Chapter 25: Leadership and Influence

"The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born."

— Warren Bennis

Three months into the Strategic Director role, Jordan was leading a team of twelve for the first time.

He had managed teams of four and six before. The shift to twelve was not a linear scaling of what he had already done. With four people, he could know each person's work in detail, sense the mood of the team from proximity, and catch problems early through natural visibility. With twelve, the team's surface area exceeded what any individual could maintain. He had to operate differently — through systems, through culture, through other people's judgment — or he would be a bottleneck for everything.

He had known this abstractly. Knowing it abstractly and experiencing it as a daily operational reality were different things.

The first month, he had over-controlled. He had reviewed work that didn't require his review. He had been in meetings that others could have run. He had answered questions that other people on the team could have answered. He had been, he recognized in retrospect, frightened of the team's judgment failing and the failure reflecting on him — and the response to that fear had been to insert himself into more decisions than the role required.

In week six, his most experienced team member — a data analyst named Rivera who had been in the department for seven years before Jordan arrived — said, with the careful directness of someone who had been waiting to say it: "I think you might be more useful if you were less visible in the day-to-day. The team knows how to do the work. What we need from you is direction and cover."

Direction and cover. Jordan wrote it down.

This chapter is about what it means to lead — not to manage, not to control, not to perform leadership for an audience, but to actually direct and serve the people who are doing the work.

Section 1: What Leadership Is (and Is Not)

Leadership is one of the most studied phenomena in organizational psychology and one of the most poorly defined in everyday usage. The word is applied to everything from geopolitical vision to team meeting facilitation, often with the implication that it is a uniform quality that some people have more of.

The Trait Approach and Its Limitations

The earliest systematic research on leadership — the trait approach — sought to identify the stable personal characteristics of effective leaders. The intuition was reasonable: if effective leaders share certain traits, identifying those traits would allow identification and development of leaders.

The findings were disappointing in their inconsistency. Different studies identified different trait profiles. Intelligence, extraversion, conscientiousness, and dominance appeared with some frequency, but the correlations were modest and the predictive validity low. Ralph Stogdill's 1948 review of 120 trait studies concluded that there was no consistent set of traits that differentiated leaders from non-leaders across situations.

The trait approach was not entirely wrong. Research from the 1980s and 1990s — better designed than the earlier work — found that certain characteristics do predict leadership effectiveness with moderate consistency: - Intelligence: the most reliable predictor across settings - Conscientiousness and emotional stability: consistent positive predictors - Extraversion: positive but more situationally dependent - Openness to experience: positive, particularly for leadership in novel or changing environments

But traits alone explain a small fraction of leadership effectiveness variance. The situation, the followers, the organizational context, and the specific leadership behaviors all matter substantially. Leadership is not primarily something you are; it is primarily something you do, in a specific context, with specific people.

Leadership vs. Management

Warren Bennis's distinction, cited frequently and worth taking seriously: managers do things right; leaders do the right things. Or, more precisely:

Management is the coordination of resources — people, time, budget, information — toward known objectives. Good management is essential and undervalued. It involves planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. The criteria for success are efficiency and accuracy.

Leadership is the orientation of people toward goals that matter — goals that may not yet exist as organizational objectives, that require vision and motivation beyond compliance, and that involve change rather than maintenance of the status quo. Good leadership creates the conditions for people to bring discretionary effort, creativity, and commitment to work that exceeds their job descriptions.

Most roles that require leadership also require management. The mistake is treating them as interchangeable, or elevating one at the expense of the other. The organization that over-invests in leadership and under-invests in management produces inspiring vision and chaotic execution. The organization that over-invests in management and under-invests in leadership produces efficient performance of yesterday's strategy.

The Influence Dimension

At its most fundamental, leadership is the exercise of influence — changing what people think, feel, or do. This definition is broader than formal authority (which is the right to direct behavior through organizational power) and narrower than general influence (which includes all social influence processes).

Robert Cialdini's six (later seven) principles of influence describe the psychological mechanisms by which people are moved: reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. These principles apply to interpersonal influence broadly — from sales to parenting to clinical relationships — and to leadership specifically.

