“None of us is as smart as all of us.” — Ken Blanchard
We love stories about exceptional individuals. The visionary entrepreneur. A brilliant individual in science. The courageous political leader. Perhaps we like them because they make complicated stories easier to tell. History acquires a face and a name.
But almost nothing important that human beings accomplish is the work of one person.
No individual builds a railway, runs a hospital, operates a bank, defends a country, or sends a spacecraft to the Moon. These are collective achievements.
And the moment work becomes collective, something else becomes necessary: coordination.
People must somehow agree on what they are trying to achieve, who does what, what happens first, how resources are allocated, and who decides when they disagree.
This, I believe, is one of the simplest explanations for why we need leadership.
Why Coordination Is Essential
Think of a symphony orchestra.
Every musician may be exceptionally talented. But fifty excellent musicians playing according to fifty different interpretations will not produce a great symphony.
Someone must establish tempo and interpretation. The musicians must listen to one another. They need to know when to lead, when to follow, and sometimes when not to play at all.
Or think of a rowing crew.
Eight powerful rowers pulling at different moments will not make the boat go faster. Strength becomes useful only when the rowers synchronize it.
Organizations are much the same.
As they grow, people specialize. Finance sees one part of reality, operations another, marketing another, technology another. Each can be perfectly competent. Each can even be right from its own perspective.
And together they can still produce the wrong result.
The problem is no longer individual capabilities. It is whether those individual capabilities can work together.
What Leadership Coordinates
This does not mean that a leader should control everything.
Quite the opposite.
I have always suspected leaders who believe that coordination means having every decision pass through them. That may create obedience, but it rarely creates a powerful organization.
Good leadership creates enough common direction for people to coordinate their own work.
Three things seem important.
Clarity of purpose. People need to understand not only what they are doing, but also why. Otherwise, departments optimize their own objectives while damaging the whole.
Alignment of effort. Different responsibilities have to be connected. Priorities conflict. Resources are limited. Dependencies appear. Someone has to make sure the pieces still fit together.
Trust and accountability. Coordination depends on a remarkably simple assumption: I can rely on you to do your part, just as you can rely on me to do mine.
When that trust disappears, organizations become heavier. People protect themselves. They copy more people into emails, demand more approvals, create more procedures, and spend more time checking one another.
Leadership, at its best, reduces the need for all that.
Government and Coordination at Scale
The same problem appears at the level of society.
Government and leadership are not the same thing. But government is one mechanism societies have developed to coordinate collective work on a very large scale.
Roads, courts, schools, electricity networks, public health systems, national defence — none can depend entirely on millions of individuals making unrelated decisions.
Markets coordinate an extraordinary amount of human activity. Communities and civil society do too. But some problems require common rules, shared infrastructure, and decisions that bind people who may never meet one another.
Consider a bridge.
Thousands or millions may eventually use it, but somebody must coordinate financing, land, engineering, permits, construction, safety standards, and maintenance. No driver crossing the bridge could accomplish that independently.
The government provides the institutional framework. Leadership is still required to make that framework work.
And, as experience repeatedly reminds us, having institutions does not guarantee good coordination.
The Temptation of Individualism
Our culture nevertheless remains fascinated by individual achievement.
We remember Neil Armstrong more easily than the thousands of people behind Apollo. We associate Apple with Steve Jobs, Amazon with Jeff Bezos, Tesla with Elon Musk, and Google with Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
That is understandable. But it can distort how achievement actually happens.
A founder may provide the original idea, energy, or ambition. But no founder designs every product, writes every line of code, raises every invoice, manages every supplier, and speaks to every customer.
At some point, entrepreneurship becomes organization.
And organization means coordination.
I learned this myself in banking. As responsibilities grew, it became increasingly obvious that having good people was not enough. You could put highly intelligent, experienced people around a table and still get a poor collective result. Each might be defending a perfectly reasonable position from the perspective of his or her own responsibilities.
Finance wanted one thing. Commercial people another. Risk saw dangers others underestimated. Operations saw practical difficulties that strategists could easily overlook.
The leader’s job was not to be smarter than all of them.
It was to help their unique knowledge become a coherent decision.
That is a very different idea of leadership.
When Coordination Becomes Bureaucracy
There is, however, a danger on the other side.
Because coordination is necessary, leaders sometimes conclude that more coordination must be better.
More meetings. Additional committees. More reporting. More approvals.
Soon people spend so much time coordinating the work that they have little time left to do it.
That is not leadership. It is bureaucracy.
Good coordination should make collective work easier, not harder.
The best organizations I have known were not necessarily those with the strongest central control. They were often those in which people understood the larger purpose well enough to make sensible decisions without constantly asking the boss.
That is the paradox.
Creating coordination requires leadership. But successful leadership eventually allows much of that coordination to happen without the leader.
Final Thoughts
Collective work gives us possibilities that individuals alone could never achieve. It also creates dependencies, disagreements, and the constant possibility that our efforts will pull in different directions.
That is why leadership is necessary.
Not because somebody must always be in charge of everybody else.
But because somebody must help us answer a few essential questions:
Where are we going?
Why are we going there?
How does my work connect with yours?
And what must we do together that none of us can do alone?
The conductor does not play every instrument. Not every oar is pulled by the coxswain. The leader does not perform everyone’s work.
The task is different.
Leadership turns separate efforts into collective achievements.
Questions for Reflection
1. Where in your team or organisation are capable people working hard but still pulling in different directions?
2. Is the common purpose clear enough that people can use it to guide their own decisions without constantly asking for approval?
3. Where do responsibilities, priorities, or resources overlap in ways that create friction, duplication, or delay?
📚Further Reading
- Ronald A. Heifetz — Leadership Without Easy Answers
Particularly relevant to the argument that leadership mobilizes people to address problems they cannot solve individually. - Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons
Perhaps the strongest book for the section on government and coordination. Ostrom shows that collective-action problems can be coordinated through institutional arrangements that are neither simply markets nor centralized government. - Chester I. Barnard — The Functions of the Executive
A classic that fits the thesis that organizations are cooperative systems, and executive leadership helps sustain coordination, communication and common purpose. - James G. March & Herbert A. Simon — Organizations
A deeper examination of why organizations exist and how specialization, decision-making and coordination interact. - Henry Mintzberg — The Structuring of Organizations
Particularly useful for your distinction between coordination and centralized control. Mintzberg describes different mechanisms through which organizations coordinate specialized work.
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