Learn how leadership can be exerted by individuals at all levels, regardless of formal authority. Explore distributed leadership models and practical strategies for influence.
Written by Laura Bouttell • Thu 20th November 2025
Leadership can be exerted by individuals at every organisational level, from frontline employees to chief executives, and increasingly, leadership emerges through influence rather than formal authority alone. This fundamental shift challenges the traditional assumption that leadership resides exclusively with those who hold senior positions. Research consistently demonstrates that effective leadership is an activity available to anyone willing to take initiative, regardless of their place in the hierarchy.
The evidence is compelling: organisations with distributed leadership patterns—where influence emerges from multiple sources rather than flowing exclusively from the top—demonstrate superior innovation, agility, and employee engagement. Deloitte's research found that companies with leaders at all levels show 28% higher revenue growth and 18% improved customer satisfaction compared to those relying solely on positional leadership.
Yet many organisations continue to confuse leadership with management authority, missing opportunities to harness the leadership potential that exists throughout their workforce. This article examines who can exert leadership, how influence manifests at different organisational levels, and practical strategies for developing leadership capability wherever you sit in the structure.
Leadership can be exerted by anyone who influences others to achieve collective goals, irrespective of formal position or title. This inclusive definition recognises that leadership is fundamentally about action and impact rather than hierarchical status. The critical question isn't whether someone holds a particular role, but whether they demonstrate behaviours that mobilise others toward shared objectives.
Formal leaders derive their authority from organisational position and are officially recognised as heads of teams, departments, or entire institutions. Their leadership is legitimised through hierarchy—a manager assigned responsibility for a team possesses formal authority to make decisions, allocate resources, and direct work because their title bestows that power.
However, formal authority alone doesn't guarantee effective leadership. Research suggests that 50-60% of people in formal leadership positions fail to inspire, develop, or transform their teams. They may manage competently—coordinating activities, solving problems, maintaining systems—but fail to create the vision, alignment, and commitment that characterise true leadership.
The most effective formal leaders recognise that their positional authority is merely a starting point. They earn influence through competence, integrity, and relationships rather than relying solely on their title to compel compliance.
Leadership can also be exerted by informal leaders who lack hierarchical authority but wield considerable influence through expertise, relationships, and personal credibility. Informal leadership emerges organically rather than being bestowed by organisational design. It manifests when colleagues voluntarily seek someone's guidance, adopt their ideas, or follow their example.
Informal leaders influence through several mechanisms:
Consider the software developer who becomes the go-to person for architectural decisions, not because of their job title but due to their technical acumen and judgement. Or the customer service representative whose colleagues emulate their approach to handling difficult situations. These individuals exert leadership through influence rather than formal authority.
Organisations that recognise and nurture informal leaders gain significant advantage. These individuals often possess unique insights about operational realities, maintain strong peer relationships, and can catalyse change in ways that formal announcements cannot.
Leadership can be exerted by individual contributors (ICs) who occupy non-managerial positions yet demonstrate substantial influence. Recent research found that 62% of individual contributors plan to remain in IC roles rather than pursuing management, yet this doesn't mean they eschew leadership.
Individual contributors exercise leadership through several avenues:
Thought Leadership: Developing and sharing expertise that shapes how others think about challenges and opportunities. This might involve publishing insights, speaking at conferences, or informally educating colleagues.
Initiative: Identifying problems and mobilising resources to address them, even without formal responsibility to do so. This entrepreneurial approach to one's role demonstrates leadership by expanding impact beyond narrow job descriptions.
Cross-Functional Influence: Building relationships across organisational boundaries and coordinating efforts that require collaboration. ICs who effectively navigate matrix structures and facilitate cooperation demonstrate crucial leadership.
Standards Setting: Modelling excellence in execution that raises the bar for peers. When others emulate your approach to quality, customer service, or innovation, you're exercising leadership through example.
Harvard Business School research on influence without authority identified four core skills individual contributors need: self-awareness, learning agility, communication excellence, and the capacity to build trusting relationships. These capabilities enable ICs to shift mindsets and mobilise action despite lacking formal power.
Leadership can be exerted differently depending on one's position in the organisational hierarchy. Whilst the fundamental elements of leadership—influence, direction-setting, alignment—remain constant, their expression and scope vary considerably across levels.