The distinction that matters: influence through legitimate means (persuasion, vision, genuine care, demonstrated competence) versus influence through manipulation (exploiting cognitive biases, withholding information, manufactured urgency). The ethical leadership literature draws this line clearly: the goal is not mere compliance but genuine, informed engagement.

Section 2: The Major Leadership Theories

Six decades of organizational research have produced several major theories, each capturing real phenomena without being comprehensive.

Situational Leadership

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's situational leadership theory: effective leadership adapts to the development level of the follower — their combination of competence (knowledge, skills, experience) and commitment (motivation, confidence) for the specific task.

Four follower development levels: - D1: Low competence, high commitment (the enthusiastic beginner — doesn't know what they don't know) - D2: Low-to-some competence, low commitment (the disillusioned learner — learning reveals how much there is to learn; early optimism fades) - D3: Moderate-to-high competence, variable commitment (the capable but cautious — skills adequate; confidence or motivation inconsistent) - D4: High competence, high commitment (the self-reliant achiever)

Four corresponding leadership styles: - S1 — Directing: high task, low relationship (tell, show, check) — for D1 - S2 — Coaching: high task, high relationship (direct + explain + solicit input) — for D2 - S3 — Supporting: low task, high relationship (praise, listen, facilitate) — for D3 - S4 — Delegating: low task, low relationship (empower, confirm, trust) — for D4

The critical insight: the mismatch between leadership style and follower development level is the primary source of leadership-follower friction. Managing a D4 follower with S1 style (high direction, low autonomy) produces resentment and disengagement. Managing a D1 follower with S4 style (high delegation, low direction) produces confusion and failure. The leader's job is accurate diagnosis of the development level and appropriate style adjustment.

Transformational vs. Transactional Leadership

James Burns's foundational distinction, elaborated by Bernard Bass:

Transactional leadership operates through exchange — contingent reward (if you do X, you receive Y) and management by exception (intervening when performance deviates from standard). Transactional leadership is not bad leadership; it is the baseline — the management of the existing contract between organization and employee.

Transformational leadership elevates motivation and performance beyond transactional exchange through four mechanisms (Bass's "Four I's"): - Idealized Influence: modeling the values and behaviors you want to see; being a source of inspiration and respect - Inspirational Motivation: articulating a compelling vision; communicating high expectations - Intellectual Stimulation: challenging assumptions; encouraging creativity and novel approaches; inviting disagreement - Individualized Consideration: attending to the unique needs and development of each follower; mentoring and coaching

Meta-analyses consistently find that transformational leadership predicts follower performance, satisfaction, and organizational commitment significantly better than transactional leadership alone. The mechanisms: transformational leaders satisfy followers' higher-order needs (competence, meaning, belonging), which produces discretionary effort that goes beyond compliance.

Servant Leadership

Robert Greenleaf's servant leadership inverts the conventional hierarchy: the leader's primary role is to serve the led — to ensure they have what they need to do their best work. The question driving servant leadership is not "how can my team serve my objectives?" but "how can I serve my team's ability to achieve our shared objectives?"

Servant leadership characteristics: - Listening as a primary activity (rather than directing) - Empathy as a relational orientation - Healing: supporting the growth and wellbeing of followers - Awareness: of self and of others - Persuasion rather than positional authority - Conceptualization: keeping the long view in mind - Foresight - Stewardship: responsibility for the organization beyond self-interest - Commitment to the growth of people - Building community

Servant leadership has found consistent research support, particularly in contexts where follower autonomy and intrinsic motivation are important for performance outcomes. The SDT connection is direct: servant leadership creates the conditions for autonomy, competence, and relatedness need satisfaction.

Adaptive Leadership

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky's adaptive leadership distinguishes two types of challenges:

Technical challenges: problems with known solutions. The expertise exists; the leader's task is to apply it. Managing routine operations, fixing a broken process, implementing a known best practice — these are technical challenges.

