(FORTUNE Magazine) – One of our divisional marketing managers recently asked for a meeting with me. A man in his mid-30s, he reports to a division general manager, who reports to the group general manager, who in turn reports to me. I know that this fellow works hard at his job, and also that he pays attention to his progress up the ladder. As he said quite openly when asking for the meeting, the purpose of the session was to have a ''career checkup'': He wanted to know if he was doing all the right things for the company to continue his rise through the ranks. Our discussion went smoothly at first. He told me of some things he had done in the past year that he was particularly proud of, and a bit about what he planned to do. Then he asked what I thought he should be working on. I countered with another question: What were his strengths? He quickly replied that he prided himself on his organizational skills, his understanding of his product area and the market, and his rapport with the corporate sales force -- the people who, while not under his authority, use his marketing strategies to sell the division's products. Next I asked where he thought he was lacking. After considerable hesitation, he gave an answer that didn't mean a whole lot to me: ''I am afraid I don't provide enough leadership.'' He isn't the only one thinking about leadership these days. Whether the question is our national competitiveness, the decay of ethics in government, or just about any other problem facing our society, sooner or later someone will identify the root cause as a lack of leadership. Leaders, we are told, embrace change. They transform their organizations with bold actions based on their abiding vision of the shape of how things need to be. In the avalanche of books and articles on the subject that have come down around our heads recently, most of the commentary centers on the President or on the chief executives of major corporations. So how does all this relate to my divisional marketing manager? He is one of perhaps five million American middle managers. For the most part, these people don't possess grand visions for their companies, but instead worry about procedures for approving loans, methods of reducing the set-up time for some newfangled and terribly expensive piece of machinery, approaches for introducing new products, and the like. Can such managers be leaders? Do they need to be? A few weeks after my meeting with the man, I happened to see him in action. He was giving a presentation -- an important one -- to a group of corporate sales managers, explaining his division's marketing plans for the next six months: what to sell, to whom, how, and for how much. His aim was to ensure that his products would receive a healthy ''share of mind'' among the sales managers, who sell products from all of Intel's divisions. This was no piece of cake. As I listened from the back row, one sales manager after another raised objections to the plans being presented. ''How can we sell against the competition if we don't have the such-and-such feature?'' one demanded. ''Unless we have a complete family to offer, we are wasting our time,'' another said. And so it went, each comment just stimulating another even more critical one. The young marketing manager acted as if he basically agreed with the comments, even when they were obviously exaggerated. It seemed to me that the sales managers were mainly trying to make their own lives easier. The perfect product is easy to sell; no salesman enjoys having to make up for a product's imperfections by dint of extra work. But the marketing exec was so bent on appeasing this group that he just went with the flow, agreeing with whatever they said. When his time was up, he left behind a very disgruntled group of sales managers. As I watched this scene, a picture of what had gone wrong formed in my mind. It struck me that most famous examples of military leadership arise in situations where the Great Leader spurs his underarmed and bedraggled followers, on their last legs and with no ammunition left, to great feats of valor. Winston Churchill's greatest moment came when London was being bombed and an invasion of England seemed imminent. Leaders, I thought to myself, are individuals who make ordinary people do extraordinary things in the face of adversity. WHAT THE MARKETING manager needed to do was to make this ordinary group of salesmen commit themselves to do their extraordinary best in selling his imperfect and incomplete product line. The more his products were underdogs to the competition, the more he needed to elicit such a commitment. But he didn't rise to the occasion. His earlier comment about his lack of leadership skills was, unfortunately, quite correct, perhaps even more true than he realized. Nonetheless, I hope the man will not try to go about improving himself by reading too much of the current literature on leadership. Being told that leaders and managers are inherently different people would be less than helpful; indeed, the message might discourage him from trying to develop his skills. Nor would the suffocating preoccupation with larger-than-life business figures like Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch do him much good: His role in the business world is so far removed from theirs that he might as well read about the exploits of Alexander the Great. The lesson my young marketing executive must learn is that an effective manager needs to blend altogether different skills but does not need to be superhuman. On the one hand, he needs administrative skills, skills based on logic and used according to predictable rules. On the other hand, he also needs an ability to convey his strong feelings about a subject when that's appropriate, as it would have been with the sales managers. What he should have said, and with obvious conviction, is something like this: ''Here's our product line. We know it's not perfect and we will work to improve it continually. But, for now, this is what we -- and you -- have to work with, and what you must sell. I know it can be sold because I have sold it myself. You can call me anytime, day or night -- here is my home phone number -- if you need help to work out an approach that's right for your customer. Give me 24 hours and I will be there to go with your salespeople to call on any account that needs it.'' My would-be leader also needs to learn to gauge the right moment to inject his emotion into a business situation. Leaders get the timing right. Had he burst into his speech too early, he would have come across to the sales managers as insincere. As it happened, he missed the right time altogether and came across as a weak, wishy-washy, uncommitted manager. The perfect moment probably would have been after he replied strongly to the first couple of objections. How will my subordinate learn such things? Not by reading about great leaders whose experience is so foreign as to make it impossible for him to identify with them. Nor, in my view, by going to wilderness retreats and climbing poles and rafting down white-water rivers. He will learn the same way each of us has learned the important, unteachable roles in our lives, be they that of husband or wife, father or mother: by studying the behavior of people who have made a success of it and modeling ourselves after them. I went back to the divisional marketing manager after the sales presentation and told him that he was right, he did indeed lack in leadership skills. I described how I saw him come across at the meeting, and the opportunity he had missed. He wasn't at all happy to have his suspicions confirmed, but, knowing him, the next time he makes a presentation to the sales managers, I'm expecting a major display of leadership.