Leadership is more than a position. You must influence, motivate, engage and share priorities with your staff. But our leaders seem to have trouble standing up and sharing, even when you created a platform for them.

In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what we’re all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.

I’m comforted by something I’ve come to believe more and more in recent years—that it’s not always good for one person to have too much power for too long. Even when a CEO is working productively and effectively, it’s important for a company to have change at the top. I don’t know if other CEOs agree with this, but I’ve noticed that you can accumulate so much power in a job that it becomes harder to keep a check on how you wield it. Little things can start to shift. Your confidence can easily tip over into overconfidence and become a liability. You can start to feel that you’ve heard every idea, and so you become impatient and dismissive of others’ opinions. It’s not intentional, it just comes with the territory. You have to make a conscious effort to listen, to pay attention to the multitude of opinions. I’ve raised the issue with the executives I work most closely with as a kind of safeguard. “If you notice me being too dismissive or impatient, you need to tell me.” They’ve had to on occasion, but I hope not too often.

Even in the vast majority of cases when no malfeasance occurs, trying to do it all alone is still a serious trap. If you operate as a lone wolf who refuses to ask for help or involve others, you will cut yourself off from valuable input and feedback. Even if you are on the right track, you will invariably burn out, which will only further hurt the organization. Furthermore, you will only make your managers feel disenfranchised, alienated, and impotent. After all, as Jim Kilts of Gillette points out, “You can lead, but ultimately it is the people in the company who have to deliver.

We will not go so far as to say that a dominant leadership style is necessary to make a shared-services model work, but empirically, where we find success, we also tend to find leaders who are willing to make powerful people in their organizations uncomfortable. And when the power brokers push back, as they often do in a reshuffling of decision rights, these leaders unapologetically hold their position. Some do it with a smile, others with a scowl, and still others with just the right amount of disinterest in the approval of others. But they all draw the line firmly. The same thing could be achieved theoretically through persuasion and consensus-building; we just haven't seen it yet. So if you find you're getting stuck in a shared-services showdown with the rainmakers in your organization, you may have to channel that internal kindergarten teacher (or drill sergeant) who is unambiguously large and in charge.