Who Leads When the Leader Is Not in the Room?

By Danny Wareham. 

For over a century we've searched for better leaders.

Danny Wareham asks, “What if we've been searching in the wrong place?” 

Leadership has traditionally been viewed through the lens of the individual. Organisations identify high-potential employees, invest in leadership development programmes and seek to cultivate the knowledge, behaviours and capabilities that distinguish effective leaders.  

This perspective has undoubtedly helped organisations develop capable managers, yet it also reflects assumptions that were formed in an era of clearer hierarchies, more stable environments and relatively predictable patterns of work. 

Today's organisations often look very different. Teams are increasingly cross-functional, expertise is distributed across networks rather than departments, and decisions are made closer to where knowledge resides.  

Given the range of responsibilities and challenges facing today’s leaders, locating all the required attributes, for all situations, all contexts, and for all followers, to effectively handle complex challenges, within a single individual could be considered unrealistic. 

The Question

This raises a question for Business Psychologists: if work has changed so dramatically, why are we still looking for the perfect leader? 

ABP member, psychologist and author, Danny Wareham, presented a summary of the primary research behind Constellation – an evidence-informed perspective that examines how leadership emerges within highly collaborative environments. Rather than asking what makes a great leader, the research asked a different question: under what conditions does effective leadership emerge? 

Rethinking Leadership in Complex Organisations 

Since leadership first became a subject of academic study in the nineteenth century, hundreds of theories and frameworks have emerged. 

From Great Man through behavioural, servant, authentic and distributed leadership, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain effective leadership. 

Across these numerous approaches, three commonalities are found in each model: 

• A leader is a person; 
• A leader sets the direction (i.e., a goal, objective, mission or vision); and 
• A leader is disproportionately influential in influencing culture 

After discussing this leadership research history and the influence of culture on individual and group behaviour, Wareham’s research asks a simple question: If the direction is paramount, and the cultural norms understood, is a traditional leadership role still required? 

Exploring Leadership Through Practice 

The research adopted an interpretive approach, drawing upon interviews with experienced Agile practitioners working across a range of industries, including technology, finance and the military. Using thematic analysis, the study sought to understand how participants experienced leadership within collaborative project management contexts. 

Rather than measuring predefined leadership behaviours, participants reflected upon their own experiences of working within teams where influence frequently shifted according to expertise, context and organisational need.  

Does the approach to leadership change when teams are experienced? Does a successful project output vary based on expertise, team perception or organisational size? 

Ultimately, the research looked to understand the moderating factors that could allow the project leader – the Scrum Master – to be removed from the process and allow the team to self-organise and achieve a shared objective. 

Three Insights from the Research 

Finding 1: Experience changes how success is defined 

The first finding largely reinforced existing thinking. Experienced and inexperienced practitioners viewed both project success and leadership differently. 

Less experienced practitioners tended to ask: 

• Was the project delivered on time? 
• How many backlog items were completed? 
• What direction should the leader provide? 

More experienced practitioners were more likely to ask: 

• What quality of work was handed to the next stage? 
• Did the team learn and improve during delivery? 
• Were better ways of working discovered? 

Rather than viewing success as the completion of tasks, experienced practitioners increasingly viewed success as the development of the team and the quality of the outcome. Their expectations of leadership shifted in parallel, favouring autonomy over direction. 

Finding 2: Context can outweigh experience 

The second finding complicated this picture. Experience alone did not explain leadership preferences. Two contextual factors consistently appeared to reset behaviour. 

Experienced practitioners became more transactional when: 

• They joined a new team where trust had yet to be established; 
• They worked in organisations of more than approximately 150 employees; 
• Their competence was not yet recognised by those around them. 

Under these conditions, practitioners who would normally favour autonomy instead preferred clearer direction, judged success through delivery metrics rather than learning, and became more cautious in their decision-making. 

Participants also described a distinct leadership preference that differed from existing approaches. Rather than wanting leaders to direct the work itself, they wanted leaders to protect the team's ability to work. 

This preference could be described as defensive leadership, where the leader's role is to: 

• Shield the team from unnecessary political interference; 
• Prevent work being introduced outside agreed processes; 
• Manage external stakeholders. 

Rather than asking leaders to lead the work, experienced practitioners increasingly wanted them to defend the environment in which good work could take place. 

Finding 3: One group broke the pattern 

One group consistently challenged the emerging themes. Participants with military backgrounds continued to favour autonomous leadership and qualitative measures of success, even when they were new to a team, working with unfamiliar colleagues and yet to establish personal credibility. 

In civilian organisations, trust is built through one-to-one, interpersonal relationships. It tends to be built through demonstrated reliability, competency, and predictability.  

Rather than trust being earned solely through repeated interpersonal interactions, military participants appeared to begin with institutional trust before developing interpersonal trust through experience. Trust development is systemised through established rituals, visible competency (displayed through uniforms and other artefacts), and prescribed capability through shared basic and ongoing training. 

What Does This Mean for Business Psychology?

In summary, the research suggests that teams can self-organise, self-govern, and self-orientate towards a shared objective, providing three factors are considered: 

1. The team must have a clear, articulable ‘north star’. This can be an emotive vision or a specific objective.
2. The team must have the psychological safety that allows each member to contribute towards that shared goal. This safety also permits challenge and friction. 
3. The team should be compartmentalised if it is part of a wider organisation in excess of 150 employees. 

Where these three moderating factors are considered, the Constellation approach outperforms traditional leadership practices across every HR performance indicator – including employee satisfaction, trust, learning optimisation, and belonging. 

Together, these findings suggest that effective leadership may depend less on the presence of an exceptional leader and more on creating the conditions in which leadership can emerge naturally.

If the team understands where it is going, feels safe to contribute, and operates within the right social context, perhaps the most important question is no longer who leads, but what allows leadership to happen? 

Conclusion

Constellation does not argue that leaders are unnecessary. Rather, it suggests that leadership itself may be better understood as an emergent property of purpose, culture and context than as the responsibility of a single individual. For Business Psychologists, that represents a subtle but significant shift in where we choose to focus our attention.

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