Have you noticed how the terms leadership and leaders are frequently conflated, taken as equivalent? The two terms tend to be mixed around as if they were largely interchangeable.

Someone might say, “The leadership team is meeting today.” Or they might say, “The leaders are meeting today.”

Even when the terms are not used with such immediately apparent equivalence, there can still be a sense that leadership and leaders are used to describe much the same thing; that leadership is the work of people at the top, who are leaders, and they carry out leadership by virtue of being in their roles.

We see this sort of thing in a lot of popular books on leadership.

Today I did a search on Amazon for books with both leadership and leaders in the title. There were over 1,800 results listed. Here are a few examples from the first page of results:

“Leaders and the leadership process” by Jon Pierce and John Newstrom
“Total leadership: Be a better leader, have a richer life” by Stewart D. Friedman
“Leadership 101: What every leader needs to know” by John C. Maxwell
“The leader’s companion: Insights on leadership through the ages” by J. Thomas Wren.

Now using the words leaders and leadership in a book title is not a literary crime or any other kind.
But the ease with which these terms are bandied about together does help underpin stereotypical images about leadership as the province of highly-ranked people – rather than leadership as being important at the top and also (and possibly to a lesser extent) at other levels.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not arguing for flat organizations, without formal leaders.
What I am proposing is that we need to be mindful in how we use leadership-related language, and especially in using the term leadership to refer to organizational role.

If we believe that others apart from leaders (formal or informal) can exercise leadership, perhaps our use of language should be reflect this. My suggestion is to save the term leadership for when we’re actually talking about leadership work, rather than role or title.

One benefit of taking this approach is that it encourages more critical thinking of what the work of leadership actually is; of what the processes are that constitute leadership.

We’ve learnt to exercise care in language use in how we refer to groups in the population, to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes. These days most of us, I suspect, would refer to “people with disabilities” rather than “the disabled.” That’s a good thing.

In my view, bringing the same kind of care to our use of language in relation to leadership would be a good thing, too.