Adaptive challenges: problems for which the solution does not yet exist, or where the solution requires changes in values, beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors that people are not yet ready to make. Most of what is described as "resistance to change" is actually the experience of adaptive challenge: the organization is being asked to give up something it values to achieve a goal it also values, and there is genuine loss in the transition.

Heifetz's critical insight: leaders often treat adaptive challenges as technical ones — applying known solutions to problems that require something deeper — and produce frustration when the technical intervention fails. Adaptive leadership requires holding the discomfort of the adaptive challenge rather than providing premature solutions: creating a "holding environment" where the challenge can be worked through rather than worked around.

Section 3: The Psychology of Influence

Leadership is influence, and influence operates through specific psychological mechanisms.

Cialdini's Principles of Influence

Robert Cialdini's research on compliance-gaining identifies seven principles:

Reciprocity: People feel obligated to return favors. Leaders who invest in their teams — time, attention, credit, resources — create reciprocal motivation. The principle applies to social capital: genuine investment in others generates genuine return.

Commitment and Consistency: People want to be consistent with their prior commitments. Once a person has committed to a position or course of action (especially publicly), they are motivated to behave consistently with it. The practical application: getting explicit, early commitment to values or directions makes subsequent alignment more likely.

Social Proof: People look to others' behavior in uncertain situations. In organizations, visible demonstration that respected peers have adopted a new behavior or approach is often more persuasive than rational argument. The leader who wants cultural change should identify and elevate the "positive deviants" — the people already demonstrating the target behavior.

Authority: Expertise and legitimate authority increase persuasive impact. Leaders who develop genuine expertise, signal competence, and communicate the basis for their authority increase their influence even with those who would otherwise be skeptical.

Liking: People are more easily influenced by those they like. Liking is increased by similarity, familiarity, genuine warmth, and compliments that are sincere. The practical implication: the leader who invests in knowing their team members as individuals — their interests, circumstances, aspirations — is not merely building relationships. They are building influence.

Scarcity: People value what is rare or threatened. In leadership contexts: opportunities for growth, access to development, visible recognition — these are influence-relevant resources that produce engagement when they are genuinely provided and are perceived as limited.

Unity (Cialdini's seventh principle, added in Pre-Suasion): Shared identity increases influence. "We are in the same group" — family, team, community, nation — activates a different motivational register than mere liking. Leaders who build genuine shared identity through inclusive language, team rituals, and authentic representation of shared values are using the unity principle.

Positional vs. Personal Power

Positional power derives from role: the right to direct, reward, and sanction conferred by organizational hierarchy. It is effective for compliance and reliable for routine task performance.

Personal power derives from the person: expertise, interpersonal skill, trustworthiness, and the ability to inspire. It is effective for discretionary effort, creativity, and commitment that goes beyond compliance.

John French and Bertram Raven's classic typology of social power: - Reward power: the ability to provide outcomes the follower values - Coercive power: the ability to provide outcomes the follower wants to avoid - Legitimate power: authority conferred by role - Expert power: influence based on knowledge and skill - Referent power: influence based on identification and admiration — the most powerful and most durable form

The research consistently finds that referent and expert power produce better long-term outcomes (higher discretionary effort, lower turnover, higher creativity) than coercive and purely positional power. This is the SDT connection again: autonomy-supportive influence (expert and referent power) satisfies needs; controlling influence (coercive power) thwarts them.

Section 4: Psychological Safety and High-Performance Teams

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety is among the most practically significant findings in the organizational psychology of teams.

Psychological safety: the belief that one can speak up, take risks, make mistakes, and disagree without fear of punishment or humiliation. It is not the same as comfort — psychologically safe teams are often more confrontational and more demanding than their less safe counterparts, because the safety allows authentic engagement rather than managed impression.

Edmondson's original research (1999) found, counterintuitively, that the best-performing hospital nursing teams reported making more errors than lower-performing teams. Investigation revealed that the better teams weren't making more errors; they were reporting them more accurately — because psychological safety made error reporting safe. The lower-performing teams were suppressing error reports out of fear.

