We ask managers to develop talent. Then we measure their importance by the size of their teams, their delivery commitments and, often, their ability to retain people within their own part of the organization.
What happens when a person is ready for a bigger opportunity in the organization? Their manager may sincerely want to help them grow and still have every reason to delay the move. What is best for one team is not always best for the person or for the organization.
Perhaps we have spent years trying to make managers better leaders while leaving a structural problem intact: we select managers for the wrong reasons and ask one role to perform two different forms of leadership.
Work has changed. Our relationship with people has not kept pace.
In matrix organizations, people move between customers, products, projects and transformations. Some contribute to several teams at once. AI may change the work and the skills those teams need even faster. Assignments and structures can be temporary, while the person’s development, motivation and capacity to contribute extend across them.
This creates the risk of an “organizational orphan”: someone with several leaders who need their work, but no lasting relationship with a leader who understands their strengths, aspirations, workload and growth over time. A formal line manager may be responsible for their career while seeing only a fraction of what they actually do.
When work becomes fluid, belonging and development must become intentional. I would separate two responsibilities that the traditional line-manager role usually combines: People Stewardship and Mission Leadership. These are two leadership relationships serving different time horizons, not two managers competing for ownership of an employee.
People Steward: sustainable contribution over time
The People Steward’s commitment is to the person across assignments. They help people discover and build their strengths, understand where they create value, develop new capabilities and sustain performance without exhausting themselves. They notice when a person is thriving, underused, overloaded or ready for a new challenge.
Their responsibility includes honest performance conversations, not only encouragement. They should be able to challenge a person, discuss a poor fit or a gap in capability, and help them respond to changing organizational needs. That responsibility gives the role substance. People leadership cannot simply be passed to HR whenever the conversation becomes difficult.
A Steward works with the person; they do not own that person’s career. The individual retains agency over their choices. Where possible, they should be able to change Steward if the relationship is no longer productive. Nor should a Steward’s group be defined only by one technical silo. A broader mix of people and assignments would help the Steward see potential and opportunities beyond the person’s current discipline.
Success may mean helping a strong performer move to another mission, even when their departure creates a short-term gap. It may mean helping someone learn a skill the organization needs or finding a better place for a capability that is going unused. If there is genuinely no good future fit, it can also mean helping someone leave the organization with dignity. The objective is the greatest sustainable contribution, not maximum retention inside a manager’s team.
Mission Leader: collective performance around an outcome
The Mission Leader brings people together to achieve a defined result: serving a customer, delivering a contract or product, solving a business problem or leading a transformation. They set direction, establish priorities, make trade-offs and remain accountable for delivery and stakeholder value.
They may lead people from several parts of the organization without being those people’s long-term manager. That makes leadership more demanding. They must build a team identity, create trust and explain why the work matters, while holding people to ambitious standards. Their mission may be temporary, but the need for belonging during it is real.
Mission Leadership can include hierarchy, budgets, demanding targets and performance management. Separating it from long-term stewardship does not weaken accountability for results. It allows the leader to focus that accountability on the mission and the people working together to achieve it.
The Mission Leader asks: How do we bring these capabilities together to create the greatest value now? The People Steward asks: How does this person grow, perform sustainably and create greater value over time? The person is the stable point of reference as missions and structures change around them.
The two perspectives must meet where decisions are made
This model would fail if it merely gave everyone two leaders and left difficult decisions between them. The relationships have different purposes, but they must share evidence and confront trade-offs.
Mission Leaders see contribution and outcomes in context. They should provide specific evidence about the person’s work, collaboration and results. The Steward integrates evidence across missions, discusses it with the person and considers development, capability and sustainable performance over a longer period. Compensation and promotion decisions would then need calibration across the organization, rather than depending on one manager’s partial view.
Allocation is harder. If two missions need the same person, the Steward can explain their capability, aspirations and current load; the person should have a meaningful voice; and Mission Leaders must explain the value and urgency of their work. None of those perspectives alone determines what is best for the whole organization. Leaders need transparent decision rights and a way to resolve competing priorities without making the person an object passed between teams.