Frontline managers and supervisors occupy the entry level of formal management, directly overseeing teams and employees whilst reporting to middle managers. Leadership at this level focuses almost exclusively on effective execution and tends to be more short-term oriented.
Frontline leaders typically employ more hands-on or transactional leadership styles, concentrating on day-to-day tasks and ensuring employees meet performance expectations. They balance functional or technical understanding of their team's work with interpersonal skills, requiring strong capabilities in:
The challenge for frontline leaders is managing the transition from individual contributor to someone accountable for results achieved through others. Many struggle because organisations promote based on technical competence rather than leadership potential, then fail to provide adequate development support.
Yet frontline leadership proves crucial for organisational success. Research by Gallup demonstrates that managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement. Frontline leaders shape whether employees feel valued, understand their purpose, and commit discretionary effort.
British retailer John Lewis offers an instructive example. Their Partnership model distributes leadership extensively to frontline managers, granting them significant autonomy in decision-making and profit-sharing. This approach cultivates a sense of ownership that drives both customer service excellence and innovation.
Middle managers occupy a transitional level, managing other managers whilst also reporting upward to executives. Leadership at this level establishes operational goals and coordinates effort required to meet these objectives.
Data suggest middle managers share execution-focused competencies with frontline supervisors and relationship-focused capabilities with executives. They serve as crucial transmission mechanisms, translating strategic intent into operational reality whilst channelling feedback upward about implementation challenges and emerging opportunities.
Middle managers exert leadership through:
The middle management layer has faced persistent criticism—regularly characterised as bureaucratic, resistant to change, and unnecessary in flatter organisational structures. Yet research increasingly recognises middle managers as critical to organisational effectiveness.
A study published in the Strategic Management Journal found that middle manager quality explained significant variance in business unit performance, independent of senior leadership or frontline capability. Effective middle managers amplify strategic intent whilst buffering frontline teams from organisational turbulence.
Leadership can be exerted at the executive level through wide-impact, high-stakes decisions about organisational strategy that others will execute. Executives are expected to exhibit visionary leadership, setting compelling direction and inspiring others to follow.
The objective at the top of the hierarchy is to consider medium and long-term strategy for the organisation at large. Executive leaders are more "zoomed out" compared to the "zoomed in" perspective of frontline managers. Their influence affects entire business units, stakeholder relationships, and organisational culture.
Executive leadership manifests through:
The transition from middle management to executive leadership requires significant cognitive shift. Whilst middle managers focus on optimising their domains, executives must think systemically, making decisions that benefit the whole even when suboptimising individual parts.
Consider how Paul Polman exercised leadership as Unilever's CEO. He abandoned quarterly earnings guidance, invested heavily in sustainability despite short-term margin pressure, and redefined corporate purpose around improving lives. This visionary approach required courage to withstand investor criticism, ultimately delivering superior long-term returns whilst transforming industry norms.
Leadership can be exerted through distributed and shared models that challenge traditional hierarchical assumptions. These approaches recognise that complex organisational challenges often exceed any individual leader's capacity, necessitating more collaborative patterns of influence and decision-making.
Distributed leadership is a conceptual and analytical approach to understanding how the work of leadership takes place amongst people and in the context of complex organisations. Rather than viewing leadership as residing in individuals, distributed leadership emphasises interdependent interactions where influence emerges from multiple sources.
This perspective draws on theories of distributed cognition, suggesting that leadership is an emergent property of organisational systems rather than a characteristic of particular people. Leadership activities—sensing opportunities, making sense of ambiguity, relating across boundaries, innovating—become distributed across the collective rather than concentrated in designated positions.
Distributed leadership differs from simply having multiple leaders. It's not about delegation or shared responsibilities in a conventional sense. Rather, it reflects a fundamental reconceptualisation of how leadership functions within organisations.
Key principles include:
Research in educational settings demonstrates distributed leadership's power. Schools where principals work with teacher leaders to share leadership responsibilities accelerate and sustain reform more effectively than those relying solely on principal authority. The distributed approach harnesses diverse expertise and builds broader ownership of outcomes.
