There are many potential causes of the failure. The person promoted may lack perspective (on the new job to be done), lack training, or have a shortage of appropriate skills. Anyway, every one loses. The person who was successful in sales—or accounting, driving a vehicle, teaching, writing—becomes unsuccessful. He or she was good at doing something; he or she is not good at managing.

Bob Joss, Dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, wrote the short article that follows. He has a home at Lake Tahoe. Bob’s article is about leadership. It applies to for-profits and nonprofits, alike.

LEADERSHIP: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU By Robert L. Joss

In May, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch visited the Business School to talk about leadership and his new book, Winning. With about 800 people in our Memorial Auditorium, he and I had a public conversation about managing. The best comment he made, I thought, was the simplest. It’s something I believe and try to practice every day. Leadership is not about you. It’s about the people who work for you.

“The day you become a leader, it becomes about them,” Welch said. “Your job is to walk around with a can of water in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other hand. Think of your team as seeds and try to build a garden. It’s about building the people,” he insisted. “Only you know the team.”

That’s right. The minute you move from being a task-oriented performer to being a manager of people, it stops being about your individual talents and starts being all about coaching, motivating, teaching, supporting, removing roadblocks, and finding resources for your employees. Leadership is about celebrating their victories and rewarding them; it’s about helping them when things don’t go as planned. Their successes become your successes. Their failures are yours, too.

Too many people today think leading is exclusively about their own performance. Even some of those who become CEOs, usually highly intelligent people who worked hard to get where they are, turn into self-aggrandizing individuals once they hit the executive suite.

Many people, perhaps encouraged by the media, have developed an obsession with leaders. In his new book on hierarchies, Top Down, Hal Leavitt covers a broad range of issues. Leavitt, Professor Emeritus at the Business School, surmises that part of today’s infatuation with the leadership discussion springs from the fact that we perceive that organizations have grown flatter. In fact, they still are hierarchies, though they have changed to be more “participative” and “groupy.” They have actually become harder to navigate, with chains of command that are less clear. As a result, leadership qualities are more necessary for managers at every level, not just for those at the top of the authority pyramid.

Although it is difficult to find common characteristics among acknowledged leaders—what would Winston Churchill have in common with Mother Teresa? —Leavitt identifies three recurring themes of leadership: transformation, persuasion, and competence.

Leaders are able to transform or change a situation. They can influence others and motivate them to follow. They exude confidence and competence about what they are doing; it inspires others.

Of prime importance, in my view, is the notion that leadership is about change and a leader must leverage those who work for him or her, empower and support them with regular feedback and rewards, and exchange ideas with them. Of course, sometimes leaders have to “weed the garden,” in Welch’s pithy vocabulary. The tough job of firing and hiring is part of creating an effective team.

One person, no matter how talented, cannot accomplish much in a managed organization of any size and complexity. Transforming thought others is the job of the leaders at all levels. As Welch said when he was here: “The day you become a leader, your job is to take people who are already great and make them unbelievable.”

Printed with permission of Dean Robert Joss and the quarterly, Stanford Business magazine.