---
title: "The leadership landscape: Choices, Create, Convince, Cause"
description: "Leadership is four jobs held at once: Choices, Create, Convince
  and Cause. Most execution problems trace back to the one pillar a leader
  quietly neglects."
url: https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/the-leadership-landscape/
language: en-GB
type: article
author: Linus Murphy
author_url: https://linusmurphy.com/about/
---

[The 30-part series · Part 10 of 30](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#series)

# The leadership landscape: four pillars, and the one you are not paying for

By [Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/) • 10 min read

Focus area 10: The leadership landscape. [Chapter 3: From vision to execution](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/).

Part of the Executive Coaching Methodology: [Set direction and keep it moving](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#set-direction)

![Aerial view of four different fields meeting where two country lanes cross](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/the-leadership-landscape.webp)

The argument in brief

Leadership is four jobs held at once — Choices, Create, Convince and Cause — and most execution problems trace back to the one pillar a leader privately does not count as real work. Doing more of your natural pillar rarely helps; paying the neglected one does.

The enterprise rests on all four pillars. When one is neglected, the whole structure tilts towards it, and the symptom shows up long before anyone names the cause.

A pattern I see often: a chief executive who is genuinely brilliant at one part of the job. Perhaps she draws the future better than anyone in her industry. Perhaps he can walk into a hostile room of investors and walk out with their support. Execution starts to thin — targets slip, good people leave, the plan stops showing up in the diary — and the leader responds by doing more of the thing they are best at. Another vision session. Another round of investor meetings. The tilt gets worse.

I have done it myself. When I was running businesses, my instinct under pressure was to reach for the pillar I enjoyed, because it felt like work and it felt like progress. It took me longer than I would like to admit to see that the problem was usually sitting in the pillar I found dull.

That is the thesis of this article. Leadership is four jobs held at once — Choices, Create, Convince and Cause — and most execution problems trace back to the one pillar a leader privately does not count as real work. Doing more of your natural pillar rarely helps. Paying the neglected one does.

The four pillars are my model, not a borrowed academic framework. The chapter [From vision to execution](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/) introduces them. Here I want to go further: why the order matters, how a seat tilts, and how to find and pay your unpaid pillar without pretending to be a different person.

## Four jobs, one seat

Each pillar answers a different question, and each leaves different evidence in a normal week. That last part matters. I do not score pillars by how a leader describes themselves. I look for receipts.

| Pillar | The question it answers | Evidence in a normal week | The usual excuse for skipping it |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Choices | What will we do, and what will we not do? | A named kill, a closed priority list, a non-goal written down | *We need to keep our options open* |
| Create | What future are we building that others cannot yet see? | A one-page picture someone else can redraw from memory | *The strategy is already signed off* |
| Convince | Can people carry the picture without me? | The sentence used to settle a live decision you were not in | *I said it at the town hall* |
| Cause | What actually happens because of me? | A standard that held while you were travelling | *Culture is HR’s job* |

**Choices** comes first because nothing else works without it. [Michael Porter](https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy) put it bluntly in 1996: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” He also wrote that one of the leader’s jobs is to teach the organisation about strategy and to say no. The evidence that Choices is unpaid is rarely a missing strategy.

It is an overloaded one. [Gallup](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/329303/productivity-priority-overload-steps-leaders.aspx) describes priority overload as a direct threat to focus and goal achievement, and found that only 22% of employees strongly agree the leaders in their organisation have a clear direction. A list of fourteen priorities is not a direction. It is a postponed argument, and the discipline of [making tough decisions](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/trust-under-pressure/make-tough-decisions/) — sorting the reversible from the irreversible and closing the list — is where Choices gets paid.

**Create** is the future specific enough to staff against: who the customer is, what good looks like in three years, which capability has to exist that does not exist today. It is the pillar visionary leaders love and operators distrust. Its evidence is portability. If only you can draw the picture, Create is still a private talent.

