The myth of the lone leader: on the leadership that happens between people
Published on 3 July 2026 • Written by Piotr Karpowicz
This essay, written by Piotr Karpowicz, draws on the concepts discussed in my article, Academia in crisis needs new forms of leadership, as well as a subsequent exchange of reflections concerning “in-between work”, distributed leadership, and well-doing.
The original version of this essay, available here, was published in the Polish version of the Wisdomletter of the Academy of Leadership Psychology. This translation was prepared by Piotr and validated for faithfulness of meaning with me.
Over recent decades, leadership has become one of the most intensively developed areas of modern management. Organisations invest in leadership academies, talent programmes, competency models, coaching, mentoring, and an ever-growing range of tools designed to assess leadership styles. Books are written, conferences and podcasts are created, and rankings of the most influential leaders are published. Yet it is difficult to escape the impression that the more we talk about leaders, the more frequently organisations encounter challenges that no individual leader — however well prepared — can solve alone.
Trust is declining, workloads are increasing, work is becoming more distributed, and effective decision-making increasingly requires the integration of knowledge held in many different parts of the organisation. Perhaps the problem is not that we have too few good leaders. Perhaps, for too long, we have looked for leadership primarily where it is easiest to see: at the top of the hierarchy, in formal roles, public appearances, and strategic declarations.
The article “Academia in crisis needs new forms of leadership”, written by Lisa Colledge, Candy Rowe, Sarah Shenow and their co-authors following the UKRI Future Leaders Fellows Development Network Host Summit, focuses on UK higher education. Yet the reality it describes is recognisable far beyond academia. The authors argue that crisis is no longer episodic. It is not simply a disruption after which an organisation returns to its previous state of equilibrium. Uncertainty has become an operating environment, fuelled by geopolitical instability, financial constraints, labour market volatility, technological change, and growing societal expectations.
One of the most telling observations from the Summit in Leeds concerned not the use of the word “crisis” itself, but the matter-of-fact way in which it was used. It was not rhetorical emphasis or a description of an exceptional event. It had become a neutral description of a shared operating reality.
This shift has profound implications for leadership. If a crisis is temporary, an organisation may respond through mobilisation, centralised decision-making, and a temporary increase in control. But when uncertainty endures for years, the same approach begins to weaken the very capabilities most needed for survival: initiative, experimentation, learning, the flow of information, and people’s willingness to raise concerns.
What may appear to be decisive leadership in the short term can, over time, lead to the overload of formal leaders and the passivity of everyone else. People become accustomed to the idea that someone “at the top” should know the answer, make the decision, and assume responsibility. The greater the uncertainty, the stronger the longing for a heroic leader. Yet it is precisely under these conditions that the heroic model becomes least useful.
The first myth, then, is the belief that an organisation can be led through complexity because of the exceptional qualities of one individual. This narrative is attractive because it simplifies reality. It allows us to attribute success to the leader’s vision, and failure to their immaturity, lack of courage, or inappropriate leadership style. We no longer need to ask about the quality of the system, the flow of information, relationships between functions, conflicting objectives, or the behaviours that the organisation rewards. The whole story becomes centred on the individual.
Yet contemporary challenges increasingly refuse to remain within the boundaries of a single specialism, team, or organisational function. As the authors of the article observe, research has become collaborative, interdisciplinary, boundary-crossing work: a team sport. The same process can be seen in businesses, public institutions, and social organisations. Value is created at the intersection of different perspectives, not within isolated silos.
This does not mean that formal leaders are no longer needed. On the contrary, their responsibility may be greater than ever. Its nature, however, is changing. A leader does not need to know everything, but should create the conditions in which knowledge distributed across the organisation can be surfaced, connected, and used. A leader does not need to solve every problem personally, but should enable shared sense-making. They should not abandon the responsibility to provide direction, but must combine direction with space for autonomy, reflection, and experimentation.
The authors describe leadership suited to an unpredictable environment as an ongoing process of learning, adaptation, and decision-making with incomplete information. Its foundation is not complete control, but the capacity to navigate complexity.
The second myth is that leadership is synonymous with position. In a traditional organisation, it is easy to identify the leader because their name appears on the organisational chart. It is far harder to recognise leadership when it takes the form of someone asking the question that others were afraid to ask, connecting people working in different parts of the system, noticing an emerging conflict, helping a team clarify uncertain priorities, or pausing a decision that is being made too quickly.
Such actions are rarely included in a formal job description. They are not spectacular, and they seldom appear in presentations summarising performance. Yet they may determine whether an organisation recognises a problem early enough and whether it is capable of responding.
In the article by Lisa Colledge and her co-authors, distributed leadership does not mean abolishing responsibility or holding a democratic vote on every decision. It means distributing behaviours that increase the whole team’s capacity for collaboration and adaptation. Curiosity, listening, kindness, effective feedback, reflective practice, and the willingness to co-create solutions are not additions to “real” management. Under conditions of complexity, they become its foundation.
