Here’s an old observation about leadership, attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu somewhere around the 6th century BCE. The Tao Te Ching contains a characterisation of leaders that runs, in one common translation, roughly like this:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next comes one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised. When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’
This is striking. It’s not the standard account of leadership that most people carry. In the standard account, the leader is the visible centre of the enterprise — the one who makes the decisions, delivers the speeches, takes the credit when things work and the blame when they don’t. The leader’s visibility is part of what being a leader means. A leader nobody notices seems, on the standard account, to not really be leading.
Lao Tzu’s proposal inverts this. The best leadership, on his view, is invisible — so fully integrated into the functioning of the group that the members experience themselves as self-directed. When the enterprise succeeds, they feel it was their own achievement. The leader has done something specific to produce this outcome, but the something is mostly unseen.
What’s interesting is how well this ancient observation has held up under modern research. A small but growing body of organisational and psychological work supports a version of what Lao Tzu proposed.
The self-managing teams research
Starting in the 1980s, a line of research began examining what happens when teams are given substantial autonomy over how they organise their own work — when leaders deliberately reduce the scope of their direct intervention and rely instead on the team’s capacity to manage itself.
The American organisational researchers Susan Cohen and Edward Lawler, among others, studied self-managing teams across many organisational contexts — manufacturing, services, professional work, software development. Their findings were mixed but, on balance, encouraging. Teams given real autonomy, with appropriate structures and support, often outperformed teams managed in more traditional top-down ways. Employee satisfaction was higher. Turnover was lower. Quality often improved. Some measures of productivity improved, though others didn’t change substantially.
The conditions that distinguished successful self-managing teams from unsuccessful ones were specific. The teams needed clear purposes — not detailed instructions about how to work, but clarity about what the work was for. They needed the right membership — people with complementary skills and the capacity to collaborate. They needed access to information and resources. And crucially, they needed leaders who could genuinely let them manage themselves, without constantly intervening, and without either withdrawing entirely or taking back control the moment things got uncomfortable.
What this research documented was something Lao Tzu had proposed: that leadership operates, in specific situations, not by directing the work but by building the conditions under which the work directs itself. The leader’s contribution is real — the conditions don’t build themselves — but the contribution is largely invisible in the moment. What’s visible is the team doing the work.
The leader-member exchange tradition
A related research programme, developed by the American organisational psychologists George Graen and Mary Uhl-Bien, has examined what they call leader-member exchange — the specific relationships leaders build with individual members of their organisations.
Their finding, across many studies, is that the best leaders don’t have uniform relationships with their subordinates. They build differentiated relationships — investing more in some members, giving more autonomy to those who’ve earned it, maintaining closer supervision over others. Over time, the high-quality relationships develop into what the researchers call in-group dynamics, where the subordinate takes on more responsibility, exercises more discretion, and needs less direct management.
What the best leaders do, in this framework, is progressively build capacity in their team members so that they need less of the leader’s direct input over time. A leader who is always required to make every decision has, in an important sense, failed — because they’ve built an organisation that depends on them. A leader who can take a month’s holiday without the organisation noticing has, by contrast, built something robust. The departure is the test.
This parallels the Lao Tzu observation from a different angle. The leader who is required to be visibly present at every moment is producing an organisation whose capacity is bounded by the leader’s own availability. The leader who has built the organisation so it functions without their constant presence has produced something larger than themselves. The second kind of leadership is less dramatic, often less celebrated, and typically more valuable.
The followership counter-tradition
A different and related research tradition, developed by the American leadership scholar Robert Kelley, has examined what he called followership — the capabilities that distinguish excellent followers from mediocre ones.
Kelley’s central insight, which he developed in the 1988 Harvard Business Review article and a subsequent book, was that most writing on organisations focused obsessively on leadership and paid almost no attention to followership — as if the capacity to be a good subordinate were a default state that required no skill. The research suggested otherwise. The best followers, Kelley argued, exhibited specific characteristics that the poorer followers didn’t: they thought critically, they managed themselves, they took responsibility for their own work, they challenged the leader’s ideas when appropriate, they committed to the organisation’s mission rather than just to pleasing their boss.
These exemplary followers, as Kelley called them, were what effective leaders tended to build around themselves — and what less effective leaders failed to develop. The best leadership, in this framework, isn’t about being the sole source of direction. It’s about producing followers who, over time, need less direction because they’ve developed the capacity to direct themselves within the organisation’s purposes.
