There Is No Role Called Leader

Gallup just published another piece telling "leaders" how to fix their "managers." It is a perfectly good summary of perfectly good data, wrapped around a word that does not mean anything.

The article, How Can Leaders Improve Employee Engagement and Company Culture? (September 21, 2026), reports that global engagement fell to 20% in 2025 and that the slide is driven largely by falling manager engagement. Then it tells "leaders" to develop their managers, define great coaching, measure manager effectiveness and model the behaviors they expect.

Read that list again. Every item on it is something a manager does with the subordinates they are accountable for.

So who, exactly, is this "leader"?

To be fair, Gallup is using "leaders" as shorthand for senior executives. And the best thinkers on this subject, John Kotter among them, never claimed that leading and managing were separate roles. They described two kinds of work that the same manager must do. I agree with them.

My quarrel is with the shorthand, because the shorthand has become the belief.

I have spent more than 30 years inside organizations, from the training room to the COO chair to the President’s office to Trusted Advisor. I have never once seen an org chart with a box labeled Leader. Not one. And yet our industry keeps writing as if there is a separate species of person, floating somewhere above the managers, who holds special powers the managers lack.

There is not. It is time we stopped pretending.

Leading is an accountability, not a role

In any employment hierarchy, roles come in two families: individual contributors and managers. The line between them comes down to one question. Whose work and results are you accountable for?

An individual contributor is accountable for their own output. A machinist, an underwriter, a staff nurse, a software engineer. They are responsible for giving their best efforts to meet the expectations they have been given by their accountable manager.

A manager is accountable for their own output as well as those of others. And here is the part our industry keeps getting wrong: leading those others is not a bonus feature of the manager role. It is the job. Setting direction, defining expectations, coaching, recognizing contributions, building the team's capability. That is what leading looks like when it shows up in a role.

Leading is a practice. It is not a position.

Elliott Jaques described finer distinctions inside these two families. Leads who assist a manager. Project and task leaders. Lateral relationships such as coordinating, monitoring and advisory roles, where one person directs another's work without being their manager. Those distinctions matter in role design, and I use them with clients. None of them changes the core question of who is accountable for whose results.

That leaves the hardest objection. What about the principal engineer who sets technical direction for six teams? The project lead running a launch? The charge nurse directing a shift?

Those people influence, coordinate and direct work, sometimes powerfully. Organizations should value that and reward it. But they are not accountable for anyone else's work and results, and that accountability is what separates influence from leading. Asking individual contributors to "step up and lead" without giving them a manager's authority or accountability sets them up to fail.

Different levels, same accountability

We all accept that people differ in capability. So we should also accept that there must be different levels of managerial roles, each handling more complexity and a longer time horizon than the one below it.

Elliott Jaques mapped this decades ago in his work on Levels of Work and Stratified Systems Theory. In most organizations the structure looks something like this.

(Managerial hierarchy by Level of Work)

The time spans in parentheses are what Jaques called time span of discretion: the longest task a role is accountable for completing. The higher the level, the further into the future the work reaches.

A First Line Manager is accountable for the individual contributors at Level I, their work and their results. A Director is accountable for First Line Managers. An executive is accountable for Directors. A President is accountable for executives.

Two refinements. Not every individual contributor sits at Level I; senior specialists can work at Level III or higher. Their level reflects the complexity of their work, not an accountability for others. And at the top, the President is accountable to a board, which governs rather than manages.

Notice what changes as you move up: the scope, the time horizon, the complexity of the problems. Notice what does not change: every one of those managers is accountable for their subordinates, for their work and for their results, and for leading them. The President leads executives. The Director leads First Line Managers. Nobody above Level I gets a pass, and nobody gets to call themselves a "leader" as if that excuses them from managing.

Gallup's own data makes my case

Here is the irony. Gallup's numbers, read plainly, prove the point they are dancing around.

According to the article, managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Manager engagement fell 9 points globally between 2022 and 2025, from 31% to 22%. Individual contributor engagement barely moved over the same period, slipping from 20% to 19%.

So the people whose engagement collapsed are the managers. And who is accountable for a manager's engagement?

Their manager.

That is not a "leader." That is a Director failing to lead First Line Managers. That is an executive failing to lead Directors. That is a President failing to lead the executive team. Gallup even admits it in its own advice, telling its "leaders" to "actively coach the managers who report to you."

Look at that phrase twice. First, Gallup's "leaders" have subordinate managers. They have managerial accountability. They are managers. Second, "report to" is the wrong frame entirely. Nobody in a healthy organization merely reports to anyone. A manager is accountable for subordinate employees, for their work and for their results. Reporting is passive. Accountability is not. In Jaques's terms, a subordinate is accountable to their manager, and the manager is accountable for the subordinate's work and results. Gallup simply refuses to call its "leaders" managers, and in doing so it hands the people most responsible for the decline a flattering title and a polite to do list instead of a clear accountability.

Why the word matters

Some will say I am arguing about semantics. I am arguing about accountability, and accountability lives or dies in language.

When we split "leaders" from "managers," three things happen in real organizations, and I see all three every week.

• Senior people stop managing. "I'm a leader, not a manager" becomes permission to set vision and skip the coaching conversations, the expectation setting and the follow through. Those get pushed down to someone else.
• First Line Managers get demoted in their own minds. If leading is something special that happens above them, then their job must be administration. Schedules, approvals, compliance. They stop seeing themselves as the people who shape engagement every single day, even though Gallup says that is exactly who they are.
• Individual contributors get a job with no tools. We tell them to "show leadership" and then judge them against an accountability they were never given the authority to carry.

In every case the accountability for leading people lands nowhere in particular. And accountability that lands nowhere in particular gets done by no one in particular.

The fix is not another leadership program. The fix is clear role design. Define every managerial role at its proper level. Make the managerial leadership practices explicit: defining expectations, coaching, recognizing contributions. Then hold every manager, from the First Line to the President, accountable for doing them with every subordinate they are accountable for.

Drop the shorthand

To the researchers, consultants, authors and keynote speakers who keep writing "leaders develop managers": drop the shorthand. It does not clarify anything. It blurs the single most important accountability in any organization, in front of the very executives who most need to hear it plainly.

Here is a simple test for the next article you read. Every time you see the word "leader," replace it with the question: whose manager?

If the sentence still makes sense, the author was talking about a manager all along. If it falls apart, the author was talking about nothing at all.

There are individual contributors and there are managers. Every manager leads. That is the job.

So let me ask you directly.

Who in your organization is called a leader but is not being held accountable as a manager?

Source: Gallup, How Can Leaders Improve Employee Engagement and Company Culture?, September 21, 2026.