The authors emphasise that these habits are built in small, everyday moments and gradually shape organisational culture. This represents an important reversal of perspective. Organisational culture is not what an organisation has written about itself. It is what its people repeatedly do — particularly under pressure.
In a later conversation arising from the article, Lisa Colledge described the activities that connect people, priorities, and different parts of the system as “in-between work”. It is coordination work, relational work, and interpretive work. It involves creating shared understanding, identifying misalignment, enabling the flow of information, building trust, and helping people navigate different perspectives.
It does not directly manufacture a product, does not always generate easily attributable revenue, and often does not result in a formal decision. Yet without it, different parts of the organisation begin to operate alongside one another rather than with one another.
“In-between work” is invisible not because it creates nothing. It is invisible because organisations have learned to look primarily at downstream outcomes. They see the completed project, the sale, the publication, the implementation, the number of customers, or the financial result. They are far less likely to see the conversations, adjustments, questions, mediation, and acts of trust that made the outcome possible.
They also fail to notice situations in which someone prevented a problem. The success of such a person lies in the fact that the crisis did not occur, the conflict did not escalate, or the flawed decision was corrected early enough. Paradoxically, the better this work is performed, the less spectacular its results appear.
In our correspondence, I described “in-between work” as the translation layer between values and action. Lisa found this extension of the metaphor particularly resonant. Organisations are generally quite good at articulating declarations. Values such as respect, accountability, collaboration, openness, and care for people appear in strategies, codes of conduct, and recruitment materials. Yet an enormous space exists between naming a value and experiencing it in everyday organisational life.
Respect does not become real because it appears on a poster. It becomes real when an employee is allowed to finish a sentence, when their doubts are not ridiculed, and when a manager is willing to change their mind in response to a better argument. Accountability is not created by adding it to a competency model. It emerges when people know what they are responsible for, have genuine influence, and can talk about mistakes without triggering an immediate search for someone to blame. Collaboration is not the result of an engaging slogan, but of the way information is shared, meetings are run, priorities are agreed, and conflicts are addressed.
When this translation layer is missing, values remain decorative. An organisation may speak the language of collaboration while rewarding individual competition. It may declare its commitment to psychological safety while punishing those who bring bad news. It may encourage innovation while requiring approval for the smallest experiment. It may talk about autonomy while retaining every meaningful decision at the highest level.
This is where one of the most significant leadership mystifications begins: we assume that because we have named a desirable value and trained leaders to understand it, change has already taken place.
We might call this leadership-washing. Just as greenwashing creates an image of environmental responsibility without a corresponding change in practice, and wellbeing washing conceals systemic sources of overload beneath the language of care, leadership-washing allows an organisation to speak a modern leadership language without changing how work is actually done.
Servant leadership programmes are launched. Empathy workshops are delivered. Inclusive leadership models are introduced. Psychological safety sessions are organised. At the same time, structures, performance systems, decision flows, and the behaviours of senior leaders remain unchanged. A manager returns from a development programme with a new vocabulary, but continues to operate within an environment that rewards control, certainty, short-term outcomes, and individual heroics.
The authors of the article clearly recognise this tension. On the one hand, they describe initiatives that develop more relational, reflective, collaborative, and adaptive forms of leadership. On the other, they point out that underlying structures, incentives, and role architectures often remain unchanged and may actively inhibit the very behaviours that organisations are trying to develop.
This is an important observation because it protects us from the naïve assumption that systemic problems can be solved solely through the personal development of leaders. Even the most empathetic manager will struggle to listen attentively when their calendar contains a dozen consecutive meetings and their performance is assessed exclusively through short-term metrics. Even the best delegation training will achieve little if every meaningful decision requires multiple layers of approval. Even a declaration of trust will fail to change the culture if the first serious mistake triggers a search for someone to blame.
This leads to the third myth: the belief that leadership can be “delivered” to an organisation solely through a development programme. Training is necessary, but attendance alone does not change the way the system operates. The authors argue that leadership development requires more than participation in programmes or the application of frameworks by people in senior positions.
People need conditions in which they can practise making decisions under uncertainty, involve others in collective problem-solving, experiment, and reflectively attune their everyday behaviours. Leadership does not develop solely through learning concepts. It develops through repeated experiences in which a new behaviour proves possible, safe, and useful.
It is therefore not enough to teach people to listen. Meetings must also be designed so that listening is possible. It is not enough to speak about autonomy. The boundaries within which people can make decisions without seeking permission must be made clear. It is not enough to encourage people to raise concerns. The first response to difficult news must not discourage the next person from speaking up. It is not enough to promote collaboration. Objectives and measures that encourage functions to optimise their own outcomes at the expense of the wider organisation must also be changed.
Leadership then becomes not so much a characteristic of an individual as a property of a well-designed environment.
In the context of an issue devoted to leadership myths and mystifications, this argument should also be connected with wellbeing washing. Many organisations recognise declining employee wellbeing and respond with additional initiatives: webinars, apps, wellbeing days, breathing exercises, or access to psychological support. Some of these solutions are valuable. The problem begins when they are expected to compensate for poorly designed work.