**Convince** is transfer. I cover it in detail in [transfer vision effectively](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/transfer-vision-effectively/), so I will only add the managerial point here. [Gallup’s research](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236570/employees-lot-managers.aspx) shows that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores, and that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged. Convince does not happen on a stage. It happens in thousands of manager conversations you will never attend.

**Cause** is what happens because of you: results, and the way results are got. It is culture with a receipt. Its evidence is what holds when you are absent, and what follows a miss. It is also who you keep: tolerating [pretenders over players](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/getting-good-people-around-you/players-vs-pretenders/) is one of the fastest ways to tell a company which standards are real.

## Why the order matters

I always say the pillars in the same order, and it is not for neatness. Each depends on the one before.

You cannot Create a credible picture until you have made the Choices it requires; otherwise the picture is a collage of everyone’s favourite projects. You cannot Convince people of a picture that does not yet exist; you can only convince them to attend a launch. And Cause is the sum of the other three. The culture people live in is shaped by what you chose, what you described and what you repeated — and by the distance between those things and what you actually did.

The most expensive mistake I see is starting at Convince. A company senses drift, so it commissions a communications campaign. But the campaign is transferring a picture that was never chosen. [Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull](https://web.archive.org/web/20221218215315/https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravelsand-what-to-do-about-it) found that two-thirds to three-quarters of large organisations struggle with execution, and that only half of middle managers can name any of their company’s top five priorities — despite relentless emails and meetings about strategy. Their point was that communication does not equal understanding. Mine is that understanding is impossible when Choices and Create are still unpaid upstream.

It is also a loop, not a line. Cause produces evidence — which bets worked, which standards held, which teams stalled — and that evidence should change your next Choices. Leaders who treat the order as a one-off sequence end up defending last year’s choices against this year’s facts.

## How a seat tilts

“Shore up the weaker pillar so the enterprise never tilts” is how I describe this work in the [thirty focus areas](https://linusmurphy.com/services/why-these-30-focus-areas-matter-to-senior-leaders/). In practice, tilt has four common shapes, each named after the pillar that is carrying too much weight.

-   **The strategist** pays Choices and Create, and neglects Cause. The plan is sharp and the board loves it. On the floor, nothing has changed, because no one has felt a consequence or seen a standard enforced.
-   **The evangelist** pays Create and Convince, and neglects Choices. Energy is high, the story is good, and every team is pursuing its own version of it. Effort is everywhere; results are thin.
-   **The operator** pays Cause, and neglects Create. The business runs well. It is becoming excellent at last year’s model, and nobody can say what it is building towards.
-   **The diplomat** pays Convince, and neglects Choices. Everyone feels heard. Nobody has been told no. The priority list grows every quarter.

None of these leaders is lazy. Each is working hard on the pillar that rewards them. That is precisely why the tilt persists: from inside the seat, it feels like effort. The enterprise does not tilt because a leader is weak. It tilts because a leader is strong in one direction and has stopped looking at the others.

## You do not have to be equally good at all four

Here is where I part company with the idea of the complete leader. I have rarely met a chief executive who is excellent at all four pillars, and I am wary of coaching that tries to manufacture one. A natural Create leader will probably never love Cause. That is fine.

What is not fine is leaving a pillar unpaid across the whole system. A strong top team can carry pillars between them. A chief operating officer with an instinct for standards can hold much of Cause. A commercial leader who tells the story well can carry a share of Convince. The chief executive’s job is to know which pillar they personally neglect, to make sure someone is paying it, and to check the receipts.

One exception: Choices. You can delegate analysis, options and recommendations. You cannot delegate the closed list. If the chief executive does not sign the list of things the company will not do, nobody else has the authority to make it stick, and the diplomat’s quarterly priority growth begins.

Elite sport taught me a version of this. A team does not need every rider to climb, sprint and time-trial equally well. It needs every job in the race plan covered, and a captain who knows which job they cannot do themselves. I write more about that translation on [the elite-sport page](https://linusmurphy.com/services/from-elite-sport-to-the-boardroom/), and the [profile of Eddy Merckx](https://linusmurphy.com/peloton-to-boardroom/eddy-merckx/) is a useful study of a dominant performer who had to learn a different set of jobs when he started building bikes instead of winning on them.

