People didn’t believe in Boudreau and Edsall, for all of their shouting. Yet they believe in a scripture-spouting kid with a hitch in his arm. Why? Possibly because Tebow grasps something about leadership that Boudreau and Edsall have yet to learn: It’s not about domination but about persuasion. Someone who tries to force others to do his bidding isn’t a leader; he’s a warlord. Leadership only works when other people find you credible and grant you their cooperation.

In the past few weeks, area coaches have given clinics in failed leadership. The Washington Capitals staged a virtual work stoppage on the ice under Boudreau. The Maryland football team quit so badly on Edsall, they lost seven consecutive games by double digits. And the Washington Redskins lost six in a row thanks in part to Mike Shanahan’s misjudgment that the happy-talk of John Beck was leadership, only it turns out they trust Rex Grossman more, even when he throws interceptions.

Meantime, Tebow has given us a starkly powerful display of the real thing, and so has the underrated leader who had the guts to hand the team over to him, Broncos Coach John Fox. The Broncos are 5-1 over six games, and Fox was smart enough last Sunday to ask Tebow to give the pregame talk that led to a crucial victory over the San Diego Chargers and put them in the playoff hunt.

“I’ve never seen a human who can will himself to win like that,” Denver linebacker Von Miller said afterwards. “He gave us a great speech. We came out fired up. And that was a wrap.”

So what exactly is that mysterious quality called leadership? It’s not exactly charisma; it doesn’t hurt that Tebow gleams like a superhero, but the worst despots are charismatic too. It’s not exactly talent, either. According to experts, one reason we struggle to define it is because we look at it from the wrong side up.

“The academic study of leadership has failed, and the reason is that it focuses on the leader, when the appropriate focus is on the followers,” suggests research psychologist Robert Hogan, who profiles executives for Fortune 500 companies. When we flip the examination of leadership on its head and look at what followers will follow, we get a better idea of what quality we’re talking about.

“What is it the followers are looking for?” he asks. “The focus should be on the work force or the team, and what they perceive. Because if they don’t perceive the right thing in a leader, you’re through.”

Okay, so let’s talk about followership. The truth is, it’s not in our human nature to “follow” anyone very willingly, from an evolutionary standpoint. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm asserts that for 2.5 million years hunter-gatherer societies were so egalitarian they wouldn’t tolerate such a thing as formal “leadership.” Bands awarded temporary authority only for coordination: Someone had to plan the hunt. As soon as the group doubted his competence, or regretted awarding him control, they had clever ways of ridding themselves of him, which anthropologists coolly call “leveling mechanisms.” They ranged from ignoring orders, to casting out of the tribe, to killing.