Shared leadership is defined as "an emergent team property that results from the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members." This model proves particularly effective when tasks involve high interdependence, creativity, and complexity.
In shared leadership arrangements, multiple team members exercise influence over collective direction, decision-making, and outcomes. Rather than one person determining objectives and approach, the team collectively establishes goals and navigates challenges.
Shared leadership manifests through:
Research published in the Academy of Management Journal found that teams with higher shared leadership demonstrated superior performance, particularly on complex tasks requiring innovation. The diversity of perspectives and distributed accountability drove better problem-solving and adaptation.
However, shared leadership isn't universally appropriate. It requires significant investment in trust-building, communication capability, and psychological safety. Teams facing urgent deadlines or working in highly structured environments may find shared leadership cumbersome. The model works best when knowledge is distributed, tasks are ambiguous, and team member maturity is high.
Organisations seeking to distribute leadership more broadly must create enabling conditions:
Climate of trust and transparency: People won't exercise informal leadership if they fear political repercussions or lack confidence in colleagues. Psychological safety—the belief that one can take interpersonal risks without punishment—forms the foundation for distributed leadership.
Preparation and development: Distributing leadership doesn't mean abandoning development. Organisations must invest in building capabilities across levels, ensuring people possess skills needed to exercise influence effectively.
Supportive structures: Formal systems should enable rather than constrain distributed leadership. This might involve flatter hierarchies, cross-functional teams, decision-making frameworks that empower lower levels, and communication platforms that facilitate knowledge sharing.
Cultural reinforcement: Leaders must model collaborative approaches, celebrate when informal leadership emerges, and resist the temptation to reassert hierarchical control when tensions arise.
Technology companies have pioneered distributed leadership models. Spotify's "squad" structure empowers small, autonomous teams to make decisions about product development without layers of approval. This distribution of authority has enabled rapid innovation whilst maintaining alignment through clear mission and values.
Leadership can be exerted through influence long before one obtains formal authority. Developing the capacity to lead from wherever you sit in the organisation accelerates career progression whilst creating immediate impact.
Influence without authority begins with developing recognised expertise. When people view you as genuinely knowledgeable about domains relevant to organisational success, they seek your input and defer to your judgement.
Building expertise requires focused effort:
Depth in critical areas: Rather than superficial knowledge across many domains, develop genuine mastery in topics that matter to organisational success. This might mean becoming the authority on customer segmentation, regulatory compliance, or emerging technologies.
Continuous learning: Expertise requires constant updating. Allocate time for reading research, attending conferences, experimenting with new approaches, and reflecting on experience. The half-life of knowledge continues to shrink; what constituted expertise yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow.
Knowledge sharing: Expertise becomes influence only when others recognise it. Share insights through presentations, blog posts, informal teaching, or consulting with colleagues. The act of helping others reinforces your credibility whilst building reciprocity.
Practical application: Theory divorced from practice rarely generates credibility. Demonstrate that your expertise produces results by applying knowledge to real challenges and documenting outcomes.
Leadership fundamentally involves relationships. Individual contributors who build extensive networks across organisational boundaries position themselves to coordinate action that formal structures struggle to achieve.
Effective relationship-building involves several elements:
Genuine interest in others: Approach colleagues with curiosity about their work, challenges, and perspectives. Ask questions that demonstrate interest rather than networking from purely instrumental motives. Authentic relationships prove more durable than transactional connections.
Reciprocity: Offer help before asking for it. Build a reputation as someone who contributes to others' success without immediately expecting return. This generosity creates social capital you can draw upon when needing support.
Bridging silos: Consciously build relationships across functional and hierarchical boundaries. These connections enable you to spot opportunities for collaboration, facilitate introduction, and navigate organisational complexity.
Communication excellence: Adapt your communication style to different audiences, listen actively, and ensure mutual understanding. Relationships deepen when people feel heard and understood.
Research by Rob Cross and colleagues on organisational network analysis found that well-connected individuals—those with diverse relationships across the organisation—wielded disproportionate influence regardless of formal position. They became critical information brokers and change catalysts.
Leadership can be exerted through entrepreneurial initiative that expands impact beyond narrow job descriptions. Organisations value people who identify opportunities and mobilise resources to pursue them, even without being explicitly asked.
