Return of the hero: Systems leadership needs individuals willing to step up
The idea of leadership as an activity for a heroic few has been well critiqued. But as we confront a climate crisis and growing social polarisation is it time for a rethink?
KATE SIMPSON
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For the last decade or so leadership thinking has encouraged us to see ‘leadership as a team sport’. Collaboration, distributed action, innovation, participation are the sources of power that leadership draws on and unleashes in the many, not the few. And this is undoubtedly a good thing.
However, as we confront a climate and biodiversity crisis; as we wrestle with growing inequality and polarisation; and as we search for new forms of economy, new forms of national and global governance, and if we are to create private firms capable of more than just maximising share holder profit – maybe we are going to need a few more heroes to show up?
We will never deal with the complex and ambiguous challenges we face if we just wait for some sort of heroic leader to show up. That is, someone who seems to have more courage, more certainty, more insight, more knowledge, more passion, more hair, just more… than we have. They are not coming. Mostly because they don’t exist. But also because no one person, however brilliant, and well intentioned can tackle complex problems alone. Collective action is the only form of action.
However, the sort of challenges we face are going to require significant disruption of the status quo. They are going to require businesses to internalise things that they have long externalised – like their impact on their environment, or on the health and wellbeing of staff. Government departments need to change how they relate to citizens; academic institutions need to take responsibility for both who they educate and who (and why) they exclude. International NGOs will need to let go of some of the resources they control and let others control them if decolonisation and localisation are to be realised. What ever sector you sit in there are deep changes to make in who has power, who is served, who is excluded. And as with all systems level change, there will be resistance.
Significant shifts in power have never come through consensus. They have been pushed for and demanded and alternatives built to prove what’s possible. And people have taken risks to do these things. Personal risks – with their own careers, assets, popularity, credibility and even their bodies. And this is the sort of heroic leadership we are going to need. The sort where individuals are willing to risk things that matter to them; and to be seen to do so.
But it is not an either or. We are going to need both heroic leadership acts and mass unleashed, collaborative, participatory, experimental, unstoppable, relentless leadership. So there are a few caveats in my call for a little more heroism:
All heroes need (a lot) of friends
For change to happen a lot of people need to take a lot of actions. When Rosa Parks decided to claim her right to sit on the bus she put her body on the line. She risked her freedom, her physical safety. The year long Alabama bus protest which followed saw hundreds of people wear their shoes out as they walked to and from work.
The ensuing dismantlement of the racist Jim Crow Laws was an outcome both of the action of heroes (of which Rosa Parks was one) and of a legion of people who did the long slow personal work of following. Systems change needs both – the individual heroes who stand out and the masses who stand up. Most of us won’t have what it takes, or the opportunity, to be heroes but we can respond to them when they shown up.
The unsung heroes matter
One of the big problems with ‘hero leadership’ is that it tends to just focus on the internal story of the person and not the wider context they were in. Sometimes the same action done by a different person or in a different moment has much less impact. A few months before Rosa Parks there was Collette Colvin – who also claimed her right to sit where she chose on a bus. Her action was the same, her impact was not.
Perhaps because of who she was (younger, less well connected) perhaps the moment wasn’t quite right. Likewise, Greta Thunberg was not the first person to mount a school strike for the climate. Systems change is a dynamic thing. There are windows of opportunity that are hard to predict till after someone has charged through them. So if we need heroes then we need a lot of them, and only a few will get their stories told.
Heroic acts not heroic people
The problem with people who do heroic things is that they always turn out to be flawed. If we are going to ask more of ourselves and each other in terms of visibility and boldness then we also have to accept individuals’ abilities to be both wonderfully right and good and also wrong and flawed. This is not some sort of offset scheme where the good and bad are tallied and an average found. Rather it is an acceptance that both will exist in all of us.
Ultimately, we can not leave the climate crisis, social justice and the building of a more peaceful and equitable world in the hands of the few. It is going to need collective action. But nor can we expect to make a difference without being seen, without being willing to spend some of the things many of us have carefully built – our careers, our popularity, our security, our networks, our perceived competence, our invisibility.
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