By Professor Erlend Dehlin, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Losing the Locker Room
In sports, there is a familiar metaphor: “losing the locker room.” It describes situations in which managers or coaches have lost authority and their players no longer seem willing to listen. Even when a manager has formal power and can decide who gets time on the pitch, they may no longer command the trust or attention of the collective. For all practical purposes, they are dead in the water.
It is a powerful metaphor, reminding us that authority is ultimately a gift bestowed by others for reasons they themselves find compelling. A leader may have formal power: legal, financial, or positional. They may even rely on force. Yet none of these can manufacture trust or authority. Fear can be imposed; authority cannot.
Power may compel compliance, but authority is what makes commitment sustainable. Without authority, leadership becomes fragile even when the tools of management, planning, and control are readily available. Fear may secure short-term obedience, but it rarely inspires people to contribute their best over time. For team sports to reach the highest levels, players arguably need to see themselves in the game. They need to find inspiration both in their own performance and in that of the team as a whole.
How Bodø/Glimt’s Coach Earned His Authority
The extraordinarily successful Norwegian football club Bodø/Glimt offers a vivid example. Based in a small town in northern Norway, the club experienced for years the limitations of a culture centered almost exclusively on results. Winning mattered so much that the fear of losing gradually overshadowed the joy of playing. In 2018, assistant coach Kjetil Knutsen was promoted to head coach. He had little authority as he brought with him few previous achievements upon which to rely and enjoyed no automatic respect from the players. He had to earn their trust, and they in turn had to grant him the gift of authority. He had yet to win the locker room. But he had an idea for how to go about it.
Following a series of conversations involving players, coaches, and mental performance staff, the club ultimately chose to rethink its entire value system. Counterintuitive as it may sound, players were no longer encouraged to focus on winning as such. In sports, this is a difficult sell. Outcomes are, after all, the very measure by which success and failure are defined.
Under the new coach’s management, the players were encouraged to enjoy the game, perform as well as possible in the present moment, and prioritize collective achievement over individual recognition. Energy should only be vested in what could actually be influenced: their own preparation and performance. It should not be wasted on factors outside their control, such as the behavior of opposing teams, unfortunate circumstances, and events beyond the pitch.
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After a slow but steady process of change, marked by occasional setbacks, the team found new meaning and eventually enjoyed tremendous success, including four national league titles in five years and becoming genuine contenders on the European scene. The contents and magnitude of this change, from results-driven to performance-driven, are interesting enough on their own terms. In this article, however, the spotlight is on how effective leadership can emerge from a position of limited recognition and status as people grow in confidence.
In the case of Bodø/Glimt, the head coach gradually gained authority as the players experienced the many positive effects. Throughout the process, his formal power remained largely unchanged. What changed was the players’ willingness to invest and participate. This is a cornerstone of all leadership, a necessary starting point: to gain trust, to win the locker room, to be bestowed authority, through which capacity for individual and collective action is realized. In short, any leader must receive an invitation to lead. To gain authority is to be invited in.
Authority Is an Invitation, not a Possession
It is a good word: invitation. It captures something essential. To invite someone in is to suggest they are worthy of trust, tolerance, attention, and consideration. In leadership, it is difficult to achieve anything meaningful without such an invitation. Yet once it is extended, there appears to be very little limit to what people, and leaders, can accomplish. In the case of Bodø/Glimt, the invitation went so deep as to change the whole mindset of the players, encouraging a huge, counterintuitive leap into unknown terrain.
To lead is not primarily about inviting others in, although that matters too. Rather, it is about conducting oneself in ways that make others willing to extend an invitation to you. Co-determination, participation, and involvement are often discussed as important ingredients in change initiatives. Yet genuine involvement is only possible when the invitation flows both ways.
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To lead without invitation is an uphill struggle and, to a large extent, a futile one. It is a quick route to exhaustion. To gain the locker room is to receive an invitation, but in practice the invitation is always conditional. It can be withdrawn. Authority can be stripped away. The locker room can be lost.
Leadership in practice is therefore an art of navigating trust and invitation, to gain authority.
Seen as invitation, authority is a process rather than a possession. It is relational, continuously negotiated and continually subject to revision. Trust is never permanently secured. Some place their confidence in careful planning and predictable development, while others prefer leaders who experiment and take risks. Some respond to displays of strength, while others value dialogue, humility, and sensitivity.
