Enableship is the leadership of innovation. It is the level that comes after management and after leadership, and it exists because the first two stopped being enough for organisations that need continuous innovation rather than occasional projects.
I arrived at it from a question that keeps coming back in executive rooms. Business owners ask me, repeatedly, what actually separates management from leadership. The distinction is obvious to anyone who has done an MBA or worked in consulting, and considerably less obvious to a pragmatic operator whose model is simple: a team member arrives late, I correct it; a team member asks what their work is for, I stay calm.
That question deserves a proper answer, because the gap between the two roles is where the third one lives. This article walks through management, leadership, the five levels Jim Collins described, and the sixth level I think the work now requires.
| The inherited ladder | Where it stops | The level that follows |
|---|---|---|
| Enableship, the leadership of innovationEnableship is the practice of a manager who engages their people, authorises action and protects the conditions that make new ideas survivable. It sits above management and above leadership rather than replacing either. | Level 5 was designed for a different decadeJim Collins mapped five levels ending at the humble, driven executive whose ambition serves the organisation. That model was built before continuous change, distributed teams and permanent innovation pressure became ordinary conditions. | Removing obstacles rather than setting directionA sixth level adds one responsibility the first five never carried: shielding people from hierarchical pressure so that being wrong stays affordable. Ideas do not need a programme, they need an environment nobody is punished inside. |
Management, leadership, and the level nobody names
Managers keep a system running and leaders redesign it. That single sentence covers most of the difference, and it explains why correcting somebody’s lateness belongs to the manager rather than to the leader. The distinction matters here because innovation needs something neither role was built to supply.
Rather than reciting definitions you could find anywhere, I want to draw out the parts that bear on change and on innovation culture.
What a manager does
A manager is an operational pillar who keeps a team functioning day to day under rules set by the executive. Those rules cover values, expected results, performance criteria, culture and working environment, and the manager’s job is to see that they hold.
A manager is appointed by the hierarchy, occupies a defined function and carries a recognised status inside the organisation. Everything about the role is granted from above, which is both its authority and its limit.
What a leader does
A leader helps people find meaning in their work, supports change, listens for the worries that get voiced and the ones that do not, tolerates ambiguity and uncertainty, and holds a positive attitude through all of it. If you remember VUCA, this is the role that has to live inside it.
Leaders are the architects and renovators of the system. Managers make sure the system works and take corrective action when it stops.
A leader can also emerge without being appointed. Commitment, ideas and initiative put somebody at the head of a group with no help from an org chart, which is the second real difference between the two roles.
Why the two are no longer enough
Managers and leaders both pursue efficiency and performance. Innovation asks people for curiosity and empathy in the face of an uncertain environment, and neither of those qualities files neatly under efficiency or performance.
That mismatch is the whole problem. An organisation can have excellent managers, genuinely inspiring leaders and no capacity for innovation management whatsoever, because nobody holds the responsibility that would make it possible.
A level is missing after manager and leader. It gathers the responsibilities that support a team’s creativity and initiative, and I call the practice Enableship.
From Jim Collins’s level 5 to level 6
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and Built to Last, described a five level scale running from the capable individual to the executive whose ambition serves the organisation rather than themselves. The scale is sound and it is also thirty years old, which is the reason a sixth level is needed.
Collins’s five levels
Collins’s ladder starts with individual contribution and ends with executive leadership, and each level absorbs the ones beneath it. The progression is worth setting out properly, because the sixth level only makes sense against it.
- Highly capable people, who contribute through their individual skills, knowledge, experience and work habits. The pleasant, professional colleague.
- Contributing team members, who work effectively with others and put their skills at the service of the group’s success. The team player you can ask for help.
- Competent managers, who organise people and resources to reach objectives efficiently. An effective relay on the ground who could potentially become a leader.
- Effective leaders, who catalyse commitment by presenting a clear and inspiring vision. Collins describes the target as a big, hairy, audacious goal, or BHAG.
- Level 5 executives, who combine inspiring, sustained engagement with personal humility and professional will. Their ego stays out of the way and they credit the team for the success they depend on.