It is impossible to improve wellbeing sustainably while leaving in place decision-making chaos, conflicting priorities, chronic overload, lack of influence, and a culture in which people are afraid to speak the truth.
Perhaps wellbeing is, to a greater extent than we sometimes admit, an outcome of the quality of everyday work. It grows not only from concern for how people feel, but also from clarity of ownership, a sense of purpose, influence, trust, opportunities to learn, and the experience that colleagues will not leave us alone with a problem.
This is where wellbeing meets welldoing. The aim is not to set wellbeing against performance, but to recognise that both are connected by the way people work together. An organisation does not become healthier simply because it encourages employees to recover and recharge. It also becomes healthier when it reduces unnecessary friction, improves coordination, and creates the conditions in which people can do meaningful work well.
“In-between work” may therefore be the missing element in many wellbeing programmes. It redirects attention from the individual to relationships and the system. Instead of asking only, “How can the employee cope with stress more effectively?”, it allows us to ask, “What is it about the way we work together that is unnecessarily generating this stress?”
Rather than focusing solely on individual resilience, it encourages us to examine whether information arrives on time, ownership is clear, disagreement can be navigated safely, and decisions are made sufficiently close to where the relevant knowledge sits. Not every wellbeing problem can be solved through organisational change, but too many organisational problems are wrongly addressed by trying to increase the resilience of individual employees.
The article by Lisa Colledge and her co-authors nevertheless leaves room for hope. Crisis is not presented solely as a threat. It can also reveal the limitations of established models and create space for experimentation with new forms of leadership.
The authors describe initiatives in which shared approaches to decision-making, reflection, and learning are being developed. The UKRI Summit itself was designed as a practical demonstration of this ethos: it combined a clear sense of direction with deliberate space for participants to shape the experience, contribute their own knowledge, and explore possible futures together. This was not an abdication of leadership, but a different way of exercising it — through creating a frame that was clear enough to provide direction and open enough to enable meaningful contribution.
The greatest challenge remains the transition from local experimentation to sustained systemic change. Good practices often exist in small pockets, depend on the energy of a few individuals, and disappear when their founders move on. The authors rightly observe that embedding new forms of leadership requires simultaneous action at several levels: visible and sustained leadership commitment, active involvement through a shared purpose, deliberate upskilling of new behaviours, and alignment of structures, processes, and incentives.
Without this alignment, inspiring initiatives remain additions to an old system that will gradually neutralise them.
Perhaps this is the most important lesson for organisations beyond academia. We do not need another shift from one idealised model of leadership to the next. The myth of the charismatic leader should not simply be replaced by the myth of the empathetic, servant, or inclusive leader presented as a universal answer to every organisational problem.
Each of these ideas can make a valuable contribution. Each can also become a new mystification if detached from context, tension, and the real mechanisms through which organisations operate. Excessive empathy can make it harder to set boundaries. Poorly understood servant leadership can lead to the avoidance of responsibility and difficult decisions. Psychological safety can be confused with comfort and the absence of standards. Distributed leadership can become an excuse for unclear accountability.
The aim, therefore, is not to replace the old cult of the hero with a new cult of collaboration.
It is to create a mature combination of direction and autonomy, accountability and trust, challenge and care, formal authority and distributed initiative. Formal leaders must still make decisions, establish priorities, set boundaries, and take responsibility for consequences. Their maturity is also revealed, however, in whether they can ensure that leadership does not end with them.
The best leader does not create an organisation that remains permanently dependent on their presence, knowledge, and energy. They create conditions in which other people are able to notice, initiate, participate in decisions, and act responsibly.
The greatest myth, then, may not be the belief that leaders are important. They are important. The mystification begins when we assume that leadership belongs exclusively to them.
In reality, an organisation’s capacity to operate under pressure is created through thousands of everyday interactions. In the way bad news is communicated. In the question asked before a decision is made too quickly. In the willingness to admit that we do not know. In the conversation between functions that had previously defended only their own interests. In feedback given early enough. In the moment when someone relinquishes control without relinquishing accountability.
For years, we have looked for leadership primarily at the top of the organisation. Perhaps we should look more often in the space that is hardest to represent on an organisational chart — between people.
That is where declared values are tested against reality. That is where culture is strengthened or weakened every day. That is where trust, coordination, and the capacity for change emerge. And it may be there, in small behaviours that rarely resemble heroic acts of leadership, that we find the most important response to the crisis of the traditional leadership model.
➡️ If these ideas resonate, you can explore how I design leadership and coordination design for complex, high-pressure environments on the Services page.
Piotr Karpowicz is a graduate of the 12th edition of the Academy of Leadership Psychology and an expert with over 25 years of experience in the banking sector. He currently serves as Vice President of the Management Board for Commercial Affairs at the Cooperative Bank in Wysokie Mazowieckie. In his professional practice and original writings, he combines hard business realities with leadership psychology, seeking simple solutions to the complex challenges of modern management. He also chairs the MBA Business Club WANS Council at the Eastern European Academy of Applied Sciences in Białystok.
