During my years at INPS, Italy's national social security institute, I led projects delivered by people whose boss, formally, I was not. Teams made of figures with stable roles, coming from different departments, with assignments and objectives that didn't align with mine — sometimes in open conflict with them. No hierarchical lever: everyone reports to their own director. No economic lever: no bonuses to hand out, no incentive schemes to switch on at will. Under these conditions you cannot "give an order" and expect it to be executed. And yet the projects get done. How?
The apparent paradox
First, a knot to untie. Putting strong leadership and collaboration in the same sentence sounds like a contradiction: how can one person "lead" if the group is "deciding together"? Doesn't an assertive guide risk smothering the discussion?
It's a paradox only on the surface. Every collaborative process, to actually work, needs two elements in tension: a guide who sets the direction and keeps the group oriented, and the ability to build the project together, drawing on distributed competence. When the first is missing, I've watched collaborative, well-meaning groups go in circles for months: nobody obstructs the work, but nobody steers it, and the result is a group that looks busy while standing still. When the second is missing, decisions rain down from above and collaboration shrinks to a formality. Effective leadership holds both together: it charts a course and builds the conditions for the group to travel it together. That's not a compromise — it's the minimum condition for collaboration to produce anything.
Leading through influence
In the public sector this balancing act comes with an extra twist: whoever coordinates an initiative almost never wields formal authority over the people involved. "Substantial" leadership, then, plays out entirely through influence: the capacity to generate consensus, build alignment, and move to action people who — on paper — owe you nothing.
This influence has a very specific engine. Unlike the private sector, where success is measured in financial return, in public administration value rarely shows up in immediately tangible form: it lives in a better experience, in reduced complexity, in responding better to people's needs. The innovating leader therefore needs a kind of sensitivity to public value: the ability to recognize — and make others recognize, or more often help them remember — the worth of what is being done, even when it isn't self-evident.
And here lies the noblest and hardest function of the job: awakening. Waking from bureaucratic torpor those who have forgotten that their work actually serves to improve people's lives. Remembering, every day, that behind a procedure, a screen or a digital signature there is someone asking for help, looking for a service, expecting an institution that is simpler, more humane, more just. When that awakening happens, influence stops being a persuasion technique and becomes something sturdier: a shared purpose.
The five traits
Over the years I've distilled this profile into five traits. They are not innate gifts: they are behaviours, and they can be trained.
1. Sets a clear direction, oriented to public value. Knows where they want to go and communicates it clearly: they are the one holding the compass. But they don't just manage operational targets: they trace the project back to its higher purpose — the concrete impact on citizens and users — and can tell that story both upward and downward, adapting the language without betraying the meaning.
2. Builds the path together with others, dosing collaboration. Involves, listens, values different perspectives. But doesn't mistake collaboration for total democracy: involving everyone all the time is not always the most effective choice. They choose when to open the game and when quick decisions are needed. Participation is a strategic lever, not an obligation.
3. Leads with influence, not authority. Knows they can command almost nothing, so they orient, engage, persuade — leaning on credibility, a shared vision, and the ability to generate buy-in around a purpose.
4. Builds support and relationships in every direction. Downward, creating trust among those doing the concrete work; upward, securing space and protection for the project; sideways, generating convergence with other actors. An innovative project is never delivered by your team alone: it takes a tireless weaver.
5. Reawakens the meaning of public work. Remembers — and reminds — that every process, every tool, every choice has a concrete consequence for the people out there. Gives direction back to an organization that has grown numb with compliance.
For the third trait, the heart of the whole thing, I have a summary I'm fond of:
They don't force things: they make them desirable.
It's the difference between a project that advances because someone is pushing it and one that advances because people want to carry it forward. The first stops the moment the pusher gets distracted. The second walks on its own.
Necessary, not sufficient
This is the profile of the leader who knows how to collaborate: oriented, inclusive, credible, relational, inspired by a public purpose. It's the figure that makes innovation possible. But beware: it does not make it inevitable. Even the best leader, with the most precise compass and the most cohesive team, can find themselves stranded halfway. At some point every project needs something that no amount of method, vision or charisma can generate: support, energy, political and operational cover. In a word: fuel. How compass, team and fuel fit together is the subject of a dedicated piece on the three tools — because a leader without sponsorship is merely an excellent expedition chief of a convoy with an empty tank.