Hungry for heroes
by Steve Hearsum and Phil Lewis
First published onJan 21, 2025
For centuries, the dominant archetype that underpins our conception of leadership has remained unchanged.
It is that of the ‘hero’: the courageous, superhuman achiever. The one who stands brave and unyielding in the face of all the world has to throw.
Look closely and you will see it everywhere. It underpins keynote introductions (“our first speaker today has conquered the world of steel piping”). It transforms profiles from useful journalism to pointless hagiography (“whither Zuck?” – cue obligatory portrait with valiant middle-distance stare). And it’s found in the landfill that is much of what gets billed as ‘thought leadership’. Heroic leadership is the stereotype that, zombie-like, refuses to die.
The cultural and social context that sustains this stereotype is indebted to the metaphor and symbolism of war and sports. This is another unavoidable pattern in most business language. Such language implies that business, like war or sport, is an activity in which there must be winners and losers. Now bring this together with capitalism’s tendency towards winner-takes-all distribution. And hey presto, say hello to the hero outliers: the “Titans” or “Olympians” of business who bestride our working culture.
Over the years the hero archetype has evolved into different forms. One variant is the ‘servant leader’. This is the individual who, to fulfil their calling, must subjugate themselves to the people they serve. The idea is powerful because it evokes self-sacrifice: in order to prosper leaders must prioritise their people’s needs over their own. One example of this is the trope that ‘leaders eat last’. Feeling hungry is all part of the hero’s journey.
Look closer and you will see that servant leadership is the basis on which religious leaders are venerated in cultures all over the world. (The Christian son of God, Jesus, washed the feet of ‘his’ people, after all.) Religious leaders are legitimate heroes in part because of their self-sacrifice. But business is not religion, no matter how hard capitalism might try to persuade us that it is.
So there are questions to answer. How well does the hero archetype serve us? If we swap the ‘high hero’ for the ‘lowly hero’, how much progress does that honestly represent? Are business leaders worthy of any sort of hero status – high or low?
At a more fundamental level, we also need to ask whether this belief system sets leaders – and their organisations – up for success.
Why does the hero myth persist?
This is a simple question with a complex answer. The first component of it is our deep psychological need to believe that our leaders have the answers, that they know what to do. It is difficult for us to deal with the anxiety of not knowing what to do, so (consciously or not) we look to others to ‘fix’ it. This behaviour is fuelled by the ego ideals of those in charge, who hold a self-image of the leader they believe they must be. A mountain of business books and ‘thought leaders’ feed this. On sale at a Waterstones near you: an infinite variety of thinly disguised ways to ‘search for the hero inside yourself’.
Then there is the organisation ideal – which is to say, the image of the leader that those working for the organisation long to hold. Quasi-heroic charisma has a lot of pull here. Indeed, our wider culture fosters this. Dragons’ Den, The Apprentice, Billions, Succession and any number of other TV series have turned narratives of what it means to ‘be’ a leader into big ratings. Such narratives ignore the fact that life is a little more complicated than simply finding the next charismatic leader to sort out the mess caused by the failure of the (now discredited) heroes who came before.
Then we might consider the human need for hierarchy. This is underpinned by the need to be led, which itself is fed by our need for protection and security. Dominance dynamics are part of this. This is a theory that suggests that humans have tendencies to look to the most assertive and powerful figure in a group and assume that they possess an authority that their intellect, morality and/or experience might not justify.
Further, if we posit business (or indeed, life) as a game in which there are winners and losers, an attractive possibility opens up: that we ourselves might emerge as a winner. This is one reason why leaders who mirror the values of the people they serve are popular. They enable the followers to see themselves (and their longed-for future success) in the leader: “I too can be a hero one day.”
Finally, we might extend the idea of seeing ourselves in leaders to its natural conclusion, where we are on a level with them. The lowly hero (‘leaders eat last’) myth is seductive because it speaks to the human desire for mutuality. To revisit religion, there is a reason why most major world belief systems posit a golden rule: that we must treat others as we wish to be treated. We are hard-wired to believe that this is how the world should be.
So, what we are collectively busy brewing here is a rich psychological stew. Blended in it are our idealised notions of leadership. Our need to find ways of managing anxiety by projecting onto others our hopes that someone has ‘the answer’. Our craving to understand and assume our position in our tribe. Our projected hopes for ourselves. And our desire for mutuality.
The fact that our desires for mutuality, dominance, safety and subjugation are in many senses conflicting is an illustration of the wonderful irrationality of the human mind.
The problem with the hero myth
Why does any of this matter?
To be in business today is to be confronted with an endless array of problems. These problems often compound one other. And all are beyond the ability of any individual, no matter how talented or experienced, to solve alone. This presents leaders with a problem: how to lead in a world where ‘I don’t know’ may be the sane response but can feel unsayable for fear of what might happen if the illusion of knowledge and control is found to be… well, just that.
In cultures that hold up leaders as all-conquering heroes, not knowing feels not only unheroic, but it can also pose a direct threat to an individual’s sense of security. “If I say I do not know”, the thinking goes, “will people still believe that I am a worthy leader?” This is especially the case given the unconscious need we have to be kept safe by those in charge.
Instead of confronting this uncomfortable truth head on, our culture suggests that it is better for leaders to (consciously or not) adopt a position of pseudo-humility. We seek to preserve the hero myth, and we do so by making the lowly hero role a diversionary tactic. It appears that leaders are prioritising and empowering their people to empower them. But, in many instances, the leader is the person still bearing the burden of heroism, wherever they stand in the canteen line.
We suggest that buried deep within the idea that ‘leaders eat last’ is a challenging emotion: shame.
Shame is amongst the most difficult emotions for humans to bear. And if saying ‘I don’t know’ is shameful, then it stands to reason that leaders will do what’s necessary to avoid or live in denial of that shame. They might eat last in the unconscious hope that someone else will come up with the answer first. Or that someone else will do the leading. Or even that leadership will not prove necessary after all.
Beyond the hero archetype
We propose that it is long overdue for organisations and those that support them to wean themselves off the hero archetype. It is a burden on leaders and counterproductive for organisational health.
Our culture is moving ever closer towards honouring individuals as autonomous beings with irreplaceable value to offer. In this context, to cling to heroes, whether well-muscled and loud or humble and softly spoken, seems absurd. If we understand diversity and difference as central to innovation, creativity and healthy workplaces, then placing faith on a single individual feels misplaced at best, and counterproductive at worst. The hero myth is little more than a sugar high, which can never sate us and will only leave us unhealthier.
Instead of pretending to be superhuman, we need to embrace a form of leadership that is outward looking, open, inclusive and enabling. This isn’t just a question of who eats when. It’s a point about the core tenets of effective leadership in a volatile, complex and uncertain world. It is not the role of leaders to have the answers. Rather it is to help scaffold the conversations and inquiries that enable all those with a stake in an endeavour to find the next wise move.
Leadership needs people who do not deny their fragility but use it as a vehicle for further learning in service of positive change, in themselves and with others. If that means being first in line to the buffet, so be it. They key is to ‘eat’ in an order appropriate to context and need. Ultimately, the hangry leader is no good to anyone.
So what?
If you are happy with the eating arrangements, and with being the person whom everyone – maybe including yourself – looks to for ‘the answer’, then there is no ‘so what?’.
If, however, you have a sense that something in your practice as a leader, or in your organisation, is out of kilter, that the cost of working in a way that perpetuates unhealthy patterns of leading, organising and relating is too great, let’s talk.
More from Steve here.
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