What Kotter Got Right About Leadership That Most Marketers Miss

John P. Kotter’s 1990 Harvard Business Review essay “What Leaders Really Do” draws a sharp line between management and leadership, arguing they are distinct functions that organisations confuse at their peril. Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership is about coping with change. Both matter. But mixing them up, or assuming one person can do both simultaneously without conscious effort, is where most organisations quietly lose ground.

For senior marketers, the distinction lands harder than it might seem. Most of us were promoted for being good managers, then handed leadership responsibilities without anyone explaining the difference. Kotter’s framework is one of the clearest lenses available for understanding why that transition so often goes sideways.

Why the Management vs. Leadership Distinction Actually Matters

Early in my career, I watched a founder hand me the whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm and walk out to a client meeting. The brief was for Guinness. The room was full of people who had been doing this longer than me. My internal reaction was not confidence. It was something closer to controlled panic. But that moment taught me something Kotter articulates precisely: leadership is not a title or a tenure. It is a function. And if you do not perform it, someone else will, or no one will, and the room drifts.

Kotter’s argument is that management and leadership have fundamentally different purposes. Management produces consistency and order. It plans, budgets, organises, staffs, controls, and solves problems. Leadership produces change. It sets direction, aligns people, and motivates. Neither is superior. Both are necessary. But organisations, particularly marketing functions inside larger businesses, tend to over-invest in management systems and under-invest in leadership behaviour.

The commercial consequence is predictable. You get teams that execute efficiently against the wrong priorities, or that are well-organised but unable to adapt when the market shifts. If you are building or refining a go-to-market function, this distinction is not academic. It is structural. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy work I cover on this site returns to this tension repeatedly: execution capability without strategic leadership is just expensive activity.

Setting Direction: Vision vs. Planning

Kotter is precise about what leaders do when they set direction. They develop a vision of the future, often a distant future, and strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision. This is not the same as planning. Planning is a management process. It is deductive, analytical, and oriented toward near-term execution. Vision is inductive. It requires synthesis, pattern recognition, and a tolerance for ambiguity.

This distinction trips up a lot of marketing leaders. I have sat in enough strategy sessions to know that what gets called “vision” is usually a slightly more ambitious version of last year’s plan. Revenue targets go up. Channel mix shifts marginally. A new technology gets added to the stack. That is not vision. That is incremental planning with better slides.

Real direction-setting, in Kotter’s model, starts with understanding the competitive environment, the customer landscape, and the forces that are likely to reshape both. It then requires the intellectual courage to describe a future state that is genuinely different from the present, and to build a strategy that bridges the gap. That is harder than it sounds, partly because it requires admitting that the current approach may be insufficient, and partly because it demands commitment to a direction before all the data is in.

For marketing leaders specifically, this means being willing to make a call on where the market is going and what the brand or business needs to do to be positioned for it. Not waiting for the next research wave or the next budget cycle. Kotter’s point is that management can plan its way through a stable environment. Leadership is required precisely when the environment is not stable.

Aligning People vs. Organising Them

The second major leadership task Kotter identifies is aligning people. This is not the same as organising them. Organising is a management function. You structure teams, assign responsibilities, create reporting lines, and establish processes. Aligning is different. It means communicating direction in a way that creates genuine understanding and commitment across a wide group of people, including people over whom you have no formal authority.

When I was turning around a loss-making agency, the structural changes were the visible part. Cutting departments, restructuring teams, changing pricing, improving delivery margins. Those were management decisions. But the harder work was aligning the people who remained around a different picture of what the business was for and where it was going. You cannot reorganise your way to that. You have to communicate it, repeatedly, in ways that connect to what people actually care about.

Kotter notes that alignment challenges are fundamentally communication challenges, but not in the narrow sense of messaging or cascade. The communication required for alignment is two-way. It requires listening to understand where resistance is coming from, addressing legitimate concerns rather than managing them, and being honest about what is uncertain. People align around leaders they trust, not around leaders who have the best slide decks.

For marketing teams operating inside larger organisations, this is especially relevant. Marketing rarely controls the full commercial agenda. It has to align with sales, product, finance, and operations around a shared direction. Leaders who treat that alignment as a political problem to be managed will always be fighting friction. Leaders who treat it as a communication and credibility problem tend to make faster progress. The BCG work on commercial transformation makes a similar point: go-to-market effectiveness is as much about internal alignment as it is about external execution.

Motivation and the Mechanics of Sustained Energy

Kotter’s third leadership function is motivating and inspiring. He is deliberate about separating this from the management function of controlling and problem-solving. Management keeps people on track against a plan. Leadership energises people to overcome the obstacles that change inevitably produces.

His framing here is worth sitting with. Kotter argues that leaders motivate by satisfying basic human needs: the need for achievement, belonging, recognition, self-esteem, a sense of control over one’s life, and the ability to live up to one’s ideals. This is not about motivational speeches or culture perks. It is about structuring work and leadership behaviour so that people find genuine meaning in what they are doing and genuine confidence in where they are going.