This ties back to the invisible-leadership thesis. A leader surrounded by exemplary followers becomes, for many routine purposes, unnecessary. The leader’s contribution is front-loaded — in selecting the right people, clarifying the purpose, establishing the norms, developing the capacities of subordinates — and the day-to-day operation runs with minimal visible direction. To an outside observer, it can look like the team is self-directing. In a specific sense, it is. But the conditions under which it can self-direct were built by the leadership.
Where invisible leadership fails
Before romanticising the invisible leader, it’s important to name the situations where visible, directive leadership is actually what’s needed.
Crises. When something has gone badly wrong, when rapid decisions need to be made under high stakes, when coordinated action across many people is needed in short time frames — the invisible-leader model fails. What’s needed in these situations is a visible figure making clear decisions quickly, communicating directly with those who need to act, and taking explicit responsibility for the outcomes. Firefighters don’t deliberate collectively about how to approach a burning building. Aircraft captains don’t empower their passengers to vote on landing procedures. Emergency rooms have clear command structures for specific reasons.
New organisations and turnarounds. When an organisation is being built from scratch, or when it needs to change course rapidly from a failing trajectory, visible directive leadership is usually necessary. The conditions for self-management don’t yet exist; they have to be built. Attempting to lead invisibly in these situations often produces drift, confusion, and eventual failure.
Situations with significant skill or information asymmetries. When the leader has expertise that the team members genuinely don’t, pretending to collective decision-making can produce worse outcomes than acknowledged expert direction. A surgeon can’t run an operating theatre through consensus. A master craftsman teaching apprentices isn’t best served by pretending they’re all equal contributors. Expertise-based authority has its place.
Cultures and contexts that expect visible leadership. Some organisational and national cultures have strong expectations about what leadership should look like, and a leader operating below those expectations — too invisible, too self-effacing, too unwilling to occupy the formal role — can be read as weak or unfit, with damaging organisational consequences.
So the honest picture is: invisible leadership works well in specific conditions — mature organisations with capable people, stable circumstances, cultures supportive of distributed decision-making. In other conditions, visible directive leadership is actually better. The skill is knowing which conditions you’re in.
What to hold from this
For a young person thinking about leadership, particularly leadership they might exercise early in their career, some practical principles.
Notice when you’re needed and when you’re not. Many leaders intervene more than they need to, because intervening feels like leading. A useful discipline is asking, before you intervene: would this work out without me? If the answer is yes, consider whether your intervention is adding value or just making you feel useful.
Invest in building capacity in others, even at the cost of your own visibility. The leader who takes credit for everything good is producing an organisation whose capacity is bounded by their own. The leader who lets others take credit, who builds their capacity to make decisions well, who deliberately makes themselves replaceable — is producing something that persists beyond them.
Develop the skill of knowing when to be visible and when not. There’s no single right answer. Different situations call for different leadership presences. What distinguishes good leaders is not some universal style but the capacity to read situations and calibrate accordingly.
Don’t confuse invisibility with absence. The invisible leader is not uninvolved. They’re just involved in ways that don’t produce visible displays of leadership. They’ve built the conditions, hired the right people, clarified the purposes, established the norms, and now they’re standing back while those things do the work. The work they’ve done is real, even if it doesn’t look like traditional leadership.
The question that remains
The deepest thing Lao Tzu’s observation captures, confirmed in specific ways by modern research, is that the purpose of leadership isn’t to be a leader. It’s to produce good outcomes for the organisation and the people in it. Sometimes that requires being visibly in charge. Often it requires being quietly effective in ways that let others shine. A career spent accumulating personal credit and visibility may look like a successful leadership career while producing organisations that collapse the moment the leader leaves. A career spent building capacity in others may look less impressive and produce organisations that thrive for decades after the leader has moved on.
Over a lifetime, which of these matters more depends on what you actually care about — your own reputation, or the work you’re doing. Lao Tzu’s answer, and the answer of much of the serious organisational research, is that the second usually matters more. The leaders who have left the most durable legacies are often the ones whose names aren’t the first that come to mind.
The question worth carrying, as you think about the role you want to play in future groups, teams, and organisations:
If you did your work well, and nobody particularly remembered your contribution but the organisation thrived, would that feel like success — or would it feel like failure?
Key research referenced: Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (ca. 6th century BCE, traditionally); Susan Cohen and Edward Lawler on self-managing teams; George Graen and Mary Uhl-Bien on leader-member exchange; Robert Kelley, “In Praise of Followers” (Harvard Business Review, 1988) and The Power of Followership (1992).