I got pointed to Philip E. Agre’s How to Be a Leader in Your Field while taking the BBST Foundations course. Its been hauled around in my bag to write about since then and now that my bag weighs a quarter metric tonne I’m dealing with it.

The paper outlines 6 things the author believes will make you a leader, and I’ll get to those in a minute, but here are the first 3 paragraphs which if you do nothing but internalize them will do wonders I think for your career path. It is aimed at people still in school, but it applies to those already in the Real World as well.

*A profession is more than a job — it is a community and a culture. Professions serve society by pooling knowledge among their members and creating incentives to synthesize new knowledge. They also help their members to build networks, find jobs, recruit staff, find collaborators, and organize around the issues that affect them. In a world without change or innovation, professions would not be so necessary. But in a world where change and innovation are ever more intense, every occupation needs more of the institutions and culture of traditional professions such as law, medicine, engineering, education, librarianship, public administration, business, and architecture.

Every profession has leaders. In a formal sense, the elected officers of a professional society are the leaders of that profession. Because a profession is fundamentally about knowledge, however, the true leaders of a profession are the thought leaders: the individuals who synthesize the thinking of the profession’s members and articulate directions for the future. Sometimes a profession will elect its thought leaders to official positions. But often the thought leaders prefer to lead through writing and speaking, cutting-edge projects, conference organizing, and dialogue. Leadership means both talking and listening, both vision and consensus. A leader builds a web of relationships within the profession and articulates the themes that are emerging in the thinking of the profession as a whole.

In a knowledge-intensive world of ceaseless innovation and change, I assert, every professional must be a leader. This is not a universally popular idea. Some people say, “leadership is fine for others, but I just want a job”. I want to argue that it doesn’t work that way. The skills that the leader exercises in building a critical mass of opinion around emerging issues are the same skills that every professional needs to stay employed at all. In the old days the leadership-averse could hide out in bureaucracies. But as institutions are turned inside out by technology, globalization, and rising public and client expectations of every sort, the refuges are disappearing. Every professional’s job is now the front lines, and the skills of leadership must become central to everyone’s conception of themselves as a professional.*

So what are the steps?

  1. Pick an issue – Look at who you look to as a leader. Odds are you can identify an issue they are associated with. It could be a technique, a language or a style. When approaching people to write chapters for Beautiful Testing we tried to get a wide variety of viewpoints and issues. He lists 26 suggestions for how to pick an issue if you do not already have one.
  2. Having chosen your issue, start a project to study it – It is not enough to have selected an issue without knowing the about it. If you fall into that trap you will look like an idiot far too often. I recall being in a presentation where the authors were throwing around ‘heuristics’, ‘context’ and ‘oracles’ like candy and were clear they didn’t get. They desperately wanted to, but they had only done step 1 at that point.
  3. Find relevant people and talk to them – There are very few purely original ideas so odds are someone has had similar thoughts. Find them. And find people who disagree with their stance. Join and participate in mailing lists. Become a peer with your peers.
  4. Pull together what you’ve heard – You are a thinking human being. Take what you learned and assemble it for your consumption. Don’t fall into the trap of just saying someone else’s issue and ideas of on it are yours as well. Sheep don’t lead. The wolf leads.
  5. Circulate the result – A unique perspective on an idea is useless if you keep it to yourself. Start writing. Now. Once you have honed your ideas some more, start talking at local groups and conferences. Keep writing. Repeat.
  6. Build on your work – Follow your original idea to the its logical conclusion. Not beyond, but just up to. And if you idea morphs into something else, fantastic! If your idea isn’t evolving then you are not doing steps 2 – 4 correctly.

He sums it all up like this: “Leadership” used to mean something unique: the army had one leader and everyone else followed. Today, however, knowledge is multiplying so fast that we need more leaders than we can possibly produce. Every leader can feel important, and genuinely be important, and everyone is a leader, including you. Go forth and lead, you now have no right to claim ignorance about how to do it.