In practice, this means involving people in decisions that affect them, giving credit where it is due, being honest about the difficulty of what is being asked, and connecting individual contributions to something larger than the immediate task. When I was growing a team from a small agency to a significantly larger one, the people who stayed engaged through the difficult periods were not the ones with the best compensation packages. They were the ones who understood why the work mattered and felt that their contribution was visible and valued.

Kotter’s point is that motivation is not a personality trait of the leader. It is a set of behaviours that can be learned and applied deliberately. Leaders who rely on their natural charisma or enthusiasm are fragile. Leaders who understand the underlying human needs and address them structurally are more consistent.

The Complexity Problem: Why Strong Management Can Undermine Leadership

One of the more uncomfortable implications of Kotter’s essay is that the skills that make someone a strong manager can actively interfere with leadership. Management rewards precision, control, and predictability. Leadership requires tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to make directional calls with incomplete information, and comfort with the messiness of aligning diverse groups of people around a shared vision.

I have seen this play out in agency environments more times than I can count. The person who built the operational infrastructure, who knows every process and every margin, who can tell you exactly where a project is at any given moment, often struggles to step back and ask the harder question: are we building the right thing? Are we pointed in the right direction? Is this business positioned for where the market is going, or just optimised for where it has been?

Kotter does not argue that management is bad. He argues that organisations need both, and that most organisations over-manage and under-lead. The bias toward management is understandable. Management produces measurable outputs. Leadership produces conditions for change, which are harder to quantify and slower to manifest. But the absence of leadership is what leaves organisations well-run but badly positioned.

For marketing functions specifically, this manifests as a bias toward optimisation over innovation, toward channel efficiency over market development, toward reporting over strategy. The tools and frameworks available to modern marketing leaders, from attribution modelling to market penetration analysis, are predominantly management tools. They help you run what you have better. They do not tell you whether what you have is the right thing to be running.

What Kotter’s Framework Means for Go-To-Market Leadership

Applied to go-to-market strategy, Kotter’s model produces a useful diagnostic. Most GTM failures I have observed are not execution failures. They are direction failures. The team was well-organised, the processes were sound, the reporting was thorough. But the underlying direction, the answer to “who are we selling to, why should they buy from us, and how are we going to reach them,” was either unclear, uncommunicated, or contested.

Kotter’s framework suggests that fixing a GTM problem requires leadership work before management work. Before you restructure the sales team or invest in new tooling or redesign the funnel, you need to be clear on direction, aligned on it across the relevant functions, and energised to pursue it through the inevitable friction. If those conditions are not in place, the management improvements will not hold.

This is not a soft observation. I have watched businesses invest heavily in growth infrastructure and see minimal return because the underlying strategic direction was muddled. The investment made the existing confusion more expensive. Leadership clarity would have been a better first investment.

Kotter also has something useful to say about the relationship between leadership and culture. He argues that leadership behaviour, over time, shapes culture. The way leaders set direction, align people, and motivate them creates norms that persist even when the leader is not in the room. For marketing leaders who want to build high-performing teams, this is the long game. Not the process you install, but the behaviour you model, consistently, over time.

The BCG research on scaling agile organisations makes a related point: sustainable performance at scale requires leadership that can hold direction steady while allowing execution to adapt. That balance, strategic consistency with tactical flexibility, is exactly what Kotter’s model describes, even if the language is different.

The Honest Limits of the Framework

Kotter’s essay is sharp and useful, but it is worth being honest about where it has limits. The management-leadership distinction is cleaner on paper than it is in practice. Most people in senior roles are doing both simultaneously, often within the same meeting. The cognitive switch between “how do we execute this well” and “should we be doing this at all” is not always available when you are three weeks from a board presentation and two people down in the team.

There is also a structural question the essay does not fully address: who decides how much leadership versus management a given role requires? In most organisations, that is determined by the org chart and the job description, not by a deliberate assessment of what the business actually needs. The result is that leadership often gets crowded out by management demands, not because leaders are incapable, but because the system does not protect the time and space for it.

Kotter wrote this in 1990. The pace of change in most markets has accelerated significantly since then. The argument that organisations need more leadership relative to management is, if anything, more pressing now than it was when he made it. But the practical challenge of creating conditions where leadership can actually happen, inside organisations that are structured around management accountability, remains largely unsolved.

That tension is worth naming, because it affects how you read and apply the framework. Kotter gives you a clear picture of what leadership is and why it matters. He is less explicit about how you create the organisational conditions for it to flourish. That is the harder problem, and it is where most of the real work sits.

If you are working through the strategic and structural questions that sit underneath all of this, the broader collection of thinking on go-to-market and growth strategy covers the commercial architecture that leadership needs to operate within.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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