The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

Richard Hackman, the Harvard organizational psychologist who studied performance teams and extolled the virtues of functional leadership, had also observed the role leaders play in helping groups navigate conflict. All of his research supported one strong conclusion—all great leaders will find themselves right in the middle of it. In order to be effective, Hackman wrote, a team leader “must operate at the margins of what members presently like and want rather than at the center of the collective consensus.” Hackman believed that dissenting wasn’t just a crucial function of a leader but a form of courage. Leaders who disrupted a team’s established norms and routines often paid a substantial personal toll for doing so—a phenomenon that later researchers would describe as “the pain of independence.”