Google's Project Aristotle (2012–2016) studied 180 teams at Google seeking the variables that predicted team effectiveness. The single most important variable: psychological safety — even more predictive than individual talent, team composition, or explicit goal clarity.

Building Psychological Safety

Leaders create psychological safety through consistent behavior across four dimensions:

Modeling vulnerability: acknowledging uncertainty, admitting mistakes, naming what you don't know. Leaders who present as infallible create contexts where admitting mistakes is dangerous. Leaders who model fallibility signal that the team can do the same.

Inviting participation: explicitly requesting input, especially from quieter voices. "What am I missing?" is a signal that the leader genuinely wants challenge. "Does everyone agree?" (when the leader has already expressed a preference) is not.

Responding to bad news without shooting the messenger: the leader's reaction to the first person who brings a problem is observed by everyone else. "Thank you for telling me early" signals that bringing problems forward is safe. Any punitive response signals the opposite.

Framing work as learning: emphasizing growth and learning over performance demonstration changes the risk calculus around failure. Teams that frame challenges as learning problems rather than performance tests are more willing to take the risks that produce innovation.

Section 5: Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence (EI) in leadership contexts established the research case that self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skill predict leadership effectiveness beyond cognitive ability and technical expertise.

The Four Domains of Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness: accurate knowledge of one's emotional states, drivers, and the impact of one's behavior on others. The foundation: leaders who lack self-awareness are genuinely surprised by their impact on others, because they cannot track the gap between intention and effect.

Self-management: the ability to regulate one's emotional responses — particularly in high-stakes, high-stress situations. The leader who loses composure under pressure, who displays emotions without deliberate choice, whose emotional state infects the team climate, is exercising poor self-management regardless of their cognitive capabilities.

Social awareness (including empathy): the ability to read others' emotional states, understand group dynamics, and navigate the organizational social environment accurately. Empathy is not sympathy — it is the informational input that allows effective response to others' needs and concerns.

Relationship management: the ability to use emotional awareness to guide interactions effectively — inspiring, influencing, developing, managing conflict, building collaborative bonds.

Goleman's research claim — that EI matters more than IQ for leadership effectiveness — has been debated. The more defensible conclusion from subsequent meta-analyses: both matter, and the relative importance depends on the leadership context. For roles requiring primarily technical expertise (research science, certain engineering contexts), cognitive ability is more predictive. For roles requiring people coordination (most managerial and executive positions), emotional intelligence predicts outcomes that cognitive ability alone does not.

The Ripple Effect

Research on mood and emotional contagion in organizations (Barsade, Sigal; Hatfield, Elaine): leaders' emotional states spread to their teams through unconscious mimicry and social learning. A leader who is chronically anxious creates an anxious team culture. A leader who is engaged and optimistic creates conditions for team engagement that go beyond explicit communication.

This is not about leaders performing positivity. Performed positivity (forced smiles, relentlessly upbeat communication in the face of genuine difficulty) is detected by teams and reduces trust. Genuine emotional regulation — neither suppressing nor broadcasting every emotional state — combined with authentic optimism about the team's capacity, is what the research supports.

Section 6: Developing People

The most frequently underweighted dimension of leadership is development: the deliberate investment in the growth of each person on the team.

The Leader as Developer

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's research on the world's best managers (from Gallup's Q12 study) found that employees' relationship with their immediate manager is the primary driver of engagement, performance, and retention — more than company strategy, pay, or benefits. And among the questions most predictive of high performance: "Does my manager care about my development?"

The SDT connection: development investment satisfies the competence need directly, and the attention involved satisfies relatedness. The manager who actively develops their reports creates intrinsic motivation for the work — the work becomes a vehicle for growth, not merely a source of income.

The 70-20-10 Model

Morgan McCall's research on how executives develop: approximately 70% of meaningful leadership development occurs through challenging on-the-job experiences; 20% through developmental relationships (mentors, coaches, peers); 10% through formal training (courses, programs).

