Leadership is not a posture. It is a regulatory function.

Leadership is widely invoked, valued, and sometimes idealized today, to the point that it is often confused with a personal posture, an ability to influence, or an aptitude for mobilizing people around a vision. This reassuring interpretation allows us to identify figures and promote role models. However, it is insufficient for understanding what is really at stake when systems come under pressure.

Because leadership never manifests itself where everything is working well!

It appears precisely when the usual regulatory mechanisms—decision-making, arbitration, recognition of roles—cease to be effective. Strategic uncertainty, latent conflicts, internal contradictions, loss of collective reference points: it is in these areas of fragility that the question of leadership arises, not as a question of influence, but as a question of maintaining the system.

This distinction sheds light on a central difficulty of our time. Many organizations and institutions seek leadership where what is lacking is less about individuals than about collective capacities to deal with disagreement, to make decisions without disqualifying others, and to make costly choices without breaking the bond of trust. In the absence of these capacities, leadership is called upon to compensate for unaddressed structural weaknesses through posture or authority.

In these contexts, leaders are often called upon to reassure, make decisions, and regain control. These expectations are not illegitimate. They become problematic when they transform leadership into a substitute for authority. While this authority can produce rapid results, it ultimately weakens the system's ability to function autonomously by reinforcing dependence on the leader.

This is where leadership differs significantly from posture. A posture can be adopted or projected. A function, on the other hand, is exercised in a demanding relationship with the system. Assuming a leadership role means accepting that its measure is not immediate adherence, but the collective's regained ability to deal with its tensions without fragmenting.

In the face of more unstable and polarized environments, expectations of leaders are becoming more demanding. But the more leadership is reduced to the figure who makes decisions, the weaker the regulatory frameworks become.

Thinking of leadership as a regulatory function then shifts the question from who leads to what leadership makes possible or impossible within the system.

Leadership is not revealed in ease, but in the way a system navigates its areas of tension without losing its ability to decide, cooperate, and endure over time.