What is it really that makes someone the leader of an organization? Is it that they are persuasive, and can influence people to think or act a certain way? Is it that they consistently act in the best interest of the organization itself? Or is it that they receive the credit and recognition for the organization’s actions?

All of these things are what I would consider either side-effects of leadership, or properties of good leaders.

I think we could all agree that the act of making someone a leader is a specific and definite action. Think back on every election or inauguration that you’ve ever seen. There is a moment where some previously unimportant person is through some magical means made the leader of some group. What really happens at that moment? You can’t instantly force someone to be persuasive. You can’t force someone’s goals to align with the group’s. You can’t force the rest of the world to acknowledge a positive contribution. So what wizardry, at that very moment, suddenly makes them a leader?

The zen of leadership is that being the leader of a group means that you are accountable for the group’s actions.

You are the person that people blame when something goes wrong, or when something doesn’t happen. You can delegate tasks to subordinates, of course, but ultimately if they fail then it is your own failure as well. The flip side to this is that, in the purest sense, a leader isn’t directly tasked with actually doing anything.

I would argue that the ideal leader of an ideal group does nothing at all.

So when the President of the United States is inaugurated, or when a small group of students all subconsciously elect the one poor schmuck among them to be “the responsible one,” there is no magical process that instantly makes that person the confident, persuasive visionary that we often associate with a position of leadership. What really happens is that we have chosen the person to blame when things go wrong, hopefully because we trust them to make it right when they do. Nobody wants wars to break out, or projects to run behind schedule, or budgets to run over, but because these things are so inevitable, we need some correcting force to make sure that those problems aren’t the end of us all.

Leadership is about being the one to blame when things go wrong. It is about making up the difference between that perfect ideal of completely competent people acting completely selflessly, and the reality of imperfect people all pulling at their own individual goals and interests.