heroic leadership – The Leadership Professor

Americans have a yearning to believe not only in a hero’s good deeds but in his goodness as a person.[1]

The quote is from a provocative piece in Newsweek about Greg Mortenson (of Three Cups of Tea fame) and his quick fall from grace following allegations by 60 Minutes and an expose (Three Cups of Deceit) by Into the Wild and Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer of fabricated claims in Mortenson’s memoir and about his charity’s school-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as serious questions about his non-profit’s financial dealings and management.

I’ll let you read the details and sort through the hundreds of blogs, posts, websites, news stories, and online sources about the story to get to the truth.

I’m more interested in what all this says about us – and about why Mortenson’s grand story, as Krakow notes, went unchecked for years.

Plain and simple, we prefer our heroic leaders perfect, saintly, and on a pedestal.

It’s hard for us to look too close because we’d have to see them as human and acknowledge that imperfect or flawed people can still do great things.

Hampton Sides ties our preference for “neat” heroes to the quintessential American longing for the guy in the white hat – the perfect personification of our nation’s strengths and Manifest Destiny through a monochromatic Puritan lens.

I see it another way. If heroes are perfect, then I’m off the hook. Ordinary people like me don’t have to step up, speak out, take risks, or take a chance. We can just wait for the next perfect ones. And when their humanity begins to show, we can use our new-found social media capacities to take them down at break-neck speed too – or, as we do with our political leaders, throw them to the pundits and vote them out of office as soon as we can. Once free of these disappointing human beings, we can search for another perfect leader and again place all our hopes, dreams, and needs on that person. And the beat goes on.

There’s a simple alternative that will serve us better. We can all look for the leader within and act. Accept the fact that despite our foibles and imperfections, we can do great things – and in the process, learn compassion for the imperfect others attempting to do the same.

There’s something deeply heroic – deeply American – about that.

[1] Hampton Sides (2011). Shattered faith: What the fall of Greg Mortenson tells us about America’s irrepressible longing for heroes. Newsweek. May 2, 2011. pp. 5-6. Available online at http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/24/shattered-faith.html

The film Black Swan has created quite a buzz. In it, Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, secures the role of her dreams – the lead in Swan Lake – only to be destroyed by the pressures that accompany doing it well. There’s an important leadership lesson in that.

We can only lead well and strongly when we retain our balance and perspective. Doing this asks leaders to navigate an interesting paradox: total immersion with measured detachment.

Leadership is all about commitment, deep relationships, and authenticity. It’s hard to be successful if you stand on the sidelines. But leaders get in trouble when they forget they are playing a role and others are responding to them in it. Reactions and dynamics – positive or negative – that look very personal aren’t really very personal at all. In the leadership dance, we relate role to role.

Anyone who has ever been a lame duck having announced his or her decision to step down knows exactly what I am talking about.

Boston University social psychologist William Kahn in his study of caregivers identified a paradox in compassionate service that sheds insights on all this.

Caring professionals who serve others in need require simultaneous openness to and distance from those they seek to aid. They need clear boundaries to sustain objectivity, protect themselves from the stress of the work, and nurture essential autonomy in others. At the same time, good caregivers, like good leaders, need to understand others deeply to respond to the unique realities of their situation over time.

This only happens when caregivers “take in” those they serve – fully grasp others’ fears, capabilities, limitations, frustrations, anger, and needs. Learned skills in “clinical detachment” enable clinicians to bound this process – remain a full step away from being personally involved.

However, skilled professionals still risk “the strain of absorption”– accumulated stress from closeness to those in need, recognition of others’ pain and frustration, and the “constant waves of emotion” that wash up against them in the course of their everyday work. Over time, compassion fatigue takes a toll. It is easy for caregivers – and even easier for leaders – to ignore this and lose their sense of balance.

Leaders face internal and external pressures to produce and dynamics that keep them focused largely on follower needs. Leadership guru John Gardner acknowledges a universal ambivalence toward leaders: people want leaders who are powerful and capable of results. At the same time, they hate dependence and giving power to others. The ambivalence pushes followers to blindly up-the-dependence-ante and then punish leaders who don’t – or can’t – deliver quickly enough.

Shared conceptions of heroic leadership – the solitary superhero whose brilliance and strength save the day – support a leader’s stoic acceptance of the added pressures. So does the reality that all leaders serve at the will of their followers. Rising expectations bring the potential for rising disappointment.

The stage is set for leaders to forget the important distinction between taking their work seriously and taking their work too personally – and we saw where that led one fictional ballerina named Nina.