The Three-Legged Stool
I've spent a lot of time working alongside senior leaders, and I was talking recently with a colleague about the strange pressures that show up during conversations about our titles. He shared a situation from his work that stuck with me.
He's up for a significant promotion. A continent-wide leadership role. He's already started operating in that zone — setting direction, clarifying roles, supporting team members across regions. At the same time, his senior leadership is asking him important questions about delivery. About results. He is expected to report on outcomes.
Here's the tension. He's being asked to deliver results without yet having the formal authority to require them. When he checked in with his boss recently, he was told the role transition was "in the works," but taking longer than expected. So he's in this strange in-between place. And this is where leadership strain shows up.
I often think of leadership as a three-legged stool:
- Responsibility — what you're expected to do
- Authority — what you're allowed to decide
- Accountability — what you answer for, up and downstream
If you remove one of those legs - things start to wobble.
If you remove one of those legs - things start to wobble.
Right now, my colleague clearly has responsibility. His leadership is strong on accountability. What he doesn't quite have yet is authority — at least not formally. His team is still responding well; he'd already done the work to make sure his relationships were solid. But there's a limit to how much goodwill can carry if expectations keep rising.
This brings me back to titles.
Inside healthy teams, titles matter much less than trust, connection, and strong ability. Leadership can be flexible and people will step up to do what needs to be done regardless of their official job description.
But titles matter more than we like to admit in two key moments:
- They matter with external partners, who often need a quick signal to understand a person's level of responsibility in a conversation.
- And they matter during organizational transitions — when changes in authority and responsibility need to be made clearly visible to others (including staff who might be feeling the transition differently).
Titles can't make a leader. But at certain moments, titles protect leaders. They ensure that authority, responsibility, and accountability signals stay clear at critical times.
And transitions are exactly those moments.
The Leadership Check-In is a free 20-minute diagnostic that shows you where the real friction is showing up in your leadership — and what to do about it.
En route — but aren't we all.