A Leader Is Judged By What Happens In Their Absence

Power enables you to act through others when you are present. Leadership enables you to keep doing so when you are not.

Managers are usually judged by what their teams accomplish under their direction. Perhaps they should be judged more by what those teams achieve when they are away, or, as the ultimate test, when they are no longer there at all. This follows from the fundamentally paradoxical nature of management: A manager is accountable for results that, for the most part, they do not personally produce.

A leader is therefore different from an expert. As I have argued before on Superception, being appointed to a management position should be viewed as a career change rather than simply a promotion.

A manager cannot merely be a supercharged technical expert in their field. They need something more, a certain depth of character that allows them, to borrow former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s definition of leadership, to “get someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

Put that way, leadership can sound suspiciously like psychological manipulation, which is precisely why that additional depth matters. It can stem from a range of qualities that enable leaders to create meaning, not merely set objectives. These may include their personal story, their strategic vision, their values, or simply the way they exercise authority. Whatever form it takes, it reflects a reality that is too often overlooked: Leadership begins where control ends. Without that deeper dimension, leadership becomes little more than coercion, whether negative – management through fear – or positive – through financial incentives and rewards.

In my view, a manager who truly leads has three primary levers for influencing others and, as a result, achieving results indirectly: Strategy, culture, and role-modeling.

Strategy is the most widely recognized of the three. It provides direction. But it only works if it is clear enough to guide the decisions that managers and employees will ultimately have to make themselves.

And no strategy, however good, can anticipate everything. That is where culture comes in. Culture guides everyday decisions through shared values and through the behaviors that give those values tangible form. As I have previously written on Superception, every company has a culture, whether intentional or accidental, explicit or implicit. If strategy guides the decisions you expect, culture guides the decisions you did not anticipate. That is why culture plays such an important role in an organization’s fate. It is, in effect, the leader’s distributed control system. At its best, culture may even be the most tolerable form of micromanagement: Instead of supervising every decision personally, the leader creates a shared framework through which those decisions can be made.

The third lever, role-modeling, is every bit as important as strategy and culture because it is the best guarantee that either will actually be applied throughout the organization. Telling is always less powerful than showing. A leader cannot credibly demand from others what they are unwilling to demand from themselves. Or rather, they can, but, when they do, they lose their ability to lead through anything other than authority and constraint. Their strategy and culture survive only because they are imposed. The beauty of leading by example is that it turns a moral virtue into a condition for performance.

Together, these three levers – strategy, culture, and role-modeling – allow managers to exert influence far beyond the boundaries of their direct control. And if we follow that logic to its conclusion, their effectiveness should ultimately be assessed in their absence. An organization or team that functions well only under the close supervision of its manager is more dependent than it is high-performing. A manager’s power is visible when they are present. Their leadership is revealed by what happens when they are not.

Incidentally, this does not mean that I subscribe in any way to holacracy’s argument that managers are unnecessary. Quite the opposite. Beyond the trade-offs they make and their role in leading and energizing teams, managers are indispensable precisely because of their contribution to strategy, culture, and role-modeling. Which brings me back to the central point: A manager is not simply a super-expert.

In any case, beyond temporary absences, the ultimate test of a leader’s performance comes with permanent absence, whether because they leave the organization or because they die.

Two cases strike me as particularly revealing.

The first is Starbucks, which went through three successors to Howard Schultz – Kevin Johnson, Laxman Narasimhan, and Brian Niccol – before apparently finding a leader capable of helping the company thrive while preserving its culture. The second is Apple which, as I have argued before, has drifted significantly since Steve Jobs’s death, particularly in relation to the culture he built. A third example may well be Disney, where much remains to be seen following Bob Iger’s second retirement.

Ultimately, these examples illustrate just how much leaders matter to the trajectory of an organization, whether we like it or not. And for someone like me, who dislikes determinism precisely because it denies the role of human agency in history, that is rather good news.