This seemed to energize her quite a bit, and I thought it was a good suggestion. Then I noticed she wasn’t coming back to me to ask what to do next, but she continued cleaning. Then she enlisted Natasha, who was watching TV. “Natasha, we want the cleanest rug in the world”
Natasha: “Why”
Athena: “So we can play in it. Can you help us?”

Once she inspired us with her vision, it took the three of us no time to get the room ship shape! I thought this was a great example of leadership through inspiring a shared vision.

What is leadership?

The description of leadership that I find the most accurate and useful is as follows:

Leadership is an activity – not a style, not a skill, and not a birth-character. It is the activity of influencing a community to face its challenges, and to mobilize the community to surmount these challenges through motivation, organization and focusing attention.

Leadership has two key requirements. First, it requires orchestrating conflicts among and within communities, focusing on how to strengthen the bonds that join the stakeholders together as a team so that they withstand the stresses of problem solving - which stakeholders have to adjust their ways to make progress on the problem, how should the issues be sequenced, what vantage points are required to clarify a complex situation?

Second, leadership requires articulating a shared vision that is relevant to the interests, concerns and perspectives of the community, rather than stating an abstract goal to rally behind. This includes being able to say what’s in it for them – “the why” – and often “the how”. This is critical for effective mobilization.