There is no shortage of leadership advice. But there is a shortage of knowing what to do with it. Drucker tells you to set clear objectives. Edmondson tells you to build psychological safety. Sinek tells you to start with why. Brown tells you to lead with vulnerability. Senge tells you to think in systems. Each of these is serious work by serious thinkers, and each is telling you something different about what your people need from you. None of them are wrong. Without an organizing principle, though, you have no way to know which one matters for your situation right now.
If your team is confused about priorities, psychological safety will help people say so, and it will not resolve the confusion. If your team is afraid to speak up, clearer objectives will not touch the fear. If your team has clear goals and feels safe but still cannot explain why any of it matters, neither safety nor targets will create commitment. Most of us have applied a well-evidenced framework and watched it fail to land, because it was answering a question nobody was asking. What we need is a way to diagnose which need requires attention.
Ronald Heifetz’s adaptive leadership framework provides one. I propose extending it by treating meaning explicitly as a fourth service of authority.
Authority as services
Heifetz treats authority as a relationship: power entrusted in exchange for services. He identifies three. Direction means defining the problem, reducing uncertainty, and providing answers. Protection means shielding people from external and internal threats. Order means maintaining roles and norms, keeping things stable, and keeping conflict in bounds.
This is already useful as a diagnostic. Confusion, fear, and destabilization point you toward direction, protection, or order. The framework becomes more powerful still when you grasp the distinction Heifetz draws between authority and leadership. Authority derives from a position. Leadership is a practice, a way of helping groups make progress on difficult challenges. Authority comes with expectations: give us answers, keep us safe, hold things together. Leadership sometimes requires resisting those expectations, because the group needs to learn its way into a solution together.
That might mean withholding the familiar response: the answer that ends the discussion, the reassurance that removes the urgency, the intervention that restores the old order. The group still needs a clear process, manageable pressure, and safeguards against harm or retaliation. Get the provide/withhold judgment right and the group builds capacity. Get it wrong in either direction and you create dependence, overwhelm people, or lose their trust.
Organizing an unorganized field
Now go back to the problem of too many frameworks. If authority is a relationship organized around services, we can sort the advice by which service it helps you provide. The categories overlap and most of these thinkers contribute to more than one, but the sorting is still useful. Drucker’s management by objectives, Kotter’s strategic vision and short-term wins, and Lencioni’s work on creating clarity all help you provide direction. When your team is confused or uncertain, start there. Edmondson’s psychological safety, Brown’s vulnerability, and the first two skills in Coyle’s The Culture Code, Build Safety and Share Vulnerability, help you provide protection. Deming’s work on process and variation helps you provide order. Senge’s systems thinking sits underneath all of it, helping you ask whether the problem you see is being generated somewhere else in the system.
That accounts for three services. But look at what is left over. Sinek’s Start with Why makes purpose explicit. Frankl puts the search for meaning at the center of human motivation. Coyle’s third skill is Establish Purpose. Senge’s five disciplines include shared vision. Lencioni’s six critical questions start with “Why do we exist?” Kotter’s first step, create a sense of urgency, ties a reason to act to a future worth reaching. Brown’s belonging work connects safety to significance. Edmondson’s toolkit includes framing the work and emphasizing purpose. Meaning runs through all of it, and none of the three services has a place for it.
Meaning as a fourth service
Meaning has long been part of leadership thinking. Smircich and Morgan published “Leadership: The Management of Meaning” in 1982, and Heifetz’s own teaching includes infusing the work with meaning. What I am proposing is to treat it as a service of authority in its own right, examined through the same two questions as the other three. What do people expect authority to provide? And when does leadership require resisting that expectation?
The providing side is easy to see. Think about the technically excellent leader who restructures efficiently, communicates the plan clearly, protects the team from external noise, and keeps operations stable. Direction, protection, and order are all in place. And people disengage, resist passively, and leave. Nobody answered the question underneath: what is this for? What story connects the pain of right now to a future worth reaching? What values survive the disruption? Direction without meaning produces compliance without commitment. Protection without meaning leaves people safe and purposeless. Order without meaning builds a structure that feels like a cage. When people look to authority for meaning and do not find it, trust and commitment erode.
Now consider a leadership team after a major merger. The integration plan is clear, roles are defined, communication is disciplined. And the organization slows anyway. Decisions take longer. Informal resistance builds. People comply publicly and disengage privately. What remains unresolved is interpretive: what does this new organization stand for? Which legacy matters? What defines success now? Leaders rush to answer - “this is actually a great opportunity!” - and the group rejects the narrative, because it arrived before the underlying tensions had been surfaced. The leader offered a settled interpretation before the group had worked through what the change meant. They short-circuited the adaptive work.
Instead say something closer to this:
The integration decisions are clear, and we have not resolved what this new organization will stand for. Both organizations are losing things that matter. Before we announce a shared identity, we need to examine what we are preserving, what we are giving up, and which commitments will guide the choices ahead.
Provide a settled interpretation too quickly and you create dependence or resistance. Leave people without support or a way to work through the uncertainty and you create drift. The skill is calibration: what interpretation should you offer, and what must people work through themselves? The same judgment applies to direction, protection, and order.
More than the story you tell
It is easy to teach strategy, risk management, and organizational systems as core leadership capabilities while reducing meaning to a communication exercise: craft a narrative, tell a better story. Meaning work goes further than the story you tell. It means helping people interpret reality: naming what is happening, why it matters, what values hold, what purpose survives the disruption. Where stated values and actual decisions conflict, meaning work may require changing the decisions. No narrative resolves a contradiction that has been left in place. And sometimes, when an old understanding no longer holds, leadership requires the discipline to resist handing people a replacement before they have worked through what they need to build together.