Enabling Leadership: The Most Critical and Yet Overlooked Kind

Here's a pattern I've seen play out countless of times: An organization recognizes it needs to change, whether from internal pressures or external shocks. Leadership articulates a reasonably compelling vision. Resources are allocated, goals are laid down, teams are energized and start spinning up creative ideas and solutions.

And then... nothing. The creative ideas die in approval, get smothered by beaucratic process, or simply fade away because nobody protected the space they needed to mature.

What went wrong? Usually, it's the absence of what complexity leadership researchers call enabling leadership, and it might be the most critical yet overlooked leadership function in any organization navigating major change or disruption.

The Missing Middle

Most conversations about leadership during disruption focus on two things: the visionary stuff (inspiring people, articulating direction, modeling new behaviors) and the operational stuff (processes, governance, measurement, resource allocation). These matter enormously. But they're insufficient.

Between vision and operations sits a crucial gap. Someone needs to create the conditions where new ideas can actually take root.

Someone needs to protect emerging innovations from the organizational antibodies that naturally attack anything unfamiliar. Someone needs to manage the inevitable tension between "how we've always done things" and "how we need to change."

That's basically enabling leadership. And when it's absent or ignored, even the best strategies and most creative innovations fail to translate into useful action.

What Enabling Leaders Actually Do

Enabling leadership isn't about having the best ideas or making all the decisions. That kind of top-down, almost narcissistic leadership is a recipe for failure in most any kind of disruptive conditions. Rather enabling leadership is about creating what researchers call "adaptive space", the conditions where creative problem-solving can flourish even within existing organizational constraints.

In practice, this looks like securing resources for productive experiments that don't fit neatly into existing budget categories. It means protecting team time and cognitive bandwidth (or creative headspace as I like to call it) so people have room to think creatively rather than just execute the backlog like automatons. It involves shielding promising ideas and initiatives from premature scrutiny or demands for ROI projections before the idea has had time to develop.

Perhaps most importantly, enabling leaders facilitate productive tension rather than trying to smooth it out. They recognize that the friction between innovation and operational excellence isn't a bug, it's a feature, and often one of the most critical ones. The goal isn't harmony; it's harnessing that tension to inspire better ideas and fuel better outcomes.

Why It's Often Overlooked

Enabling leadership tends to be invisible when it's working well, even though I would argue it's the most powerful measure of a true leader and not just a functional manager or on the other end of the spectrum, a self-described "visionary." There's rarely a moment where the enabling leader takes the stage to a standing ovation.

The credit typically flows to the team that generated the breakthrough or the executive who championed the vision. The person who quietly removed obstacles, brokered compromises, and kept the engine running while others did all the fun and exciting stuff? They're rarely in the highlight reel.

This invisibility, and frankly lack of glory, creates a dangerous gap in how we develop leaders. We often train people to be inspiring visionaries or excellent operators. We rarely train them to be boundary spanners, tension managers, and adaptive space creators. While enabling leadership comes naturally to some, for many leaders they stumble into it accidentally, if at all.

The skills involved are also genuinely difficult. Enabling leadership requires holding competing priorities simultaneously without rushing to resolve the discomfort created by the underlying tensions. It demands political savvy to navigate between factions across the organization without becoming captured by any of them. And it requires enough technical or functional credibility to understand what's being protected and enough organizational credibility to actually protect it.

Enabling Leadership for CMOs

For marketing leaders specifically, enabling leadership deserves special attention. Marketing sits at the intersection of multiple organizational boundaries: between the company and its customers, between brand and pipeline, between creative and analytical, between long-term big bets and quarterly performance pressure. This boundary-spanning position makes the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or marketing head of function uniquely positioned to play an enabling role, but only if they recognize it as a core part of their job.

When your team surfaces an insight that challenges corporate assumptions, enabling leadership means creating the space for that perspective to be heard rather than letting it disappear into the void. When a promising experiment needs different governance than your standard campaign approval process, enabling leadership means brokering that exception. When creative and analytics teams are at an impasse, enabling leadership means helping them find the productive tension between their perspectives rather than simply picking a winner.

Developing Your Enabling Capacity

The good news is that enabling leadership can be learned and practiced. Start by mapping where adaptive work is already happening in your organization, often in unsanctioned pockets that have figured out how to work around standard processes (if only they flew pirate flags above their desks to make it easy to find them!). Rather than shutting these efforts down, be open-minded and curious about what they're teaching you about where your organization could be more effective, more innovative.

Pay attention to the obstacles these teams face. Many will be legitimate constraints that serve important purposes. But some will be bureaucratic artifacts that no longer make sense. Distinguishing between the two, and having the internal capital to address and overcome the latter, is enabling leadership at its core. This need for organizational capital is often a core consideration for when "executive champions" are assigned to major change initiatives; it's an attempt to ensure enabling leadership is present inside potentially strategic or disruptive initiatives.

Most importantly, get comfortable with the idea of productive tension. The instinct to resolve conflict quickly is strong and often confused by new leaders as what "real leadership" means, but especially for leaders who've been rewarded for decisive action. Premature resolution of tension risks killing or at least stifling the ideas and innovations your organization needs. Learn to hold the tension open longer than feels comfortable, if you believe it has the potential to be productive.

Enabling is the Connective Tissue

I've come to think of enabling leadership as the connective tissue of organizational change, which is why it's a central idea in Complexity Leadership Theory and the foundation for Disruption Fluency. Without it, you have vision and strategy that never becomes reality and operations and structure that can't change to meet disruption at the speed needed. With it, you have a fighting chance of translating bold vision into actual organizational results.

So the next time a change initiative stalls in your organization, before blaming the vision or the execution, ask a different question: Who was supposed to be creating the conditions for this to succeed? And did they have the skills, the capital, the mandate, and the organizational support to do it?