That specialisation is necessary. You do not want your finance team behaving like your creative team, or your sales team managing risk in the same way as your operations team.
The problem is that specialised departments naturally begin pulling in different directions.
Sales wants greater flexibility to close the deal. Operations wants consistency, predictability & enough time to deliver it properly.
Marketing wants to create demand. Finance wants to know what it will cost & when the money will arrive.
Product wants to build the best possible solution. The commercial team wants something it can sell now.
None of them is necessarily wrong. They are simply doing their jobs through the lens of their own function.
That is where the Integrator comes in.
Lawrence & Lorsch described the challenge as reconciling the need for specialisation with the need for integrated effort across the organisation. Their Integrator was not simply a senior operations manager or someone who kept a task list. The purpose of the role was to create unity across areas of the business that would otherwise struggle to coordinate effectively.
That distinction still matters enormously today.
The Integrator Is Not the Business Babysitter
One reason the role is so often misunderstood is that people confuse integration with administration.
They assume the Integrator is there to chase everyone, organise the meetings, update the project plan & clean up whatever the Visionary has started.
That is not integration. That is often highly paid babysitting.
A strong Integrator helps the leadership team make decisions across the whole business. They make sure one department does not succeed at the expense of another. They turn competing priorities into an agreed company priority & ensure that commitments become execution.
They are not merely running operations. They are integrating the business.
This requires authority, judgement, trust & the ability to work through conflict. It also requires a willingness to make decisions that may not keep everybody happy.
Sometimes, the best decision for the whole company is not the decision that one functional leader wants.
Visionaries Often Misunderstand the Role Too
Visionaries usually want an Integrator because they are tired of carrying the business, being dragged into every issue & feeling as though everything still depends on them.
However, some Visionaries want the benefits of an Integrator without giving them the authority to integrate.
They want someone to take responsibility, but they still override decisions.
They want someone to create focus, but continue introducing five new priorities every week.
They want someone to hold the leadership team accountable, but step in when a long-serving employee becomes uncomfortable.
They want someone to run the business, but only if they run it exactly as the Visionary would.
That does not work.
An Integrator cannot create unity across the organisation while constantly being undermined from above. They need room to lead, clear authority & genuine backing from the Visionary.
This does not mean the Visionary becomes irrelevant or hands over the company. It means the two roles must be properly understood.
The Visionary brings the ideas, relationships, energy, future thinking & appetite for opportunity.
The Integrator brings those ideas into the reality of limited time, people, money & capacity.
One sees what could be possible. The other works out what must happen next.
Both matter.
Integrators Can Misunderstand It as Well
Integrators are not innocent in this either.
Some believe their role is to control the Visionary, protect the team from every new idea or become the sensible adult who says no to everything.
That is not integration either.
A good Integrator does not crush the Visionary’s energy. They help channel it.
They listen for the valuable idea hidden inside the enthusiastic brain dump. They distinguish between an idea that needs immediate action, one that needs further thinking & one that should be captured for later.
Their job is not to build a wall around the business. It is to create a bridge between possibility & execution.
Integrators can also become too operational. They get pulled into solving every problem, managing every project & filling every gap. Before long, they are so deep in the work that they no longer have the space to see across the business.
The original concept was not about becoming the busiest person in the organisation.
It was about creating alignment between specialised areas.
Why This Role Matters More as a Company Grows
When a business is small, the founder often acts as the default Integrator without realising it.
They know what sales has promised, what operations can deliver, what is in the bank account & which customer is becoming unhappy. Much of the integration happens inside the founder’s head.
As the business grows, that stops working.
More people become involved. Departments form. Information becomes fragmented. Decisions have consequences across teams that may barely speak to one another.
The founder can no longer personally connect every moving part.
This is the point at which many businesses begin experiencing what looks like a people problem, an accountability problem or an execution problem.
Often, it is actually an integration problem.
There is nobody clearly responsible for making sure the leadership team operates as one team rather than a collection of functional leaders.
That is why the role matters.
Whether the title is Integrator, Chief Operating Officer, General Manager, Managing Director or something else entirely, the business needs someone who can see across the organisation, resolve competing priorities & create unified action.
The title is less important than the function.
It Is an Old Idea Because It Solves an Old Problem
The language may have evolved since 1967, but the underlying tension has not changed.
Businesses need specialisation because people must become excellent at different things.
Businesses also need integration because those different things must ultimately serve one shared purpose.
Lawrence & Lorsch recognised that decades ago. Their wider research into organisational differentiation & integration was published in 1967 through Harvard’s Division of Research, examining how organisations could respond effectively to different market, technological & environmental demands.
EOS later built on this foundation & made the concept far more accessible to entrepreneurial leadership teams.
That matters, but so does understanding where the idea came from.
The Integrator was never intended to be the Visionary’s assistant, the company police officer or the person who catches every ball someone else drops.
The role exists to create unity of effort across a business.
Nearly 60 years later, that may be more important than ever.
Are You Getting the Best from Your Visionary & Integrator Relationship?
Understanding the roles is one thing. Making them work properly inside a real business is another.
At Sherwood Foundry, we have created two practical e-books to help Visionaries & Integrators understand where they may be getting stuck:
- The Visionary Bottleneck explores how a Visionary can unintentionally slow the business down, undermine their leadership team or remain too involved in decisions that should no longer depend on them.
- Are You Really Acting as an Integrator? looks at whether the Integrator is genuinely bringing the leadership team & wider business together, or has simply become the busiest problem-solver in the organisation.
Both e-books are available to download from our Sherwood Foundry website.
