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Why Leadership Sits at the Heart of Management
Principles of Management · Chapter 2: Core Management Functions and the Leadership LinkSection 2.2 · lesson 5 of 11712 min · free with a free account
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Next lesson: Managers vs. Leaders: Where the Two Roles Diverge and Overlap →← Planning, Organizing, Leading, and Controlling: The Management CycleNext lesson: Managers vs. Leaders: Where the Two Roles Diverge and Overlap →
In this lesson
The case for leading as the central function, and its limits.
- Explain why leading is treated as central
- Distinguish compliance from commitment
- Describe what leadership adds inside each function
- Weigh the evidence and the counter-position
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,756 words). Read along, or search it.
Core Management Functions and the Leadership Link
Why Leadership Sits at the Heart of Management
The last section treated the four functions as equal partners in a cycle. This one examines a stronger claim, often made about one function in particular. Leading. The claim is that leading sits at the center, in a way the other three do not. We look at the argument, and at the mechanism behind it. Influence, and the difference between compliance and commitment. We see why good leadership is so hard to notice, and where it shows up inside the other functions. Then we do something popular business writing often skips. We check the claim against the evidence. And we hear the strongest counter-position, stated fairly. The goal is a balanced view. Leadership matters, in a specific way, and it is not the whole story.
The Argument
The Function Through Which the Others Get Done
Start with what is true about all four functions. In one sense, they really are equal partners. None of them can substitute for another, and neglecting any one produces a distinct failure. But a more specific claim is commonly made about leading. Here is how the argument runs. Planning produces an objective, and a means of reaching it. Organizing produces a structure, and an allocation of resources. Controlling produces a measurement, and a signal to adjust. Notice what those three outputs have in common. None of them acts on the world directly. Each one ultimately depends on people carrying it out. A brilliant plan that no one executes accomplishes nothing. A well-designed structure, staffed by people who are not really trying, accomplishes little more. Leading is the function through which the other three actually get done. That is why its quality places an effective ceiling on what the others can produce, however well each was designed on its own.
Influence Versus Authority
Compliance Can Be Ordered; Commitment Cannot
The mechanism behind the claim is influence. Influence is the capacity to affect what someone else does, or wants to do. It is distinct from formal authority. In subchapter one point one, authority was defined as the organizationally granted right to direct someone's work. Authority and influence can line up. But they are not the same thing. The distinction matters because of what each one can, and cannot, produce. Authority can compel compliance. That means doing what is asked, at the level required to avoid a consequence for not doing it. Authority alone cannot compel commitment. Commitment is genuine engagement with a goal, pursued because the person has come to value it, not merely because it was assigned. Put simply, a manager can order a task performed. She cannot order someone to care about doing it well.
Discretionary Effort
Above the Floor That Authority Can Enforce
The practical difference between compliance and commitment shows up in one specific concept. Discretionary effort. Discretionary effort is the effort, care, and initiative an employee is capable of contributing, but free to give or withhold. And there is no formal consequence either way. Every job has a floor of required performance. Authority can enforce that floor reasonably directly, through instruction, supervision, and consequence. Above the floor sits a large, and often decisive, range of additional contribution. Catching a problem before anyone asks about it. Offering an idea nobody requested. Staying a few minutes longer, to make sure a handoff goes cleanly. No policy can require these things, and no supervision can fully monitor them. Leadership is claimed to be the function that unlocks this range. The logic is tight. Discretionary effort is given only when someone wants to give it, and wanting to is a commitment outcome.
Table 2.2.1
Compliance and Commitment Compared
Set the two side by side, and the trade-off becomes clear. Compliance is produced by formal authority, by instruction, and by the consequence of not complying. It delivers the required floor of performance that a job specifies. Its limit is that it cannot reach discretionary effort. It stops at the minimum enforceable standard. Commitment is produced by influence. Communicated meaning, trust, and a goal the person has come to value. It delivers discretionary effort above the required floor, given voluntarily. Its limit is just as real. It cannot be ordered into existence. It is slower to build than compliance, and easier to lose. That point is worth holding on to. Commitment is the more valuable outcome, and also the more fragile one. The line between the two is the same line that separates authority from influence.
The Visibility Problem
Good Leadership Leaves No Evidence
Leadership's contribution has another unusual feature. It is very hard to see while it is working well. This asymmetry is worth naming, because it distorts how leadership gets credited and blamed. Good leadership's typical effect is an absence. Conflicts get resolved before they escalate. Small problems are caught and fixed quietly. People stay engaged, and simply do not generate a visible incident. None of that shows up as an event anyone can point to. Poor leadership's effect, by contrast, is highly visible. The missed deadline. The public disagreement. The employee who leaves abruptly, and says why on the way out. The two are not equally obvious. So observers, including managers themselves, systematically underweight good leadership's contribution, compared with poor leadership's damage. The reason is simple. One leaves evidence, and the other does not.
