Leadership as a Process, Not a Position

Why leadership emerges through interaction, feedback, and shared purpose—not authority or status.

We Keep Pointing at the Wrong Thing

Most conversations about leadership start with the same question: Who is the leader? In complex environments, that question is already misaimed.

Leadership is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s not necessarily something a single person possesses—it’s something a system produces. When leadership works, it’s often hard to see. When it fails, everyone looks for a person to blame.

That reflex—to point at a role, a rank, a title—is understandable. Our bias is to consider only what we can see, and since positions are visible and legible, they give us someone to credit or punish. Politicians understand this. When the economy–not something any individual or group controls–is going well, they point the finger of credit at themselves. But when it’s going poorly, they point the finger of blame elsewhere. But in the environments I’ve spent my life in—combat operations, elite teams, organizations under pressure—leadership rarely behaves the way hierarchical org charts—the things we can see—suggest it should.

The mistake isn’t moral. It’s structural.

The Position Fallacy

Organizations routinely conflate three things that are not the same:

• Rank with leadership.
• Authority with influence.
• Role clarity with effectiveness.

This confusion persists because positions are easy to categorize, easy to control, and easy to measure. Bureaucracies love things that fit cleanly into these nice, neat boxes. But processes—especially human ones—are far messier. They don’t sit still long enough to be measured neatly.

Here’s the operational truth: Authority can compel compliance, but it cannot compel engagement. Engagement, or commitment, can only be cultivated. And engagement is what complex environments demand.

People comply when they’re watched. But they engage when they understand the purpose, trust the system, and believe their voice matters. No amount of positional authority can substitute for that. The US Military, and the Navy in particular, claims to value engagement. Yet, it does everything in its power to limit engagement by relying not on mutual relationships or meeting as equals, but on vertical relationships based on rank alone. That doesn’t work in a complex environment (check the scoreboard if you don’t believe me), and if the military were a business, it would have gone out of business long ago.

Leadership Emerges Where the Work Is

In real operations, leadership migrates. It moves to whoever has the clearest picture in that moment. Whoever is closest to the problem. Whoever the team trusts right now.

In a SEAL assault squadron, the kind I grew up in, this isn’t theoretical—it’s lived reality. The breacher leads at the breach. The medic leads when someone is bleeding. The comms guy leads when connectivity is failing. At the door, the Number One man leads in the most ancient way possible—by stepping across the threshold first into danger.

Leadership flows to competence, context, and trust—not rank.

The positional leader’s role is not to dominate these moments, but to enable them. To create conditions where the right leadership can emerge without friction or fear. When positional leaders try to hold leadership tightly, they slow the system down right when speed and adaptation matter most.

Leadership Is a Relational Phenomenon

Leadership does not live permanently inside individuals. It lives between them, in the interstices, in the relationships that connect people to people.

It is shaped by trust, psychological meaningfulness, safety, and availability. it is shaped by shared (and routinely updated) mental models, and—most critically—norms for speaking up and dissenting. You cannot lead people who do not feel safe telling you the truth. And positional power, when misused, suppresses the very feedback effective leadership depends on.

I’ve seen this repeatedly: Teams with strong credentials and impressive résumés fail not because they lacked talent, but because they lacked relational meaningfulness and safety. People withheld concerns because they felt their input wouldn’t matter or because they didn’t feel safe. Weak signals went quiet. Reality arrived late—and hard.

Leadership is not projection. It’s reception. If you can’t hear the system talking back to you, you are not leading—you are broadcasting, pontificating, or bloviating.

Feedback Is the Engine

In complex systems, feedback—not authority—drives adaptation.

The quality of leadership in a system is proportional to four things: the timeliness of feedback, the honesty of feedback, the system’s ability to interpret it, and its willingness to act on it.

Good leaders don’t just receive feedback. They design environments where feedback can survive regardless of which direction it flows, where bad news travels as fast as good news, and where dissent is treated as information, not insubordination.

Rank does not accelerate learning. Feedback does.

Simple Rules Beat Detailed Instructions

Plans do not survive first contact with complexity. Good teams do.

Complex environments overwhelm detailed plans. They change faster than centralized control can keep up with. What scales is not instruction—it’s constraint.

Effective leadership processes rely on a clear purpose, simple rules, and broad latitude for ethical execution. Simple rules travel. They allow local adaptation without waiting for permission.

In the SEAL Teams, a handful of rules guided behavior under extreme uncertainty. Regarding the enemy: Don’t bunch up; don’t cross open areas without someone covering you; make contact with the smallest element possible. These are the rules that, if broken, don’t only increase one’s chances of failure, then hasten catastrophe. And because relationships are so important to high-performing teams, similar simples rules apply to the team room as well: Meet as equals regardless of rank; show mutual respect for all the diverse knowledge, skill, and experience a teammate brings; actively show care and concern—e.g., learn to listen well. It sends a big, fat signal that you care about what your teammate has to say, even if you disagree.

These aren’t slogans. They’re constraints that enable success in a world that changes rapidly. They narrow the field of action without prescribing specific behavior. They allow judgment to operate where it belongs—closest to the problem.

The Leader’s Real Job: Shaping Conditions

If leadership is a process — input, action, output — then the leader’s role shifts dramatically.

The job becomes one of stewarding purpose and function. Setting initial conditions, like simple rules and relational tone, and boundaries, such as deadlines, budget, decision-making authority, and non-negotiables. Within the boundaries, variation and dissent are encouraged, feedback loops are built and protected, and learning and effort—not just outcomes—are rewarded.

This work is quieter than issuing orders. It’s less visible. And it’s far more demanding. You don’t get to hide behind decisiveness or charisma. You must tend to the system itself as a participant, practitioner, co-creator, and learner. Above all, you have to be present.

All of this is easier said than done—much easier—and most leaders simply aren’t trained for this. They’re trained to perform leadership, not to cultivate it.

Why This Threatens Traditional Leadership Models

This view of leadership is threatening because it decentralizes influence. It reduces the centrality of the individual leader. It makes leadership harder to measure—and harder to take credit for or shift the blame.

But it also dramatically increases adaptability. It builds resilience into the system rather than into a hero. Heroic leadership fails the moment the hero is absent, overwhelmed, or wrong. Process-based leadership keeps working.

When Position Still Matters

This is not an anti-authority argument.

Positions still allocate responsibility. They establish legal and moral accountability. They absorb risk on behalf of the team. Someone still owns the consequences. But position should support the leadership process—not replace it. Authority should create space for leadership to emerge, not smother it.

The Cost of Confusing Position for Leadership

When leadership is treated as a position, teams wait instead of act. Dissent goes underground. Adaptation slows.

When leadership is treated as a process, teams self-correct. Learning accelerates. Responsibility, accountability, and ownership are shared.

In complex environments, leadership does not belong to a single person. It belongs to the moment—and to the system prepared to meet it. In a word, this is character, and the distinction isn’t academic. It’s the difference between organizations that survive turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity (TUNA)—and those that collapse while still insisting someone should have been “more decisive.”

Working With Leaders in Complex Environments

I work with senior leaders, teams, and institutions operating in conditions of uncertainty, risk, and consequence. If this essay resonates, you can learn more about my work or contact me directly.