The one single factor that separates great leaders from mediocre ones

Someone in your team doesn't accept you as their manager.

You see it in the eye contact that breaks a second too early. In the way they respond to your decisions. In what they don't say in meetings when everyone else does.

You've been watching it for a while. And somewhere in the back of your head, a thought keeps surfacing.

I'm the manager. They should listen. If they won't, they need to go.

Hold that thought for a second. Because before we get to what you should do, there is something worth understanding. Something that changes how you read this entire situation.

The success of your leadership is determined by your team's willingness to follow you.

Not your title. Not your experience. Not the quality of your ideas. Whether people actually choose to follow.

Why that one line matters more than most leadership advice

In 2024, psychologists Alex Haslam, Mats Alvesson, and Stephen Reicher published a paper in The Leadership Quarterly that cuts through a lot of what gets taught about leadership. They called it 'Zombie Leadership': beliefs that have been repeatedly debunked by research yet keep circulating anyway.

The most stubborn one: that leadership is about the leader.

Their finding is direct. Leadership is proven by followership. Without it, the title means nothing.

When someone on your team won't accept your authority, that is not just an awkward personnel issue. It is a signal that your leadership, in that specific relationship, is not functioning. And a non-functioning relationship does not fix itself by being ignored or by being forced.

Most managers respond to that signal with defensiveness. The best ones get curious.

Getting curious means asking the right question first

The right question is not: how do I get this person to fall in line?

It is: what is actually driving this?

There are four causes that come up most often.

Your reputation. How do people in the organization see you, before you even walk into the room? Sometimes a perception has formed, quietly, that works against you. Knowing that is not comfortable. It is useful.

Something specific that happened. A decision that landed wrong. A comment in a meeting that wasn't received the way you intended. People file these moments away and draw conclusions from them they never share out loud. The leader who finds a way to surface that gains real information.

Unprocessed loss. Did this person want the role you now hold? That kind of disappointment rarely shows up as disappointment. It shows up as resistance. Leaders who recognize this respond with acknowledgment rather than pressure, and that changes the entire trajectory of the relationship.

Frustration that was never really about you. Sometimes you are the nearest visible face of an organization someone has grown to resent. Mediocre leaders take that personally. Great leaders ask what is underneath it.

Getting clear on the cause is what makes the next step possible. Without it, you are solving the wrong problem.

The conversation that great leaders don't postpone

Once you have a read on what's driving the resistance, you have the conversation.

Crucial Conversations, the book by Patterson and Grenny, offers a principle that applies directly here: before you name the problem, name what you both want. Shared purpose first. Then the difficult part.

"I want this team to work well. I think you do too. And I've noticed something between us that isn't working. I'd rather understand it than leave it."

Then you name it. Directly, calmly, without loading it with accusations.

This takes more courage than escalating to HR. It also builds something that authority-on-paper never could: genuine influence. The kind that doesn't depend on your title.

Teams notice when a manager faces something uncomfortable with curiosity and courage. That noticing changes how they see you. And over time, it changes how willing they are to follow you.

The impact of this over time

Every leader faces this at some point. The ones who handle it well come out with something the others don't: a clearer sense of how influence actually works.

Because influence is not the goal. It is what makes the goal possible. When people genuinely follow you, you can start doing what you actually became a leader for: guiding your team toward something meaningful, helping them grow, or any other positive goal worth achieving.

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If this is something you're in the middle of right now, you're welcome to think it through with someone who has been there. Start with a free conversation at davidbuirs.com/en/contact/.

Managers who want to build this kind of capability more structurally will find a good home in leadership coaching. For organizations that want to make it part of how their managers operate, a leadership training program tends to be the more lasting investment.

Source: Haslam, Alvesson & Reicher (2024). Zombie Leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly.