We Don't Need Another Hero

Intro

If you find yourself watching any of the leaders currently taking up too much space in your news feed, and wonder, “Who thought it was a good idea to put this guy in charge?” - you are not alone. Tales of leadership styles that have resulted in huge spending and little change, grand promises and limited results, endless headlines but hollow outcomes are not contemporary issues. Male leaders have been getting it impressively wrong for a very long time. Perhaps we think it’s worse now because the most current version is loud and at a scale previously reserved for the dreams of avarice… or Croesus.

How is it that men are allowed such blind faith that they are able to do well individually, and such forgiveness when they fail everyone so catastrophically? While anything involving humans is more complicated than preferable, I can hear the echoes of Great Man Theory at the heart of the heart of this question. Despite the stacks of unread meta-analyses from social sciences on what makes a group of employees happy, the strength of wanting to believe in mythology looms large and seems to hold us captive still.

What is Great Man Theory?

The short version is: throughout important points in history, there has always been a man, who led brilliantly (particularly when there was a crisis), who was born with the necessary traits, and there will be another.

If you prefer to suffer through the original publication of the theory, check your local library for Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 page-turner-of-the-day On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History. (Do tread carefully - he opposed the abolition of slavery, in case you were wondering what sort of Victorian man of letters he was.) [1]

While the original version has been interpreted by some as a rejection of great leaders of industry (and so, worthy of rehabilitating), for this article I’m only considering the echoes of the original ideas.

Contemporary Echoes

Whenever considering the version of events that made it into a history book, and how it came to your attention, it’s useful to ask yourself who is telling the tale of glory and why it’s the version that made it to the printing press. While there are several sides to every story, only one or two will appear in most history textbooks, documentaries, and the general public perception of ‘what happened’. Before it’s been decided who the ‘hero’ of the story is, the setting and series of events will have been necessarily reduced. Reading tales of heroes from eras long gone could always do with a reminder that much has been flattened in that account.

Another way we can hear echoes of the theory is through gender analysis. Why are there so many great men throughout history? Tales of genius, ingenuity, daring-do, and downright pluck fill the story arch of biographies, films, and legendary lore to reaffirm that there was one man, and he was special. You could say he was born to lead. Why he was special varies, depending on when he was alive. Sometimes there’s a higher power involved, although these days origin stories tend to focus more on gene pools or educational provenance. Nevertheless, the through-line remains a robust use of je ne sais quoi + man = great.

Bizarrely, there are so few women throughout history who led, were geniuses, and had that special something. How very odd. It seems women have summarily managed to be found wanting as far as gods are concerned, are lacking the ‘leader’ gene, and/or they failed to study the correct combination of latin and bullshittery. Mysteriously, very few poor men come to be Great either. It’s almost as if generational wealth, nepotism, and built-in networks have an outsized impact on who is eligible to become Great.

Finally, and perhaps the most powerful part keeping this echo alive, is the idea that there will be more Great Men in the future. The input through stories, comic books, history lessons, and general background noise of gendered behavioural norms forms a strong, supportive base for little boys who see representation and begin to shape their sculpture of self. There will be another Great Man and he will lead us away from all this. And, if you have the correct combination of characteristics, it could be you!

Why is this harmful?

The most immediate way this harms us is in the lack of representation. When words like genius, hero, great, and leader are narrowly defined to be a man who looks and sounds a certain way, the achievements and potential of others will be unfairly heard and go unrecognised. It’s this narrowness which creates an environment that's perfect for phenomena like epistemic injustice. This is where “someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower, (and) wronged therefore in a capacity essential to human value,” [2]. Representation matters in that it is how we societally come to decide who is capable of ‘knowing’, and so who is worthy of being listened to.

Can you think of this in the context of your work? Who has knowledge, and how do you decide that? Does your manager know? Is the knowledge from collective endeavor and contribution? Is it decided from a centralised place in the organisation, and then disseminated?