Level 5 leadership rests on the idea that respect for your team, altruism and personal commitment to results bring out the best in people. Reduced to a formula, it reads as cultural fit, plus a leader’s temperament of ferocious will and personal humility, plus a strong professional drive to succeed, equals success.
Which is fine, as far as it goes.
What changed after Collins wrote
Collins published the level 5 concept in the 1990s. Leadership applied to innovation has moved a long way since, and level 5 no longer covers continuous innovation together with perpetual change. Six shifts explain the gap.
- Digitalisation. Technology became ordinary in every workplace, so leaders now need to be technologically alert as well as visionary.
- Globalisation. Business became interconnected, and leaders have to navigate diverse markets and cultures with a more inclusive and adaptive approach.
- Continuous change. Change used to arrive in bursts. Organisations now face it constantly, which asks leaders to anticipate and accompany it rather than merely manage it.
- The weight of innovation. In a saturated, competitive market, innovation became the difference between differentiation and disappearance, which requires a culture where disruptive ideas are actively encouraged.
- New expectations from the workforce. Younger generations value transparency, collaboration and meaning, which forces a rethink of how leadership is exercised.
- Hybrid work. Teams now split their week between home and the office, which changes how a leader communicates, how much trust they extend and how flexible they have to be.
None of those six removes anything from Collins. Each one adds a demand his model was never asked to carry.
Level 6, the Enabler
The level 6 manager involves their people in every project those people touch. The Enabler differs from the inspiring, charismatic leader in two ways: an orientation towards innovation, and a willingness to shield their team from hierarchical pressure.
That shielding creates a working climate where everything is possible, including being wrong. Somebody practising management is a manager, somebody practising leadership is a leader, and somebody practising Enableship is an Enabler.
Enableship, and the problem with the word
In English, enabler already means something, and it means something unflattering. An enabler is the person who makes somebody else’s destructive behaviour possible by removing its consequences, which is a term borrowed from addiction and co-dependency. Naming a leadership level after it looks like carelessness.
Why I kept a word that was already taken
I kept it because the two meanings sit either side of one precise line, and the line is the whole concept. A clinical enabler removes consequences. An Enabler in this sense removes obstacles. Consequences belong to the person, obstacles belong to the organisation.
A manager who protects somebody from the results of their own choices is doing the damaging version. A manager who protects somebody from a process that punishes experiments is doing the other one. Same protective instinct, aimed at two different things.
Every alternative I tested loses something. Activator drops the protection. Facilitator already belongs to the leader’s job. Connector is too narrow. Sponsor implies budget rather than air cover.
So the word stays, with the distinction stated up front rather than hidden. Anybody who has spent a career watching managers confuse the two will recognise why the line matters.
The five observations the concept came from
Enableship arrived from five observations gathered across engagements rather than from a model I set out to build. Each one on its own is unremarkable. Together they describe a job nobody in the existing vocabulary was doing.
The first is that management stopped being a methodology to update annually with the latest fashion or the consultant of the moment. Faced with the range of expectations and behaviours in any team, no single memorised method covers running a conversation or handling somebody who arrives late. The vocabulary moved to mindset and soft skills for a reason.
The second is that becoming a manager stopped functioning as social proof of success. With societal values built around independence, autonomy and self-determination, the promotion carrying more responsibility and a fixed salary now gets declined regularly.
The Australian evidence is blunt on this. Research profiling 1,000 Australian middle managers found that one in three name burnout as their biggest challenge at work, and that middle managers are three times more likely to be burned out than anyone else in the organisation. Gallup’s global measurement points the same way, with manager engagement falling from 27 per cent to 22 per cent in a single year, a nine point drop since 2022, while individual contributors stayed flat.
The third is that management and leadership together no longer produce innovation or engagement. Both chase efficiency and performance, and both leave curiosity and empathy unaccounted for.
The fourth is the move from a headcount approach to diversity towards inclusion, which measures the appetite to contribute rather than demographic difference. That shift asks whether people have the supervision, tools and processes to take initiative without frustration, offer ideas without fear of judgement and launch projects without worrying that somebody else will claim them if they succeed. Korn Ferry reaches the same conclusion in its own research and measures the effectiveness of inclusion practices in enablement.