## Arguments

### The case for

The pillars name things the evidence already points to. Porter showed that strategy without choice is not strategy. Kotter separated leadership from management and described it as setting direction, aligning people and motivating them, which is close to Create and Convince. Gallup’s data on managers and priority overload shows how often Choices and Convince go unpaid in practice, and the execution research shows how rarely communication alone closes the gap. A simple four-part model lets a leader ask, in the working week, which part of the job they are avoiding — a question most strategy documents never prompt.

### The case against

The fair objection is that any four-part model is a simplification, and simplifications can become boxes. Leaders already carry plenty of frameworks; another one may add vocabulary without changing behaviour. A second objection is that some contexts genuinely reward imbalance. In a turnaround, Cause and Choices may matter far more than Create for a year.

In an early-stage company, Create and Convince may be almost the whole job. Insisting on balance in those moments would be a mistake. A third objection is that the model is mine, not peer-reviewed, and should be treated as a coaching lens rather than as science. All three are fair, and in a genuine crisis the opposite of my thesis can hold: deliberately overpaying one pillar for a season is the right call.

### Where I stand

I treat the pillars as a lens, not a law. I do not ask leaders to balance them evenly every week. I ask them to know which pillar they neglect, to decide consciously whether that neglect suits the season, and to make sure the system is paying it if they are not.

In my [seven-step coaching process](https://linusmurphy.com/services/impactful-leadership-7-step-executive-coaching-process/), the pillar audit sits in Step 2, Awareness, where we look at how your leadership actually lands rather than how you intend it. The unpaid pillar usually becomes one of the vital few in Step 3, Challenges, because it is often the root of the bottlenecks people complain about. And when the gap is Convince, the work continues in Step 4, Influence. If a season genuinely calls for imbalance, I would rather we choose it than drift into it.

## Try this: the one-week pillar audit

Do this with last week’s diary, not with your memory of it.

1.  **Tag the week.** Go through every block in your diary and tag it Choices, Create, Convince, Cause or none. Be honest about the none column.
2.  **List the receipts.** For each pillar, write one piece of evidence from the week: something you killed, a picture someone else redrew, a decision your sentence changed without you, a standard that held while you were away.
3.  **Find the thinnest pillar.** It is usually the one with the least diary time and the weakest receipt. It is usually also the one you find least interesting.
4.  **Ask two people.** Ask two direct reports, separately, which of the four they think you neglect. Listen without explaining.
5.  **Choose one behaviour.** Pick a single, visible behaviour for the next thirty days that pays the thin pillar — one public kill a month, a weekly walk of the floor, a fortnightly session where someone else redraws the picture.
6.  **Assign the rest.** If the pillar is one you will never love, name who on the top team carries it and how you will check the receipts.

Then sit with these questions:

-   Which pillar do I reach for when I am under pressure, and what does that cost the other three?
-   What is on our priority list that I have not had the courage to remove?
-   If I disappeared for a month, which pillar would collapse first?
-   Who in my top team quietly pays a pillar I take credit for?
-   Is my current imbalance a choice for this season, or a habit I have stopped noticing?

## Where to go next

The landscape is the frame for the other two focus areas in this chapter. [Transfer vision effectively](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/transfer-vision-effectively/) goes deep on Convince, and [goal setting successfully](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/goal-setting-successfully/) turns Choices into a short scoreboard with owners. If the audit surprised you, it may be a blind spot rather than a preference; [common leadership blind spots](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-blind-spots/common-leadership-blind-spots/) covers the familiar ones, including hero syndrome, which often hides an unpaid pillar.

This audit is the kind of work I do one to one in [executive coaching](https://linusmurphy.com/services/executive-coaching/), because the honest answer about which pillar you neglect is easier to reach with someone outside the hierarchy. If you want to run it on your own seat, [book a 30-minute strategy call](https://linusmurphy.com/contact/).

