I just received my order of 4 new books on leadership. I was browsing through Lift when my adult daughter said to me, “Mom, you have so much experience and so much knowledge, how come you write about what other people think and not about what you think?” What a good question!

I’ve been in school my entire adult life (I’ve worked for pay at the same time, let me assure you). A few years ago I completed a doctorate. So now I really know that what I think is not nearly as important as what I can synthesize and integrate about what other people think. I used to know what I thought and used to write about what I thought and felt. But somehow in all this process of educating, I’ve lost my own voice.

I can tell you what David Cooperrider (business and positive psychology scholar) thinks or what Henri Nouwen (theologian) thinks, or what Barbara Frederickson (positive psychologist) thinks or even what Nora Ephron (screenwriter) thinks (she feels bad about her neck). But I can’t tell you for the life of me what I think.

I’ve never found a book about leadership, for instance, that is particularly helpful to those whose leadership it has been my role to enable. Yet, when asked what I think about leadership I instantly trot out various theories of leadership or, at best, what applications of those theories might work for real people. I’ve used every assessment that purports to help leaders challenge the process, execute strategy, or change their organizational culture. But I’ve never actually seen a leader who can do all of these things well (as the assessments seem to predict that one can).

My hope for this coming year (it’s September, after all, the beginning of the school year), is to find my authentic voice, my writing voice, what I think and what I find to be true about leadership and other things, even if I am an expert of one. So here begins Sara Orem’s leadership coaching blog.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working with leaders, both in corporations and in service organizations (mostly non-profits). I’ve spent much of the last 10 years teaching about leadership both in corporations and graduate programs. I also coach leaders and would-be leaders.

So you’d think that I would know how to describe what leadership is, and what a leader is and does. It occurs to me this morning that everything I would write here about leadership has an exception–usually in the form of a person I have known. I have known leaders who are not good at the “vision thing” and leaders who are not very enabling of others. I’ve known leaders who are charismatic to the point of narcissism, and leaders who are two-faced like Jekyll and Hyde. All of these leaders have also had strong, capable, enobling characteristics as well.

What I believe is that no human holds all of the characteristics of leadership that any scholar would like her to have. It takes a village, or a committee, or a team to encompass all of the attributes of great leadership. We need each other to lead. Yes, someone has to wear the whistle around his neck and spark the initiative, but others must make up for the lack of vision, personal coolness or rampant egotism that any given human being might also display.