Leadership, we’re often told, is about standing out, taking charge and organising effectively to deliver results. Most new leaders step into that established template and try to bring it to life in their daily work – only to hear complaints that their leadership style is too focused on the products and the numbers, and too little on the people and the culture. 

But what does it take to challenge the traditional template? What happens when leaders try to put development on par with delivering as their core concern? Those who aspire to lead in new ways often find themselves needing to forge a new model and carve their own path.

No one knows this better than a new cadre of leaders that have risen in prominence in the last decades. Their titles commit them to fostering ethics, diversity, innovation, sustainability, well-being and learning, among other goals. But they often receive an ambivalent embrace once they enter the C-suite, and find themselves being “marginal” and “leaders” at the same time. As a result, they have to define their place and purpose in novel ways to work alongside traditional business leaders.

There is a lot to learn from these “marginal” leaders about how to lead in a way that others have not done before, and we set out to distil their lessons in a study recently published in the Academy of Management Journal. We focused specifically on “leaders of learning”, as we call them, who are charged to make sure people and the organisation are not just efficient in the short term, but equipped for the long term. We studied senior executives in charge of learning and development across 69 multinationals, and found that they had to navigate conflicting currents to find firm ground as leaders in their organisation. 

Balancing dualities

Every leader’s role encompasses both instrumental and humanistic aims. They need to care about the organisational machinery, as well as its community. This is most evident when it comes to learning. For organisations, learning serves an instrumental purpose – it enables employees to perform better, advance in their careers and contribute to profitability. For individuals, learning addresses deeper humanistic needs – bolstering future employability, fostering growth, and offering meaning and connection in uncertain times.

Traditional leadership templates, to put it bluntly, put instrumental principles and practices first. Performance is an imperative. Growth, community and culture are a luxury of sorts. Those marginal leaders who want or need to break that template often must find their own way to navigate this duality of aims, and define their leadership and its value in the process.

Constructing leadership identity

Our study revealed how marginal leaders build a novel way of leading. The process, depicted in Figure 1, underpins the crafting of a leader identity in the organisation, as well as their strategy for the organisation. It combines becoming a leader and doing leadership.

First, marginal leaders must find a place within the organisation and define their relationships to their function, established leaders and employees. This is both a structural task and an existential one: how do they fit in a system that is not built for them?

Second, they need to take a stance on their function – be it instrumental, humanistic or somewhere in between. This stance shapes how they lead and how others perceive them.

Third, they must build a space to help others learn what matters, according to their stance. Incorporation spaces are linked with instrumental goals, like standardised training courses that align employees with organisational objectives. Individuation spaces encourage personalised development, experimentation and transformation, such as role rotations, fieldwork and group or executive coaching. 

Three paths for novel leadership

Marginal leaders need a leader identity to secure their place in the organisation and guide their work. Interestingly, our study shows that they don’t follow the same trajectory towards that identity. Some left the “margins” to lead, embracing either an instrumental or humanistic view of their function. Others lead from the margins, casting that duality of functions as a paradox. 

In general, they took one of three routes to craft their identity: custodians, challengers and connectors.

Custodians followed the well-studied path of adapting to mainstream demands to secure a place near the centre of the organisation. They did so by aligning with established leaders and the organisation’s objectives, and demonstrating measurable impact to build credibility. 

Challengers cast themselves as valuable outsiders needed to disrupt the status quo while promoting personal growth as a precursor of innovation. They often pushed for learning to be seen as a strategic objective in itself and advocated for spaces of individuation for employees. 

Lastly, connectors served as bridges between different groups. They held the tension between organisational demands and individual desires to strengthen the bonds people had with each other and with the organisation, making both more resilient.

The value of marginal leadership

Although leadership is traditionally associated with centrality, our study shows this may not necessarily be so. Some marginal leaders move towards the centre, while others are content with – and very effective at – leading from the margins. Yet, some others connect the two.

Marginal leaders can lead well when they build resources and maintain connections with different groups within and outside the organisation. Many of them in our study expressed the importance of “co-creation with a collaborative spirit”, leveraging the freedom of marginality by “talking quite passionately at every opportunity” and challenging traditional leaders’ narrow focus on delivering short-term results.

In short, marginality can be a positive and creative experience, especially when it becomes a starting point to challenge and redefine an organisation’s traditional leadership template. Our framework shows how marginal leaders can forge a leadership identity that is grounded in relations, intent and structure. Focusing on the existential struggle and strategic choices that lie beneath and beyond building an identity, we cast light on the process of bringing leadership to life – and not just bringing leaders into roles.