The practical implication: formal training is the smallest component of development. The leader's most powerful developmental lever is assigning challenging, growth-producing work — stretch assignments, new problem types, experiences that require the person to operate at the edge of their current capability.

Feedback as Development

Feedback is only developmentally useful if it is specific, behavioral, timely, and delivered in a context of psychological safety. The empirical literature on feedback is sobering: over-general feedback ("great work," "needs improvement") provides insufficient information for behavior change. Evaluative feedback delivered in a threatening context is defended against rather than integrated.

Specific behavioral feedback: "In yesterday's client presentation, when the client asked about the timeline, you paused before answering and gave them a complete answer including the reasoning — that was exactly the right response" is actionable. "You did a good job" is not.

The distinction between feedback and coaching: feedback describes past behavior; coaching focuses on future capability. Both are useful. Coaching ("what would you do differently next time?") often produces more sustained behavior change than feedback alone, because it engages the person's own reflective capacity rather than merely providing an external evaluation.

Section 7: Leading Through Change

Change leadership is a distinct competency that draws on the general leadership toolkit but applies it to a specific challenge: moving an organization or team from a current state to a desired future state against the resistance that change inevitably produces.

Kotter's 8-Step Change Model

John Kotter's model, drawn from research on large-scale organizational change, identifies eight sequential steps:

1. Create urgency: establish why change is necessary now; communicate the cost of not changing
2. Form a guiding coalition: build the team of people with authority, expertise, and credibility to lead the change
3. Develop a vision and strategy: create a clear, compelling picture of what success looks like
4. Communicate the vision: saturate the organization with the vision, repeatedly, through multiple channels
5. Enable action by removing barriers: identify and address structural, systemic, and attitudinal obstacles
6. Generate short-term wins: create visible, unambiguous early successes to validate the direction and sustain momentum
7. Consolidate gains and produce more change: use the credibility from early wins to tackle bigger obstacles
8. Anchor new approaches in culture: ensure the changes are embedded in systems, norms, and hiring practices, not dependent on individual champions

Kotter's primary finding: most change efforts fail, and they fail not because the vision is wrong or the strategy is flawed but because leaders skip steps — most commonly, rushing past urgency creation and guiding coalition building to announce the vision and expect compliance.

Heifetz on Adaptive vs. Technical Change

Kotter's model assumes the change is primarily technical — the solution is known, the resistance is navigational. Heifetz's adaptive leadership framework adds the more difficult category: adaptive change, where the solution is not known and requires people to give up something they value.

Adaptive change requires: - Naming the loss: what are people being asked to give up? Failing to acknowledge the genuine loss in a change undermines trust and intensifies resistance. - Pacing: change can only proceed as fast as people can adapt. Pushing faster produces breakdown. - Protecting voices of dissent: the people who most loudly resist change often have important information about what is being lost. The resistant employee is not always wrong.

Section 8: Leadership in Practice — Character, Integrity, and the Long Game

The research on leadership ultimately converges on a dimension that is difficult to operationalize but impossible to avoid: character.

Trust as Infrastructure

Research on leader trust (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002) establishes that trust in leadership is among the most robust predictors of organizational performance, follower well-being, and willingness to take the risks required for innovation. Trust is slow to build and fast to destroy, and its reconstruction after betrayal is asymmetric — partial recovery is possible, but baseline levels rarely return.

Integrity-based trust: the belief that the leader holds and acts on values that are consistent with the follower's interests and with organizational health. Built through behavioral consistency — doing what you say, saying what you mean, acknowledging when you're wrong.

Ability-based trust: confidence in the leader's competence to make decisions that will produce the outcomes they promise. Built through demonstrated competence, transparency about uncertainty, and accurate calibration of confidence.

Benevolence-based trust: the belief that the leader genuinely cares about followers' wellbeing, not only their performance. Built through individual attention, investment in development, advocacy in difficult situations.

The Long Game

Jordan's observation in week six — "direction and cover" — captures something the research confirms: what teams need from leaders is not constant visibility but reliable structure and protection. Structure: the direction is clear enough that people can make decisions without checking. Protection: when things go wrong (and they do), the leader absorbs rather than deflects the consequences.

