In job descriptions, in presentations, in job adverts, everyone makes their own interpretation. An organisation can operate for a long time with these approximations.
Yet, at the moment when it needs clarity, this is no longer enough.
Who is a leader, and who is an expert?
There is no ready-made definition of the leader. And this is a good thing, because it would be illusory.
However, each organisation has every interest in building its own governance on this point, in giving itself its own criteria to distinguish a leader from an individual contributor, or more simply from an expert.
This distinction is not a question of seniority, nor of salary, nor of title.
A very senior expert, very well paid, and recognised in their field, is not necessarily a leader.
A manager at the beginning of their journey, on the other hand, may already be one.
What makes the difference is objective, measurable criteria. Here are some examples: the percentage of time really devoted to management activities, the number of people managed directly or indirectly, whether or not one has formal authority over hiring, dismissal, remuneration and performance review decisions, whether one has a scope that includes both hierarchical and functional responsibility, whether one achieves their objectives by themselves or through the work of a team.
An important point: one is not a leader because one ticks a box, and it is probably not useful to tick them all either. One is a leader because one combines several of them. A person who has many direct reports but no decision authority is not a leader, they are a coordinator. A person who decides but spends 90% of their time on expertise activities is an expert with decision authority, not a leader. The criteria must combine.
Once this reference point is set, another question emerges, more subtle.
There is not one leader, there are several
Among those we have identified as leaders, not all have the same prerogatives. This is even the silent cause of many misunderstandings in organisations: we call "leader" an aggregate of different profiles, and then we are surprised that confusion can arise.
In my HR practice, I distinguish at least six leadership profiles, which can coexist in the same person, whatever their department, but which are best named separately:
The direction profile sets the strategy, may represent the company externally, and is often responsible for succession planning for high-impact roles.
The reward profile manages the allocation of bonus and increase budgets and conducts performance review within their teams; it complies with the legal and operational framework defined by human resources.
The career management profile conducts career conversations, identifies and develops successors, contributes to recruitment, and drives mentoring and development within their teams.
The communication and transformation profile relays strategy to teams, translates changes into concrete narratives, and drives transformation initiatives.
The job description management profile knows the real work of their teams, ensures that descriptions reflect it, and represents their team and their job in the job architecture and very often in evaluation matters.
The operational profile steers day-to-day operations, priorities, workload, deadlines, quality.
These profiles are not silos. A leader can exercise several of them. But the organisation has every interest in knowing, leader by leader, which ones are active on which subjects.
The risks of undefined leadership
As long as these profiles are not named and assigned, we can neither distinguish the missions, nor manage very concrete situations:
– At the time of pay transparency, who in the organisation actually reviews job descriptions, to ensure they match the real work? Is it the same person who runs the annual remuneration review? And the one who will speak to teams to explain the transparency policy? If it is the same person, this should be confirmed. If they are different people, it is necessary to know who they are, and how they connect.
– Another frequent situation: a large number of decisions taken by the executive committee never actually happen on the ground. Have we clearly identified the leaders with the direction profile to carry the decision, the communication and transformation profile to relay it, and the operational profile to convert it into concrete delivery?
– In a reputational crisis, who are the leaders who take the lead? Those with the direction profile? The communication and transformation profile? The operational profile? We usually discover this in urgency, whereas it should have been clarified well in advance.
– It is during transformations, where an organisation should be at its most flexible and quickest, that we often observe a flaw with serious consequences: the channels to carry important information, to spread a change, to initiate a transformation, have not been identified. We do not know who speaks on behalf of what, nor whom to approach to relay. Yet we still need to have determined who carries this relay.
– The level review committees are no exception to these prerequisites. I mentioned in another article in this series, "The life of levels", that an organisation cannot form them at random. This assumes knowing who in the organisation has enough authority in the matter to defend a decision across the organisation. Without this clarification, we bring together people who have neither the real authority, nor the training to own what is decided there, and the decisions do not hold.
The essentials
Defining what a leader is is not a matter of judgement, it is a matter of governance. It goes through two stages: setting criteria that distinguish a leader from an expert, then naming the different leadership profiles and assigning them leader by leader.
A solid governance thereby gives itself its own definition of the leader, and embeds it in its processes.
These stages are crucial for what comes next, because you cannot build a training path for a leader you have not identified, whose profiles and missions you do not know.
This is the governance work that the HDH (HR Decision Hub) platform helps organisations to conduct, through its Leadership Charter Add-On: setting one's own criteria, defining one's leadership profiles, and putting each manager through these criteria to make it clear, in the open, who is accountable for what.
Beyond these structural clarifications, the leaders in charge of communication in the context of pay transparency need to be able to exercise it concretely.
On this point, the EU Pay Transparency Communications Toolkit developed by Becky Hewson-Haworth (Clarion Call), partner of HDH, brings a concrete framework to leaders who wish to equip this communication.