Leadership Systems

By Donna Butchko

In your business, are you a hero?  Do you want to be a hero?  Does your company appreciate, recognize and reward heroes?  If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you may be experiencing a lack of leadership.

Despite what many people think, the opposite of leader is not follower, it is hero.  A hero is an individual who steps in to save the day, when we find ourselves in a crisis situation.  A leader is someone who works through others to achieve a vision.  A hero may save many people, but it is through his or her individual effort.

One of the jobs of a good leader is to look ahead.  Only by looking ahead do you have the opportunity to spot a potential crisis before it becomes an actual crisis.  If you frequently find yourself, or members of your staff, solving crises you need to find out why.  Not in the middle of the crisis, but after it’s been heroically solved.  And one of the first questions you should ask is, “Could we have foreseen this?”  If the answer is “Yes”, the next question is “Having foreseen it, could we have prevented it?”  The answer won’t always be “Yes.”  There are sometimes things that you can see coming but still do nothing to prevent – like tornados.  However if the second answer is also “Yes” then you need to do some investigating into why it wasn’t prevented. 

There are a lot of reasons that crises happen.  Sometimes there are things that are outside of our control; sometimes it is actually easier to deal with the crisis than to prevent it.  And often it is more fun and more rewarding to deal with the crisis than to prevent it.  This is the one that you want to be on the lookout for. 

Everyone enjoys the thrill of saving the day, of being the hero.  Companies frequently reward that behavior, too.  This combination can easily lead to a culture that appreciates and creates heroes, rather than one that prevents crises.  While this can be fun and rewarding for the individuals, it is usually hard on the business overall.  Rarely is it cost effective to allow a situation to reach a crisis when you could have prevented the crisis. 

There will always be some things that cannot be foreseen or, when foreseen cannot be prevented.  And there will always be an opportunity for a hero to emerge in that situation and save the day.  The challenge is to ensure that your culture doesn’t favor heroes so strongly that there is an incentive for people to ignore the coming crisis while it is still avoidable, in favor of being able to solve the crisis when it is here.

So what do you and your company value?  Not in your words, but in your actions.  Does special recognition go more to heroes or to crisis preventers?  The preventers are harder to spot, and therefore harder to reward, but more important for the long term strength of your business.

That’s what good leadership is like.  If you do it really well all that your people remember is what a great job they did.  There may not even be one hero.  But you achieved your goals with the least amount of drama possible.  What more could a business want?