The leader who throws team members under the bus in senior presentations — who distances from failure and attributes it to individuals — destroys trust rapidly and creates a culture where people manage up rather than managing work. The leader who stands with their team through difficulty — who says "we got this wrong, here's what we're doing about it" — builds the relational reserve that discretionary effort requires.

This is not about protecting poor performance. It is about the difference between accountability culture (we learn from failure, we improve, we hold each other to genuine standards) and blame culture (failure finds someone to attach to, exposure and self-protection are the organizing principles). Accountability cultures produce better outcomes. Blame cultures produce better-managed appearances.

From the Field: Dr. Reyes on Leadership and Therapy

Leadership and therapy have more in common than either profession usually admits. Both involve creating a container in which another person can do difficult work. Both require the practitioner to manage their own reactions — to not impose their anxiety, defensiveness, or preferences onto someone else's process. Both require the practitioner to believe, more than the person sometimes believes themselves, in the person's capacity for growth.

The best leaders I've known — and I've known a few, because therapists hear a lot about bosses — are people who don't need the team to succeed in order to feel okay about themselves. They're secure enough to let other people shine. They don't take credit for team accomplishments as evidence of their own worth. They invest in development because they genuinely want the people to grow, not because it makes them look good.

That kind of security is not natural for most people. For most people it has to be developed. And it tends to develop only when leaders have done some of the work I do in this room — attending to their own fear of inadequacy, their own tendency to perform competence rather than exercise it, their own relationship to failure and uncertainty.

The technical skills of leadership — communication, strategy, feedback, change management — can be taught in a weekend workshop. The character it takes to use those skills in a way that actually serves other people takes longer.

Research Spotlight: Google's Project Aristotle and Psychological Safety

In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle — a systematic study of 180 of its teams to identify the factors that predicted team effectiveness. The research team analyzed 250 attributes across teams including individual talent, team composition, management practices, and interpersonal norms.

The findings contradicted what Google's data-driven culture expected: individual talent and star-player composition did not predict team performance. The single most powerful predictor was psychological safety — the degree to which team members felt safe taking interpersonal risks.

The five factors identified (in order of predictive strength): 1. Psychological safety (most important) 2. Dependability: team members reliably complete quality work on time 3. Structure and clarity: roles, plans, and goals are clear 4. Meaning: team members find personal significance in the work 5. Impact: team members believe their work matters

The research confirmed Edmondson's earlier clinical and educational work at scale: the teams that produced the best outcomes were not the teams with the best individuals. They were the teams where individuals felt safe enough to bring their full capability to the work.

Practical implication: the best talent strategy for a leader is not acquiring the best individuals. It is creating the conditions where the people you have can do their best work.

Key Terms

Common Misconceptions

"Leaders need to have all the answers." The most damaging myth in leadership development. Leaders who feel required to have all the answers suppress the information and expertise of their teams. Adaptive challenges particularly require the leader to hold uncertainty rather than provide premature solutions.

"Leadership is about charisma." Charisma predicts initial follower attraction, not long-term leadership effectiveness. The research on narcissistic leaders — high charisma, self-focused, lacking in genuine empathy — consistently shows short-term engagement and long-term organizational damage.

"Psychological safety means being nice." Psychologically safe teams are often more directly confrontational than less safe ones — because safety allows honest challenge rather than managed deference. Psychological safety is about permission to be honest, not permission to be comfortable.

"The best individual performer makes the best leader." Promotion to leadership based on individual performance is the dominant talent practice in most organizations. It is also, the research suggests, often wrong: the skills that produce individual performance excellence are not the same skills that produce effective leadership. Some excellent individual performers make poor leaders; some mediocre individual performers make excellent leaders.

"You either have it or you don't." Bennis's quote in the epigraph captures the research: leadership behaviors are learnable. The character dimensions of leadership (security, integrity, genuine care for others) are developable. Some starting points are easier than others, but leadership is a skill domain, not a genetic endowment.