment, intelligence and creativity, frankness and the ability to disagree constructively. And you don’t get those by shouting at people.

Leadership does not need to be invested in just one person and it is quite possible for a team to lead itself. Although it usually ends up that someone is given the title of leader, especially in a hierarchy, that individual still doesn’t have to do all of it.