Figure 2.2.1
Leading Reaches Into Every Other Function
Leading is not a separate activity, performed in its own dedicated block of time. Instead, it shows up as a specific obligation inside each of the other three functions. Within planning, the leadership obligation is communicating the plan. Not simply distributing it, but explaining it so people actually understand it, and ideally accept it as reasonable. Within organizing, the obligation is making the structure work in day-to-day practice. An authority relationship drawn on an organization chart does not, by itself, make people willing to coordinate smoothly across it. Within controlling, the obligation is delivering the message once a variance has been found. How a manager tells someone their performance fell short, or credits a team that beat a target, matters a great deal. It largely determines whether the news produces defensiveness, or genuine correction. So picture leading not as a fourth box beside the other three, but as the function reaching into each of them.
What The Evidence Supports
Real, but Smaller Than Popular Accounts Suggest
Now for the evidence, because the argument so far is a reasoned claim about mechanism. It should not be mistaken for a claim that leadership alone determines organizational success. The honest characterization is this. Leadership's effect on organizational outcomes is real, but smaller than popular business writing typically suggests. A substantial share of the variation in performance, across organizations and units, comes from factors a leader does not control. Often, the leader cannot meaningfully change them in the short run either. The state of the market the organization competes in is one. The structure and resources the unit was given to work with is another. Broader economic conditions are a third. So attributing a result entirely to the person leading a unit is a mistake, in either direction. It credits or blames a single factor, for an outcome that usually has several major causes operating at once.
The Romance Of Leadership
Why Observers Over-Credit Leaders
This pattern of over-crediting leaders has itself been studied directly. The research goes under the label, the romance of leadership. It is associated with work by Meindl and colleagues in the mid nineteen-eighties. It documented a consistent tendency among observers. They attributed organizational outcomes to a leader's qualities and decisions, considerably more than the evidence available to them warranted. Be precise about the finding. It is not that leadership never matters. It is that people reach for a leader as the explanation, even when structural or circumstantial explanations fit the facts at least as well. Why would they? Because a single identifiable person makes a more satisfying story than a diffuse set of conditions. That tendency, and the fuller theory built around it, returns in subchapter ten point seven.
The Counter-Position
Build Systems That Do Not Need Heroes
There is a distinct, and equally serious, position on the other side. It holds that this course should be cautious about centering leadership at all. On this view, systems, structures, and incentives explain more of the variation in performance than the qualities of whoever happens to be leading. And an organization that depends on an exceptional individual leader to function well is poorly designed, rather than well led. The reason is predictable fragility. Its performance will collapse the moment that individual leaves, becomes unavailable, or is replaced by someone more ordinary. Notice what this position does not say. It does not deny that leadership matters. It denies that leadership should be relied on as the organization's primary mechanism for good outcomes. Instead, build structures, incentives, and processes robust enough to perform reasonably well across the range of people who might hold the role. Not depending on any one of them being exceptional.
Holding Both
Both Positions Can Be True at Once
These two positions can both be true at once, without contradiction. Holding them together is the balanced conclusion this section asks you to take forward. On one side, leadership genuinely matters, in the specific, mechanistic sense developed here. It is the function through which the other three actually get carried out. And it determines whether an organization receives compliance, or commitment, from the people in it. On the other side, leadership is neither the sole nor even the dominant explanation for most organizational outcomes. And an organization that has built itself to depend on exceptional leadership, rather than sound structure, has left itself exposed. A useful habit follows. When you hear an outcome explained by one leader, ask what else changed at the same time.
Case Vignette
A Difficult Quarter in the Northern Region
A composite case puts the whole argument to work. A distribution company's northern region missed its revenue target badly. In the same quarter, its long-tenured regional manager, Alicia, left for a role at another company. The connection seemed obvious to nearly everyone. She was well regarded, she left, and the numbers fell apart shortly afterward. In informal conversation and at a leadership offsite, the decline was repeatedly described as the direct result of losing her. A closer look complicated that story, without erasing her contribution entirely. The region's largest industrial customer had independently cut its orders that quarter, after a shift in its own business. That change had no connection to the region's leadership at all. And two smaller regions, with entirely different managers and the same broad market conditions, also posted softer results. Alicia's departure was real. It may well have cost the region some relationships and momentum, which a leader in place might have preserved. But crediting the whole shortfall to her absence reached for the simpler story, rather than the fuller one. The honest account was neither that leadership did not matter, nor that it explains everything. A real leadership effect and a real market effect arrived together. The organization collapsed them into a single, more satisfying cause.
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