Where this came from

The four pillars are my own model, built over more than 25 years as a chief executive, not an academic framework. They sit inside a longer conversation. In 1990 John Kotter argued in Harvard Business Review, in What Leaders Really Do, that leadership and management are different jobs: management plans, organises and controls, while leadership sets direction, aligns people and motivates them. In 1996 Michael Porter added that strategy is choice, and that one of the leader’s jobs is to say no. My model puts choice first, keeps direction and alignment as Create and Convince, and adds Cause: the culture that results from you, whether you meant it or not.

Source: [What Leaders Really Do](https://web.archive.org/web/20210125165527/https://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do)

## Questions I am asked

**Do I need to be equally strong in all four pillars?**

No. Very few leaders are, and pretending otherwise wastes energy. What I ask is that all four are paid somewhere in the system, and that you know which one you personally neglect. You can share Convince and Cause across a strong top team. You cannot hand Choices to someone else, because the closed priority list is the one thing only the chief executive can sign.

**Why are the pillars always in the order Choices, Create, Convince, Cause?**

Because each depends on the one before it. You cannot create a picture until you have chosen what you will not do. You cannot convince people of a picture that does not yet exist. And Cause, the culture that results, is the sum of the first three. In practice it is also a loop: what you cause produces evidence that should change your next choices.

**How do I find my unpaid pillar if I am not sure?**

Look at last week, not at your self-image. Tag each block in your diary to a pillar or to none. Then list the evidence: what you killed, what picture you drew, where your sentence changed someone else’s decision, and what happened after a miss when you were away. The pillar with the thinnest evidence is usually the one, and it is usually the one you find least interesting.

**Is this a replacement for our strategy process?**

No. Keep your strategy process. The pillars are a way of holding the job of leading, not a planning template. I use them to notice which part of the job a leader is avoiding when execution thins, and then to decide where the next ninety days of personal effort should go.

## Sources

1.  [What Is Strategy?](https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy) — Harvard Business Review, November 1996
2.  [What Leaders Really Do](https://web.archive.org/web/20210125165527/https://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do) — Harvard Business Review, December 2001
3.  [Productivity vs. Priority Overload: 3 Steps for Leaders](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/329303/productivity-priority-overload-steps-leaders.aspx) — Gallup, 5 February 2021
4.  [Employees Want a Lot More From Their Managers](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236570/employees-lot-managers.aspx) — Gallup, 8 April 2015
5.  [Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It](https://web.archive.org/web/20221218215315/https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravelsand-what-to-do-about-it) — Harvard Business Review, March 2015

[Editorial standards](https://linusmurphy.com/editorial-standards/)

![Portrait of Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/images/portraits/linus-headshot.jpg)

**[Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/)**

Elite executive coach. Linus spent 25+ years as a CEO in technology and services, where the businesses he led averaged 45% annual growth, and has coached hundreds of people from more than 20 countries. He is a former Irish National Cycling Champion.

[Book a 30-minute strategy call](https://calendly.com/linusmurphy-coaching/30min)

## Related parts

[![A forest path splitting into two trails among autumn beech trees in light fog](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/make-tough-decisions.webp)Part 30 of 30 · Chapter 9**Make tough decisions: sort the door before you walk through it**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/trust-under-pressure/make-tough-decisions/)[![A white lighthouse on a rocky headland at blue hour, its beam crossing a calm sea](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/transfer-vision-effectively.webp)Part 1 of 30 · Chapter 3**Transfer vision effectively: the real test happens two levels below you**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/transfer-vision-effectively/)[![An empty theatre stage with one spotlight on bare boards and red curtains half drawn](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/players-vs-pretenders.webp)Part 15 of 30 · Chapter 7**Players vs. pretenders: make ownership visible, and the performance fades**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/getting-good-people-around-you/players-vs-pretenders/)[![Small stone cairns marking a trail along a rocky ridge towards a distant summit](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/goal-setting-successfully.webp)Part 12 of 30 · Chapter 3**Goal setting successfully: hard goals, short horizons and the side effects nobody mentions**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/goal-setting-successfully/)

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