The fifth is that managers now have to engage people working from home. That takes different listening, understanding and communication, animating a team rather than directing it, holding people to the organisation through culture while keeping performance pressure at a level that does not damage them.
Two new responsibilities follow from all five. Remove the reasons to leave before working on engagement, and build an environment of trust before talking about innovation at all.
What an Enabler actually does
The Enabler’s role covers four responsibilities that sit outside both the manager’s and the leader’s job descriptions. Each one is concrete, observable by the team, and awkward to fake for longer than a quarter.
Manager, leader and Enabler compared
The three roles differ across ten dimensions, from what they act on through to the governance logic they run under. Reading the columns side by side shows that the Enabler is not a better leader, but a different function operating on a different object.
 |  |  | |
| Acts on Objective Role Ideas Practice Means Value Relationship Governs Management rule | The job Production Control Command Direct Tools Capture Subordinates Products Command and control | Behaviour Cohesion Motivate Steer Animate Methods Create Followers People Inspiration and influence | Mindset Innovation Engage Authorise Give responsibility Experiments Deliver Colleagues Ideas Experience and engagement |
The four responsibilities
Four responsibilities carry the practice. Others exist and I will develop them separately, and these four are the ones a team notices within a fortnight of a manager taking them on.
Build a working environment based on trust. Engagement and innovation are never created by a programme, and both result from a decent managerial environment. That takes an Enabler through what I call the 6 circles of managerial transformation, checking that every person has the appetite and the opportunity to say what they have to say rather than keeping their frustration to themselves.
Hand out responsibility generously. An Enabler is not a supervisor, and supervision belongs to an age when people followed the tasks in a job description, topped up by their manager’s instructions. Obedience is worth less now than colleagues with their eyes open who use curiosity to innovate and agility to adapt, so the Enabler checks that people hold the right tools, the right autonomy and the right responsibilities.
Remove obstacles. This is the facilitating part of the role, and it goes past making sure everybody speaks in a meeting. It means facilitating the delivery of a team’s ideas and projects, which sometimes requires making sure your own organisation’s culture and processes are not working against it.
Hold a creative sanctuary. An Enabler can select, decide and settle, and never judges their people’s ideas. An idea is neither good nor bad, an idea is suited or unsuited. Once an idea becomes a project, the Enabler supports it to its conclusion and shields the team from the hierarchical pressure they are absorbing themselves.
Field note
The manager who kept the pressure to himself
Running an innovation programme inside a large services business, I noticed one team submitting ideas at roughly four times the rate of any other. The obvious explanation was the team’s composition, so I looked at that first and found nothing unusual: same mix of tenure, same functions, same workload.
The difference was their manager, and it showed up in what his team did not know. He was absorbing weekly pressure from two directors about the time his people were spending outside their core targets, and he had told nobody. His team experienced a quarter of unusual freedom. He experienced a quarter of unusual conflict, and he had decided those were two separate problems.
What struck me was his own framing when I asked about it. He did not describe himself as protecting anybody. He said his job was to make sure the pressure landed on the person who could do something about it, which happened to be him.
Enableship is mostly invisible to the people who benefit from it. If you want to find your Enablers, stop looking at who talks about psychological safety and start looking at whose team has never heard about the pressure coming down the line.
Leadership development, coaching or Enableship, which one fits
Three investments compete for the same budget, and they solve different problems. Leadership development builds capability, coaching builds individual awareness, and Enableship work changes what a manager is permitted to shield. Buying the wrong one produces a well-trained population operating under unchanged conditions.
Three approaches compared
The deciding question is whether your managers lack the skill or lack the authority. Skill responds to training, and authority responds only to a decision made above them, which is why the third column is the slowest and the most political.
| Criterion | Leadership development | Executive coaching | Enableship work |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it changes | Capability and shared vocabulary | One person’s awareness and habits | What a manager is allowed to authorise and absorb |
| Who it reaches | A cohort | An individual | A management layer plus the executives above it |
| Time to visible effect | One to two quarters | Three to six months | Two quarters, and it holds longer |
| Main risk | Skills returned to an unchanged system | Insight with no lever to apply it | Executives discover the constraint is their own behaviour |
| Fits when | Managers genuinely lack the practice | One person is stuck and it matters | Good managers keep producing no innovation |
Signals that point to Enableship rather than training
Four signals indicate that capability is not your constraint. Each of them is visible without a survey, and each one points at the layer above the managers rather than at the managers themselves.
