What leadership is about - and what it is not
Everyone teaches you how to lead others. Almost no one teaches you how to lead yourself first. 7 principles, inspired by Peter Drucker.
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9/10/20263 min read
Most of my clients are in leadership positions, some even at the top of their organisational pyramid. They have all studied leadership in some form through books, MBAs, corporate trainings. And yet one of the most influential management thinkers of the 20th century made a claim that most leadership seminars still overlook.
Peter Drucker left behind a statement that represents the true core of his philosophy: Fundamentally, a leader has to lead only one person and that is themselves. Everything else commonly understood as leadership (motivating people, making decisions, shaping culture) is the visible consequence of this, not the cause.
This reverses the usual order of things. Most leadership models ask: How do I lead others? The right initial question is: How do I lead myself? I dove into some of the main research about leadership from Drucker and other authors. Based on those, I formulated 7 principles about what leadership is all about.
1. Doing the right things: Values
Drucker distinguished management from leadership using perhaps the most famous formula in management literature: Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Management optimizes within a given framework; leadership decides which framework is the right one in the first place. From a self-leadership perspective, this means: before I start doing, I must know what matters to me. Without clarity regarding my own values, action is meaningless. Many people start climbing a ladder and only years later realize it is leaning against the wrong wall.
2. Responsibility: for myself and my actions
Drucker insisted that leadership is about responsibility, not position: it entails taking full responsibility for my own actions without seeking excuses. A CEO may have decision power, but could fail to be a leader (by not taking responsibility). While an intern has no power, but could be a leader by proactively pushing projects he/she cares about. Self-leadership begins with taking responsibility first for one's own decisions, reactions, and initiatives.
3. Self-awareness: knowing one's own blind spots
While rarely stated explicitly in Drucker's work, it follows logically from his premise: to lead oneself, one must know oneself, including those aspects one cannot see. A good leader who is unaware of their own reflexes, triggers, and blind spots is not truly leading, but rather reacting to their own programming.
4. Context: inner agility rather than rigid principles
Research into leadership demonstrated early on that no single leadership style is superior in itself. Fred Fiedler's contingency theory (1967) found that task-oriented leadership works better in situations that are either very clear or very unclear, whereas people-oriented leadership is more effective in intermediate situations. Leadership that works in one situation can be counterproductive in another.
Leading according to context requires enough inner agility to switch approaches, rather than clinging to a single style simply because it worked once. This requires a certain level of psychological flexibility (with one's own thoughts and feelings).
5. Results: taking action rather than just having intentions
Drucker challenged the myth that a leader must be popular or charismatic; what matters is that the right things actually get done. From the perspective of self-leadership, this is a personal call to action: values and intentions are worthless unless followed by action. The difference between a leader and someone with good intentions lies in the willingness to act, even when it is uncomfortable.
6. Role model: coherence between values and actions
Values define what is right, while actions put it into practice. What others see from the outside is precisely this alignment (or the lack of it). Being a role model is therefore not an additional leadership task, but the automatic result of my values and actions being in sync.
7. Learning: The key break every barrier
A widely cited meta-analysis by Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002, Journal of Applied Psychology) examined the link between personality traits and leadership success across more than 73 studies. The result: even the strongest single factor (extraversion) predicts leadership success only weakly to moderately. There is no such thing as a "born leader". Leadership is largely something that can be learned. By everyone.
In order to create the life, career, relationship, community, project we want, we must start to lead. Leadership is not about being a good speaker or charismatic. It is about knowing yourself, take action based on what matters to you, and keep learning. Leadership is such a big word these days. But it shouldn’t be. It should be the most natural part of being human.
© 2026 Gregor Braun
Psychological counselling & coaching in Zurich and online.
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