Leadership and Management in Procurement and Supply
The Leadership and Management in Procurement and Supply domain tests how you get work done through other people: building team capability, influencing stakeholders you do not control, leading change and managing performance.
Core rules and concepts
- Leadership and management differ. Management delivers planning, control and process; leadership sets direction and creates commitment. Transformational leadership builds vision and individual development; transactional leadership trades reward for performance; situational leadership adjusts style to follower competence and commitment.
- Power and influence (French and Raven): legitimate, reward, coercive, expert and referent. Procurement rarely holds positional power over budget holders, so expert and referent power, backed by evidence, do the work.
- Stakeholder analysis (Mendelow's power–interest grid): high power/high interest manage closely; high power/low interest keep satisfied; low power/high interest keep informed; low power/low interest monitor. Then plan engagement method and frequency.
- Team development (Tuckman): forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning. Intrinsic motivators such as achievement, recognition and growth sustain performance more than hygiene factors such as pay.
- Change (Lewin; Kotter): create urgency with data, build a coalition, communicate a vision, remove barriers, deliver short-term wins, embed in policy. Expect resistance and the emotional dip shown on the change curve.
Worked example
A group procurement team must centralise buying across three autonomous business units that protect local supplier relationships.
Reasoning: map stakeholders first. Business unit directors are high power/high interest, so manage them closely through a steering group and shared savings targets. Category buyers are high interest but low formal power, so co-opt them into category teams and give them a defined role in the new model; ignoring them produces passive resistance. Establish urgency with spend data showing 8% price variance for the same commodity. Deliver a visible win in a low-sensitivity category within 90 days, then embed the model through delegated authority limits and joint KPIs. Expect storming when roles change, and coach rather than restructure alone.
Traps that cost marks
Naming models without applying them to the scenario; confusing power with interest; treating change as a communication exercise; ignoring informal leaders; assuming everyone resists for the same reason; prescribing training as the answer to structural problems.