- Your best managers are the ones leaving, which usually means they were absorbing pressure nobody replaced them for.
- Ideas arrive and stop at the same layer every time, which locates the obstacle precisely.
- Managers ask permission for things their role description already covers.
- A project fails and the post-mortem discusses the person rather than the process, which tells every observer what happens next time.
Find out which circle is stopping your Enablers
Enableship rests on trust, and trust is the first of six conditions that build on each other. Score your own practice with the managerial transformation diagnostic and find out which circle gives way before innovation ever gets a chance.
How I can help you build Enableship
I work with executive teams and management populations on the sixth level, which usually means working on the executives before the managers. The pattern is consistent: managers know how to shield their teams and are rarely permitted to.
Keynotes and management programmes
A keynote suits an organisation that has invested in leadership development and seen no change in its innovation output. Forty-five minutes is enough to move a room from talking about leadership capability to talking about who is allowed to absorb pressure.
Programmes run longer and go circle by circle, starting from cases your managers are currently stuck on rather than from a model. They end with a decision about what the executive layer will stop doing.
Diagnostics and manager communities
The managerial transformation diagnostic is where I start, because six scores make an abstract conversation operational within ten minutes. Run at two levels, it shows the gap between what executives believe they authorise and what managers believe they can do.
Manager communities keep the practice alive afterwards. An Enabler working alone in an organisation that has not changed will revert within two quarters, and a community is the cheapest defence against that.
Conclusion: Enableship is the leadership of innovation
Managers keep the system running and leaders redesign it. Neither role was ever asked to stand between a team and the pressure that makes experimentation unaffordable, which is why organisations full of competent managers and inspiring leaders still produce nothing new.
The sixth level adds that responsibility and names it. An Enabler removes obstacles rather than consequences, authorises rather than commands, and treats an idea as suited or unsuited rather than as good or bad.
Start by asking who in your organisation is already doing this without a word for it. There is usually one, their team has the highest idea rate in the building, and nobody has ever told them that Enableship is the leadership of innovation and that they have been practising it for years.
Frequently asked questions about Enableship
What is Enableship?
Enableship is the leadership of innovation, a sixth level of management practice sitting above Jim Collins’s five. Somebody practising it engages their people, authorises action, removes organisational obstacles and shields their team from hierarchical pressure so that being wrong stays affordable.
Is an Enabler the same as an enabler in the negative sense?
No, and the distinction is the concept. The negative sense describes somebody who removes the consequences of another person’s destructive behaviour. An Enabler removes organisational obstacles instead. Consequences belong to the individual, obstacles belong to the organisation.
What is the difference between a manager, a leader and an Enabler?
A manager acts on the job and controls it, a leader acts on behaviour and motivates it, and an Enabler acts on mindset and engages it. The manager commands, the leader steers, and the Enabler authorises. Their objectives are production, cohesion and innovation.
Why is Jim Collins’s level 5 no longer enough?
Collins published the model in the 1990s, before continuous change, hybrid work and permanent innovation pressure became ordinary. Level 5 describes a humble, driven executive who sets direction. It never asked anybody to protect a team from the organisation itself.
References
- Wilder, D. A. 1990. Some determinants of the persuasive power of in-groups and out-groups: organization of information and attribution of independence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59, no. 6: 1202-1213.
- Chatman, J. A., and Flynn, F. J. 2001. The influence of demographic heterogeneity on the emergence and consequences of cooperative norms in work teams. Academy of Management Journal 44, no. 5: 956-974.
- Cunningham, E., and Platow, M. J. 2007. On helping lower status outgroups: the nature of the help and the stability of the intergroup status hierarchy. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 10, no. 4: 258-264.
- Tapia, A., and Lange, D. 2016. The Inclusive Leader. Los Angeles: Korn Ferry.