Effective initiative involves:
Problem identification: Develop the habit of noticing friction, inefficiency, or missed opportunities that others overlook. Curiosity about how things work and could work better distinguishes leaders from those simply executing assigned tasks.
Solution development: Rather than merely identifying problems, invest energy in developing practical solutions. Research options, build business cases, and create implementable proposals rather than abstract suggestions.
Coalition building: Recognise that most valuable initiatives require cooperation from others. Identify stakeholders, understand their interests, and enrol support before attempting implementation.
Bias toward action: Whilst thoughtful planning matters, excessive analysis creates paralysis. Develop comfort with intelligent experimentation—testing approaches on small scale, learning from results, and iterating rapidly.
Celebrating others: When initiatives succeed, generously attribute credit to collaborators. Leaders who make others look good while taking responsibility for failures earn trust and future cooperation.
Admiral Lord Nelson's leadership during the Napoleonic Wars exemplifies initiative. His willingness to interpret orders creatively, take calculated risks, and lead from the front inspired extraordinary loyalty. The Royal Navy's tradition of "mission command"—granting subordinates autonomy within commander's intent—reflects this philosophy.
Leadership can be exerted upward and laterally, not just downward. Individual contributors who effectively influence senior stakeholders amplify their impact and accelerate career progression.
Managing up requires understanding what senior leaders value, need, and face as pressures. Rather than simply executing assigned tasks, anticipate needs, proactively solve problems, and communicate in ways that make senior leaders' jobs easier.
Effective upward influence involves:
Alignment with priorities: Understand organisational strategy and senior leaders' objectives. Frame your ideas and initiatives in terms of how they advance these priorities rather than your personal interests.
Problem-solution framing: Senior leaders face countless issues competing for limited attention. When raising problems, come prepared with proposed solutions and their implications rather than simply escalating decisions.
Communication discipline: Respect time constraints by communicating concisely. Lead with conclusions, provide supporting detail as needed, and adapt style to individual preferences—some leaders prefer data, others narrative.
Reliability: Build reputation for delivering commitments on time and with quality. This credibility gives you license to stretch boundaries and propose ambitious initiatives because leaders trust your judgement.
Strategic timing: Recognise when leaders are receptive to input versus when they're overwhelmed. Political and emotional intelligence about appropriate moments to influence proves crucial.
Leadership can be exerted through distributed approaches, yet implementation faces significant challenges that organisations must navigate thoughtfully.
When leadership distributes across multiple actors, maintaining coherent direction becomes more complex. Without clear alignment mechanisms, distributed leadership risks fragmenting into competing agendas that work at cross-purposes.
The challenge intensifies as organisational scale increases. Whilst small teams might naturally maintain alignment through frequent interaction, larger organisations require explicit mechanisms—shared metrics, communication forums, strategic frameworks—to ensure distributed leaders pull in consistent directions.
British multinational GSK faced this challenge during its organisational restructuring. Efforts to push decision-making authority closer to markets initially created inconsistency in brand positioning and resource allocation. Only through substantial investment in leadership development, communication infrastructure, and governance frameworks did they achieve alignment whilst preserving local autonomy.
Distributed leadership can obscure accountability, particularly when initiatives require cross-functional collaboration. If multiple people share leadership responsibility, who is accountable when things go wrong? This ambiguity can lead to diffusion of responsibility where everyone assumes someone else is handling critical tasks.
Effective distributed leadership requires explicit agreement about accountability. Who has decision rights in different domains? How do conflicts get resolved? What happens when distributed leadership yields sub-optimal outcomes?
Distributing leadership doesn't eliminate organisational politics; it may intensify competition for influence. When formal authority doesn't clearly delineate who leads what, informal jockeying for position can become consuming.
Some individuals struggle to relinquish control, particularly those who advanced under traditional hierarchical models. Senior leaders who intellectually endorse distributed leadership may unconsciously undermine it by micromanaging decisions or dismissing ideas not originated at senior levels.
Successfully navigating these political dynamics requires explicit culture work—reinforcing values of collaboration over competition, celebrating shared success over individual achievement, and modelling genuine openness to influence regardless of its source.
