Mighty.

What does leadership look like on the Career River?

I’ve been thinking about this ever since one of my 110 career chats, when someone pointed out that that the river metaphor didn’t really work for leaders. Rivers can’t go up, since gravity doesn’t work that way. Fair point.

It got me thinking about why we consider leadership a matter of going “up,” anyway.

When I asked Neil Golden, the former Chief Marketing Officer of McDonald’s USA, what advice he would give himself if he could travel back to an earlier point of his career, he said he’d tell himself to recognize the importance of leadership, not just to make a decision, but to inspire groups of people to align toward a vision.

Once, when he was promoted, his new boss pulled him aside and told him that he was technically very solid, but that “from this point forward in your career, your growth is going to be 100 percent dependent on how you’re able to lead.”

“What I didn’t fully prepare for as the CMO, was the depth of leadership development and talent management that I was going to want to do,” he said. “I was so focused on doing the job in terms of the marketing part of the job, that I didn’t realize with a team of 230 it was a nonstop, general management type of approach.”

“I could tell my younger self, ‘Get ready for that. If that’s you want to do, if that’s the type of role that you want, just understand what comes with it.’”

My first boss taught me about servant leadership when I became a manager. As I wrote last week for Big Shoes Network, I took that approach in all my future roles. Long after I left the newspaper where we worked together, I brought those lessons with me. And the people I managed carry them forward as well.

Leadership isn’t restricted to a certain title, level or even limited to a particular organization. It’s about