Interests will not always align. A person may prefer one assignment while the organization urgently needs another capability. Good stewardship does not promise that every preference can be met. It makes the constraint visible, gives the person an honest explanation and looks for ways to build their agency and future options. It also gives the organization a reason to develop and redeploy people before treating them as interchangeable vacancies or surplus headcount.
Imagine a specialist who is already overloaded when two missions need their expertise. The Mission Leaders explain their priorities and time horizons. The specialist brings practical knowledge of the work and their actual capacity; the People Steward works with them to build a realistic plan. Together, they may sequence the work, adjust scope or bring in another specialist. If the demands still conflict, the relevant leaders must decide which mission takes priority, taking the specialist’s constraints and development into account.
HR would still have important responsibilities, including employment practice, specialist advice and organizational safeguards. Exactly how those responsibilities change deserves further design. But a Steward must have enough authority and accountability to lead people directly, including through difficult decisions; the role cannot become a friendly intermediary who sends every consequential conversation elsewhere.
Select leaders for the work they will actually do
The familiar career sequence is strong individual performance, then management, then a larger team and greater status. Yet being outstanding at one job does not automatically mean someone can develop others or lead a collective effort. Research by Benson, Li and Shue on salespeople across 214 firms found evidence consistent with organizations placing too much weight on individual sales performance when deciding whom to promote into management.
People Stewardship should be selected primarily through observed behaviour and motivation, not assumed from a coaching certificate, psychology background or prior job title. Who do capable colleagues seek out? Who makes others better, can give difficult feedback without breaking trust and takes satisfaction when someone they support grows beyond their own team? Training can strengthen these skills, but the selection question comes first. Finding enough people who can do this well is a genuine constraint on the model.
There should also be a respected Mission Leadership path for people drawn to customers, products, programmes and transformation. Greater responsibility would mean owning more complex outcomes and bringing more capabilities together, rather than necessarily accumulating permanent direct reports. Both paths need status, reward and progression. People could move between them.
Give organizational leadership a fuller picture
Senior organizational leadership still sets vision, direction and strategic priorities. To do that well, it needs two views of the organization.
Mission Leaders tell senior leaders what is being delivered, which customers need attention and where decisions are blocked. People Stewards can bring a different kind of information from their relationships across missions: where capability is emerging or going unused, where people are losing energy, how they are reacting to change and where they see opportunities that the formal hierarchy may overlook.
A Stewardship Lead might help Stewards improve their practice, develop future Stewards, calibrate assessments and surface these patterns without turning stewardship into another layer of headcount control. The exact role remains open. What matters is that organizational leadership receives both the view of business outcomes now and the view of human capability for what comes next.
A business hypothesis, not a proven return
The model rests on mechanisms for which there is evidence, although that evidence does not prove this particular organizational design. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report says that 20% of employees globally were engaged in 2025 and estimates that low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity. A meta-analysis of business teams found a positive relationship between team trust and performance. LinkedIn’s analysis associates stronger internal mobility with longer employee tenure. The sales-promotion research raises a separate question about how we select managers.
Together, these findings make the proposition worth testing: a better fit between people and work, stronger trust within missions, more deliberate development and less blocked mobility may improve both employee experience and business results. They do not show that the gains will automatically exceed the cost of Stewards, shared decisions and coordination in every organization.
That is why incentives and measurement matter. Rewarding leaders for keeping headcount in their own unit would preserve the old behaviour under new titles. Stewardship should be assessed over a longer horizon, including capability growth, sustainable contribution, mobility, engagement and the quality of decisions about people. Mission Leaders should be accountable for outcomes, customer value and the health of the teams delivering them. Both should share in the organization’s overall success. The exact compensation formula needs careful design.
A pilot in a sufficiently large matrix or shared-capability environment could compare results over time: productivity and customer outcomes, internal moves, regretted departures, development, engagement, workload and the cost of operating the model. It should also record where decision making becomes slower or conflicts are merely moved elsewhere. A simpler management structure might eventually be a good result, but lower cost or fewer layers should be tested as possible consequences, not promised as the purpose.
Can we design an organization where people do not belong to managers, but managers are genuinely there to help people create more value?