If there is a hole in the ground, that you see people falling into, what do you do with it?
Wait
The easiest, and probably therefore the most common response is to just ignore the hole. Wait for somebody else to fill it in. It isn’t my job. I’m too focused on this other thing, and don’t have time for that. It doesn’t affect people I actually know.
What if the hole is one that you fall in yourself on a regular basis? Inconsistent unit tests perhaps? The problem now does affect you, and your team. Is there a cost-based analysis that you run to determine if you should spend time to fill in the hole? Is the amount of time you spend thinking about how bad he hole is, and that somebody should fill it in, greater than the amount of time it would have taken to just fill it in yourself?
Grab a Shovel
Some people will just see the problem, come up with a solution to it, and just start implementing. Action is greater than inaction. They may not have the best solution. They may not even really know what they are doing. But they do know that something needs to be done, and nobody else seems to be doing it.
Sometimes this is driven from pure altruism; they just see a problem that is tripping up people, so they genuinely want to help out. Maybe they see it impeding their own progress or effectiveness, and so it comes down to more selfish means. The motivation doesn’t really matter; the problem still gets solved.
Give Somebody a Shovel
You don’t want to get your own hands dirty, but you do see a solution to the problem. So you work to give the tools to solve the problem to others. You give them the direction and tools they need, and they churn away at the problem until it is solved.
This can be extremely useful. Delegation is a tool that few people are able to actually master. They either manage too much, or too little. They micromanage, or they do not give enough direction. So this can also be a way to dig a bigger hole over there, just to fill in this hole here. When done properly, delegation an management is a very powerful way to get jobs done.
Requisition a Bulldozer
It is a problem, and you may kind of want to deal with it, but you really just need this off your plate. So you push the problem over to somebody else. Bulldozers are pretty good at moving dirt, and this really boils down to an amount of dirt not occupying the correct space, so we need a bulldozer. That’s not my department, so let’s ask Joe’s team to work on it.
Design the Perfect Shovel
The problem is so interesting for you, and you can see so many possibilities for how to solve the problem. What if after we fill in this hole, another one crops up a week later? We may need to build a re-usable shovel. Ooh, and if this dirt is prone to holes in the first place, we probably need to bring some other fill-dirt that has other properties that we may desire. Man, maybe this is the start of a sink-hole, and we need to design a network of interconnected piers each working together to hold up a walkway!
Leadership
Each of these mechanisms (except perhaps the first) is a form of leadership. Some will be more effective in certain cases than others. A shovel will not be very efficient to fill in a hole the size of an olympic pool, but a bulldozer will be overkill for a small pothole. Leaders are not necessarily great in all of the different areas of leadership, but they do excel in one or more areas.