Why Authority Depends on Context
Authority is contextual. Just as a police uniform may strengthen a traffic officer’s authority, it may become an obstacle when that same officer seeks to build trust through dialogue in a local community. Likewise, a teacher entering a classroom accustomed to participation and discussion may struggle if attempting to establish military-style discipline. There is no universal formula. Different situations call forth different forms of authority, different traits, and different capabilities. The invitation is rarely stable and should never be taken for granted. It must be earned repeatedly.
Arguably, this is among the most important tasks of leadership: becoming someone to whom others are willing to extend an invitation. Whenever that happens, people allow you access to their energy, commitment, creativity, and effort. The invitation signals that we are part of the same undertaking. That we are, in a meaningful sense, in this together.
When Authority Becomes Intoxicating
Authority is emotional and conditional. Just as an invitation can be extended, it can be taken away, and the experience may be deeply unsettling. For a leader to lose authority poses a threat not only to their position but also to their sense of identity and self-worth. Receiving an invitation, by contrast, can be profoundly energizing. Sometimes it borders on euphoria. The emotional force that comes from being trusted and valued is powerful and, at times, seductive. As necessary as authority may be, it can also become intoxicating.
How a Finished Plan can Lose the Room
To lead change is, above all, to ensure that an invitation is extended persistently by those who are expected to follow. Every leadership action, particularly during the early stages of change, that is not oriented toward receiving such an invitation risks creating distance.
A practical example: Presenting a finished plan, complete with content, objectives, and timelines, before people understand the situation, is among the most alienating things a leader can do.
just as an invitation is conditional, it may also be remarkably deep and persistent
As much as we yearn for our leaders to have some plan or vision, we’d rather not have it used as a straitjacket on organizational behavior. Sometimes imposing, or even promoting, one’s plan or vision is enough to lose the locker room. The exception is when the invitation is already there, running so deep that it can tolerate alienating, pompous, managerial behavior. For just as an invitation is conditional, it may also be remarkably deep and persistent. Whenever the invitation is not present, however, the leader would be wise to secure it before moving ahead with change initiatives.
The Danger of Trusting Too Much
As members of organizations, we are cautious about handing out invitations to just any leader who comes along. Indeed, leadership development programs can arguably be seen as instruments designed to help aspiring leaders develop the capacity to be listened to. (Management fads and recipes are poor substitutes for finding one’s unique leadership voice.) And even if charisma, first brought into sociology by Max Weber and later adopted in leadership studies, remains a scarce resource, the prevailing belief seems to be that leadership is a quality that can be grown and developed with the aid of training and coaching.
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Herein also lie some of the hazards of leaders who are actually good at it. Sometimes, despite our reluctance to invite people in, we hand out invitations when we really should not. For instance, if people can see themselves as part of a leader’s vision, they may tolerate insensitive actions and alienating plans. They may even tolerate immoral actions, as leaders are bestowed with blind trust.
In the case of “cult values,” as coined by George Herbert Mead in the early 1900s, the invitation is so profound that individual freedom and responsibility are surrendered in service of some larger organizing idea.
Leading by Invitation: Four Lessons
Returning to the everyday practical life of business leaders, this article advances four arguments. First, authority is best understood as an invitation signaling that you deserve someone else’s attention. Second, every invitation is an act of trust. Third, invitations are relational, contextual, emotional, and conditional. Consequently, invitation is not a commodity but an ongoing process, and its content varies across situations. Fourth, because invitation is conditional, it can be regained after being withdrawn. Trust can be rebuilt, and the art of doing so is contextual and improvisational.
Leaders should therefore continually ask themselves what, in any given context, makes them worthy of others’ attention: why should anyone listen to you here and now? To this one might also add a moral obligation to remain curious about whether one’s organizing project is legitimate and ethical.
Questions to Ask Before You Lead Change
- Why should anyone listen to me, here and now?
- Have I been invited in, or am I relying on formal power?
- Am I presenting a finished plan before people understand the situation?
- Is the project I am asking people to join legitimate and ethical?
All other things aside, if you wish to help your organization grow, develop, and change, there is but one way to do it: by invitation only.