Leadership can be exerted more broadly only when people possess requisite capabilities. Organisations that distribute leadership without investing in development create frustration and failure.
Different people require different development. Someone technically brilliant but lacking emotional intelligence needs different support than someone politically savvy but strategically naive. Distributed leadership demands sophisticated approach to capability assessment and development.
Yes, leadership can be exerted by anyone willing to influence others toward collective goals, regardless of formal position. Research demonstrates that approximately 70% of leadership effectiveness stems from behaviours and competencies that can be developed rather than innate traits or hierarchical authority. Individual contributors build influence through recognised expertise, relationship quality, demonstrated initiative, and delivering results that advance organisational priorities. The key is shifting from permission-seeking to responsibility-taking whilst respecting organisational norms and building genuine credibility through contribution rather than self-promotion.
Formal leadership derives from organisational position and includes legitimate authority to direct work, allocate resources, and make decisions within defined scope. Informal leadership emerges from personal influence when people voluntarily seek someone's guidance or follow their example, independent of hierarchical position. Formal leaders can exert both formal authority and informal influence, whilst informal leaders rely exclusively on earned credibility through expertise, relationships, and demonstrated judgement. Both types prove essential—formal leaders provide structure and legitimacy whilst informal leaders often drive innovation, maintain culture, and influence peers in ways formal authority cannot.
Distributed leadership views leadership as an emergent property arising from interdependent interactions across the collective rather than residing in designated individuals. Traditional hierarchical leadership concentrates authority and decision-making at senior levels with downward delegation, whereas distributed leadership enables influence to emerge based on expertise, context, and need. Distributed approaches prove particularly effective for complex challenges requiring diverse knowledge and rapid adaptation, though they demand higher investment in trust-building, communication capability, and alignment mechanisms. Organisations often blend both models—maintaining hierarchical accountability whilst creating space for distributed influence and initiative.
Individual contributors who exert leadership without formal authority typically demonstrate four core capabilities: self-awareness to understand their impact on others and regulate behaviour accordingly; learning agility to extract lessons from experience and apply them to new situations; communication excellence including both articulating ideas compellingly and listening actively; and relationship-building to cultivate trust and social capital across organisational boundaries. Additionally, effective IC leaders show initiative by identifying problems and mobilising resources to address them, develop recognised expertise in domains valuable to organisational success, and manage up by understanding senior priorities and framing contributions accordingly.
Organisations cultivate leadership throughout by creating enabling conditions rather than simply exhorting people to lead. Critical elements include establishing psychological safety where people can take interpersonal risks without punishment; providing development opportunities that build leadership capabilities across levels; creating structures that empower lower-level decision-making rather than requiring endless approvals; explicitly recognising and celebrating when informal leadership emerges regardless of source; ensuring senior leaders model collaborative approaches and genuine openness to influence; and implementing distributed decision-making frameworks that clarify accountability whilst preserving autonomy. Culture proves more important than programmes—leadership at all levels flourishes when organisational values, norms, and systems consistently reinforce distributed influence.
Organisations relying exclusively on positional leadership face several risks: they fail to harness expertise and insights from frontline employees closest to customers and operational realities; they create bottlenecks where decisions queue awaiting senior approval, slowing response to market changes; they cultivate learned helplessness amongst employees who wait for direction rather than exercising initiative; they miss opportunities for innovation that emerge from unexpected sources; and they create succession vulnerabilities when leadership capability concentrates in few individuals. Research shows companies with leadership capacity distributed across levels demonstrate 28% higher revenue growth than those dependent solely on senior executives, suggesting positional leadership alone represents competitive disadvantage.
Conflicts arising from competing leadership claims require explicit frameworks for decision rights and dispute resolution. Effective approaches include establishing clear domains of accountability where specific individuals or teams have legitimate authority to make final decisions; creating escalation paths that specify how unresolved conflicts get addressed without defaulting to senior intervention; implementing decision-making protocols that distinguish between one-way doors requiring consultation versus two-way doors allowing autonomous action; fostering culture that values collaboration over competition through reward systems and role modelling; and developing facilitation capabilities to navigate competing perspectives toward synthesis rather than win-lose outcomes. The goal isn't eliminating healthy tension but channelling it productively.