Leading from the back bench demands persistence and focus.

• Author: Linsky, Marty
• Position: LINSKY ON LEADERSHIP - Column

The public discourse often confuses authority for leadership. Too often, people assume men and women with big jobs, fancy titles and lots of formal power are the epitome of leadership.

Exercising leadership and exercising authority, however, are very different activities.

Authority is a contract for services. Whether you are talking about a mom or dad, the CEO of IBM or the speaker of the House, people in authority are supposed to provide certain services, for which they will be rewarded.

Leadership is a very different matter. It is about meeting needs rather than wants. It's about helping communities face up to their most difficult problems. It's about making progress on tough issues.

In legislative life, we have institutionalized this confusion by calling people majority and minority leaders. As every legislator knows, you get to be majority or minority leader by satisfying caucus members, or at least half plus one of them. That's necessary work, but often has little to do with leadership.

Two types of legislators exercise leadership with little or no authority. The first is a back-bencher, particularly a minority party back-bencher, whose skill and persistence shepherds an important and perhaps controversial piece of legislation through to enactment. The second is a back-bencher who through dint of expertise or longevity and personality is able to exercise leadership across ideological and partisan divides, and influence the chamber without having much formal authority.

What It Takes

I'd like to focus on the first type--back-benchers who pushed difficult legislation through to enactment--to understand what it takes to make that happen. My next column will focus on the second type of back-bencher.

Two such stories, one involving Massachusetts Representative Carl Sciortino Jr., a Democrat, and the other Washington Representative Kevin Parker, a Republican, illustrate my point.

Sciortino is in his fourth term representing two blue collar Boston suburbs and is openly gay. In 2007, he was the lead sponsor of legislation to classify discrimination against transgender people a hate crime. He assembled a large number of co-sponsors, but couldn't get the bill out of committee.

By 2009, the opposition had organized. Calling it the "bathroom bill," they raised fears that transgender individuals would be able to use public bathrooms of either gender. Some legislators who had signed on to the earlier version of the bill were scared off by the...