The Leader as Hero

• Everyone wants to be a hero.
• Even if in a small way - to be admired, respected, accepted.
• If you admire sporting heroes, you want to be like them yourself.
• The true leader is essentially a hero - someone who does something outstanding.
• The appointed manager cannot compel hero worship.
• We admire heroic leaders too much sometimes, thus depending on them and disempowering ourselves.
  

How you can be a leader and a hero

• To be a hero, you must demonstrate some form of excellence.
• The drive to be a hero = the drive to differentiate yourself, to be who you can be.
• Those who genuinely do not have this drive are content with their own status quo.
• Unlike their sporting heroes, they don't push themselves to improve in any way.
• Otherwise they have low self esteem and feel they cannot do any better.
• To be a hero, you do not need to stand out by doing something extraordinary.
• All managers looked up to in any way are still heroes to those to look up to them.
• Being such a hero will enable you to lead those who admire you.
• Being too much of a hero can be counterproductive if it disempowers others.
• Small, occasional acts of heroism help others to feel they can emulate you.
• Referring to heroes may sound over the top, but can you not think of a few people you admire even if you would not call them your heroes?
• Younger people are more prone to full blown hero worship than older people.
• That's because they're still looking for role models on which to base their own identity.
• If you overly admire heroes at a more mature age, you might be avoiding some aspect of reality you find unpleasant.
• Even if you don't go so far as to put photos of your manager in a scrapbook, you may be deferring too blindly to his or her authority, too reliant on your manager to look after you and, hence, too let down when your expectations are disappointed.
• For your own development, it might be of some benefit to explore for yourself why you defer to readily or rely so completely on your manager for leadership.

Post-heroic Leadership

• Current definitions of leadership have a post-heroic connotation.
• The claim is that it is possible to be a leader without being a hero.
• Heroic leaders can, it is felt, take on too much power and make promises they can't meet.
• They can disempower employees and thus destroy employee engagement.
• This is a complex problem because we also tend to be inspired by role models to challenge ourselves to do better.
• So, we partly depend on heroes while, at the same time, are inspired by them.
• The question is whether the downside is worth the upside.
• It can be argued that the post-heroic leader is more engaging.
• The aim of post-heroic leaders is to draw solutions out of team members rather than to sell their own solutions.

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When you think of leadership do you have a particular ideal in mind? What is your image of the ideal leader?

Challenging conventional thinking about leadership

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