It's worth reiterating that leadership and management are (at least in academic circles concerned with such things) rather distinct concepts. Management concer

It's worth reiterating that leadership and management are (at least in academic circles concerned with such things) rather distinct concepts. Management concerns the organization of people, tasks, information, incentives and all such things. Bad management is a common plague upon many an engineer, and probably for good reason. Bad leadership is more commonly felt through its absence. Managers could and maybe should be leaders, but often are not. Leading, of course, can also be done by someone positioned elsewhere in the formal hierarchy. Nowadays, the formal hierarchy (aka the org chart) of a firm may not necessarily reflect the informal structure of a well-functioning team. This then leads to the question: What is a leader? Surprisingly, the whole concept is rather elusive. If we do not mean management, what precisely does a leader do? The answer depends a lot on whom you ask. For example, economists have traditionally very little use for a leader. Coordination, information and all things amenable to traditional econ models, are things that a manager does. "Leading by example" is one of the few concepts where a leader has any use in economics of organization. Other literatures, by contrast, have an overwhelming amount of roles and theories about leadership, to the degree that one might question if the entire concept is well-defined at all. If you are interested in a shameless plug, we have analyzed the entire corpus of Harvard Business Review - a publication that concerns itself with leadership - to find a semantic definition of leadership "from the horse's mouth", so to speak. Results were fairly surprising - we see changes in roles and contexts of a leader over time: increasing reach and importance of the concept, but also sharper definitions of contexts of its roles. All these things mean that leadership is elusive. It means many things in different context (presentation on youtube under v=z2uceIRQA6g - again sorry for the plug). In my current view, the most important role for a leader, next to determining the strategic direction, is sense-making (or more precisely, sense-giving). Whenever the expectation of the team differs from reality, a leader's job is to provide the frameworks and consensus for a united narrative, one that allows the team to react and move forward.