The Heroics of Modern Leadership
With the weight of the world on our shoulders, do we need a hero to save us?
Something that has been on my mind lately is how we, as a society, view and approach the concept of leadership. In much of our culture, we look for and praise the “heroic leader.” We seem to worship and romanticize leadership, expecting somebody to swoop in and save the day. The ideal leader appears to have a knack at inverting falling revenue graphs while willing their companies into prosperous times. And, we eat it up.
While I am far from the first person to struggle with it, the myth of the “heroic leader” has been an unflappable social icon, even in scholarly literature. I believe it causes us more harm than good as the heroics are easy — much like empty calories in our social diet. If we sit around waiting for somebody else, we give up our agency over our problems, silently admitting defeat because somebody else did not do something.
Styles of Leadership
In 1991, Charles Manz and Henry Sims, Jr. wrote about the concept of SuperLeadership, a sort of antonym to the more common heroic styles. Charles and Henry point out the many flaws in our idealized view of leadership and how it robs our organizations of autonomy.
The authors identified four primary leadership styles found throughout the business world, which still live on today: “The Strong Man,” “The Transactor,” “The Visionary Hero,” and “The SuperLeader.” The Strong Man view of leadership tells us that the leader is the one with all of the ideas. Going against him — with the intentionally masculine pronoun — will bring about devastating consequences for the transgressor. Questioning the Strong Man is unacceptable. The Strong Man embodies fear-based leadership in action.
The Transactor relies on giving and taking — rewards and punishment — to get work done. If a worker does a satisfactory job, they receive kindness from the leader. If the worker fails to meet the leader’s expectations, the leader modifies their behavior through punishment in an attempt to get the desired results. The leader focuses on goals and relies on the worker’s external locus of control and reliance on rewards for motivation. As much as the Transactor calculates their moves, their followers respond in kind.
The Visionary Hero is the one who excels at story-telling, seemingly able to map everything the business does into a higher calling. Those following rely on the leader as an oracle, subscribing to the leader’s higher calling. The vision goes unquestioned as followers become disciples, working to make the vision a reality. The Visionary Hero’s leadership generates unshakable emotional commitment from their followers, based on the follower’s belief in the idea.
Strengths and Weaknesses
While each of the styles, to this point, may work in some situations and fail fantastically in others, they are inconsistent. What happens when the Strong Man is marching his team off of a proverbial cliff? The followers believe he “knows better” and may be too afraid to speak up in a crisis, let alone mundane day-to-day work.
The Transactor may run out of effective rewards and punishments, leaving followers numb to their effects. The leader may also need to reach for extremes, as Charles and Henry point out, with larger-than-life rewards, which are also known to breed corruption and unethical behavior.
The problems the Visionary Leader runs into may include self-delusion as they strive to keep their vision sharp for the organization. The Visionary’s storytelling provides all of the necessary ingredients to rob their followers of the ability to think for themselves. Much like the Strong Man, the Visionary Leader may drive the entire organization into disastrous consequences.
Centralized Authority and Control
Many of the faults of these styles boil down to a central theme — they place all of the authority and decision-making capability on the leader. These styles expect followers to fall in line and either shut-up-and-work, enjoy-rewards-avoid-punishment, or blindly-follow-the-vision. None of these styles build up their followers to be themselves a leader.
SuperLeadership
The concept of leadership is challenging. We do not have a general solution to every problem, and yet our quest for a social panacea continues onward. Is there something better available to us? Do we have a socially nutrient-dense alternative to the processed leadership styles available to us?
In the words of Charles and Henry, which are more appropriate today than ever before:
[T]he most appropriate leader is one who can lead others to lead themselves. We call this powerful new kind of leadership “SuperLeadership.”
The two authors describe SuperLeadership as self-leadership — or the ability to lead ourselves first, teaching others to do the same. SuperLeaders rely on those around them to commit to their work from an innate sense of ownership, and not because of fear-, reward-, or emotion-based responses. Instead:
Leaders become ‘super’ — that is, can possess the strength and wisdom of many persons — by helping to unleash the abilities of the ‘follower’ (self-leaders) that surround them.
Herein lies the difference between the other styles of leadership and SuperLeadership: It is, instead, about building up the leaders around us. Ironically, when we take the focus off of our power and control, unlocking it in others, we become better leaders. When we unleash the abilities of others, we gain crucial insights — that we would have otherwise been blind to — because a ‘follower’ was given the room to speak up safely.
Leader-Follower or Leader-Leader
In his book, Turn the Ship Around, L. David Marquet shares the story of his struggle as a submarine commander, taking over command of the worst-performing ship in the Navy. Much like Charles and Henry point out, David realized that leaders have the responsibility to build up others as leaders.
David points out that we tend to praise leaders when organizations crumble in their wake. If our CEO is our only glue that binds our companies, David questions their worth. He argues that we should, instead, judge our leaders by their ability to build up others. When leaders leave, our organizations should remain stable because other leaders have blossomed.
In his book, David describes two different models of leadership: Leader-Follower and Leader-Leader. Traditional leadership takes the Leader-Follower approach and minimizes the impact followers have on an organization’s success. In this model, leaders are responsible for being chief decision-makers, and their demands are binding. In the Leader-Leader model, leaders focus on building up those around them, recognizing that unlocking the strengths of others does not maximize our weaknesses.
We are somebody
Instead of sitting around and waiting for somebody to save us, we can recognize our innate power. As Simon Sinek is fond of saying, we can be the leaders we wish we had. We are somebody. We have agency and do not need to ask permission to build up others around us.
We, too, can be SuperLeaders.