The narrowness of the Great Heroic Genius Leader criteria similarly functions as a maintenance feature, informing us what is natural and what is unnatural. This is often the case when a woman is in a leadership position. She is perceived as an oddity because it seems unnatural to us after disproportionately witnessing stories, marketing, and real-life examples of men as CEOs. In a paper interrogating why we react to corporate ‘saviors’ the way that we do, the author notes the influence of Great Man Theory’s “assertion that certain individuals, certain men, are gifts from God placed on earth to provide the lightening needed to uplift human existence,” [3]. Certain characteristics of leadership are expected and celebrated as masculine in men, while being simultaneously punished in women. This changes depending on industry, where you work, and position of power within the organisation, however, even with all of our back-patting, women continue to be kept out or pushed out of leadership [4].

If we consider Work through a gendered division, we can identify the normative roles and relationships which gender performance requires and recreates as a way to maintain the separation. What should the women in the company say/do/wear/hide/ignore/absorb in order to be an accepted leader? How do understandings of power shape your perception of her performance as a leader? When she screws up, is the mistake attributed to gender?

Women are quite simply not afforded the tolerance level for getting it wrong. I would argue we’re not even afforded the same tolerance for being mediocre.

We don’t need another hero

Heroes and the worship of them do a wonderful job of centering the Individual and reducing or obstructing the Collective. It isn’t unrelated to more celebrated masculine performance, of course - the ideal Individual who knows, who can, who does, and who’s available to work late every time ticks many boxes on the list. Relying on others and working as a collective occupies, despite the Individual focus of the past 50+ years, a space in most company literature but is less easy to point at on a daily basis. The organisation of an organisation is usually designed to prioritise the Individual.

In an (accidentally hilarious) publication from 1974 “For a more effective organization - match the job to the man”, authors argue that organisations will be much more effective if the design and management is individual-focussed [5]. This hyper focus on the Individual compliments pre-existing expectations of a Hero leading the organisation into lands of plenty. It also hasn't changed much in 50 years.

Whether it’s talk of a self-made man or a once in a generation genius, the Hero Leader narrative retains impressive staying power that rivals gum on your shoe. Think of contemporary examples in the Big Tech industry and you’ll not struggle to match the labels to the lone ranger. I find it stunning that public discourse still blindly cheers on the idea that a man who is almost entirely removed from society and most employees’ reality can be an effective leader. A particularly bizarre example of this is seeking out their advice on what will happen as technologies shift in relation to work. In the same way that Simone Weil critiqued Marx for not actually understanding factory workers and their day-to-day experience of work [6], I’m perplexed by anyone thinking unimaginably rich men are capable of understanding work as it is experienced, needed, completed, hated, or used as a way to understand the Self within Society by most people. Work is such a complicated thing; capable of simultaneously playing roles in our ability to experience dignity, meaningfulness, purpose, a place to demonstrate skill mastery, to relate to others, and to have autonomy.

Why would anyone listen to these men talk about work?

Oh, right - the money. And Hero worship. And the conflation of money-making with goodness.

Final thoughts

We don’t need another hero. We certainly don’t need more hero worship. We could do with a better understanding of the potential our work design and participation has in creating that which we desire. This becomes more painfully obvious as we collectively watch a growing collection of jobs become more and more data-ified and dehumanised.

What is it that we desire from our work? I suspect it is not to be led nor saved by a billionaire (not that any of them ever did). I suspect we would like to come away from the limitations of thinking about such a complicated and intertwined part of our self and society as something the language of economics could ever attend to. I suspect we would like to know how to participate in it with each other in ways that are at least not harmful, and at best potentially meaningful. All those positive outcomes, as it so happens, require consistent, collaborative effort in small-ish groups. Not heroes.

Works Cited

[1] Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841.

[2] Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, 2007; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001.

[3] Spector, B. A. (2016). Carlyle, Freud, and the great man theory more fully considered. Leadership, 12(2), 250–260. https:// doi.org/10.1177/174271501557139

[4] Kark, R., & Buengeler, C. (2024). WO∼Men and Leadership: Re-Thinking the state of research on gender and leadership through waves of Feminist Thinking. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 31(3), 245–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518241257105

[5] Lawler, E. E., III, Finegold, D. (1999). Individualizing the Organization: Past, Present and Future. University of Southern California. <https://ceo.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/1999/11/1999_14-g99_14-Individualizing_Org.pdf

[6] Weil, S. (2019). Œuvres complètes: Tome V, Volume 2. Écrits de New York et de Londres (1942–1943) (F. de Lussy, Ed.). Gallimard.