You will never be a good leader.

Here's some bad news. You will never be a good leader. Not definitively, for sure.

Leadership isn't like riding a bike, where you either know how or you don't. Leadership is a relationship, nothing more, nothing less.

Just as you can't say after your wedding that your marriage is definitely good now. Furthermore, after couple's therapy following a breakup, you won't say you're finished, that you've definitely fixed everything and now have a good marriage.

How you lead a team, or a subordinate, be it an employee or a project member, depends solely on the relationship you have with that person or team.

And perhaps it's not a particularly new idea to suggest that you don't have a separate relationship with the team as such, given that it doesn't exist. As my younger daughter likes to say: "I was thinking of a concept, Mom, an object that doesn't exist." A team is such an object, meaning you can't lead your team any differently than through the relationships established with each of its members.

If you have 600 people (my sincere condolences), then the opinions of 527 of them about you - and your leadership activities - will be determined by your relationship with the 73 you've actually managed to have meaningful discussions with.

So?

So, you won't be a good leader.

Nor bad, for that matter, which you've likely deduced on your own. You're only as good a leader as the variety of people with whom you're able to establish a relationship within which framework both of you can function in a way that suits him, you - and hopefully your organization too.

And yes, there may well be a type of person (just to have something to nitpick about, since what even is a 'type of person,' such a thing doesn't exist - and it really doesn't.) whom you despise so much that you simply can't deal with them. Yes, there's room for improvement there. You can feel and know yourself to be a better leader if you learn to live with more and more of such people. Even as a leader.

Leading the slacker, who always just makes promises. Leading the balloon, who looks sleek and shiny with unicorn sparkles on the outside but is empty on the inside like a first-grader's notebook on September 2nd. Leading the team-stabber, the fern-behind-the-back-do-everything person, the never-satisfied, the it's-all-good-leave-me-alone type, and the rest.

But this won't make you a good leader.

Because this isn't a skill you acquire and then it just works. It's something you learn about, read about, then work on yourself, and then work on yourself some more, and sometimes it gets worse, sometimes it gets better. First, you learn to delegate, which most new leaders find challenging, then when for the fiftieth time something gets messed up by your people, you start doing everything yourself again.

You're your own master if you have no servant.

Then you do everything, even more, and you burn out, and you recover from burnout and then you learn to delegate again. Because you know it's better somewhat messed up than not at all. Were you a good leader in the meantime? Hardly. You were better, worse, then better again. Then you'll be worse again.

But a "good leader," a leader instead of a boss, or a manager, as those countless bullshit diagrams show, you'll never be that.

There will be people who think you're the best boss in the world. If you do your job well, more and more of such people will emerge. But for that, you need to work on the relationship between you every single day, the one that's called leadership.

And no, no matter how much you train yourself, no matter how many years you spend with the world's best coaches, leadership developers, anyone, you still won't know in advance when you'll encounter a new type out of the 7.9 billion with whom you have no idea what to do.

Who won't think you're a good boss.

Not because they're slackers, because they're balloons, because they're backstabbers, because they're dissatisfied, because they're fans of the status quo.

But because you don't understand them.

Not yet.