We've built entire mythologies around heroic leadership. The visionary founder who saw what others couldn't. The turnaround specialist who saved the dying company. The innovative CEO who disrupted an entire industry. (Picture them in your mind for a moment. Chances are, most of them are men. The hero narrative isn't just limiting - it's gendered too.)
These narratives are compelling, certainly (we've all read those biographies). They make for excellent magazine covers and keynote speeches. But they might also be one of the most limiting beliefs we hold about how organisations actually work.
Where The Camera Points
Think about it like this: every story has a perspective, a place where you've chosen to position the camera. In most corporate narratives, that camera sits firmly on the leader's shoulder, following them as they stride through challenges, make bold decisions, and overcome obstacles. It's the Superman angle -- we see what Superman sees, we experience his journey, his struggles, his eventual triumph. (And yes, it's usually Superman, not Wonder Woman - but that's another conversation.)
But what if we moved that camera? What if we positioned it on the shoulder of someone standing on the street, watching Superman fly past? Suddenly, it's a completely different story. It's about impact rather than action, about what changes in the world rather than who changes it. It becomes less about individual power and more about collective transformation. Same story, completely different meaning.
I once observed this phenomenon at a UK Building Society, where "Customer Comes First" adorned the reception walls. Pick up their internal magazine, though, and you'd find story after story about brilliant staff solving problems, creating innovations, driving change. The customers? They appeared as nondescript characters, grateful recipients of this brilliance, if they appeared at all.
The disconnect wasn't malicious -- it was simply that they'd positioned their narrative camera in the habitual place, on the hero rather than on those the hero serves.
The Scenius Effect
Brian Eno (yes, the musician and producer) has this rather brilliant scepticism about the whole concept of genius. He's coined an alternative term: "scenius" -- the intelligence and creativity of a whole scene, a whole community of practice. When we look at those figures we typically label as geniuses -- the Michelangelos, the da Vincis -- we tend to forget the entire ecosystem that made their work possible. The patrons who funded them, the apprentices who mixed their paints, the suppliers who developed new pigments, the intellectual communities that sparked their ideas.
The same applies to organisational leadership. When a CEO successfully transforms a company, they often bring key people with them from previous roles. Why? Because they recognise (even if they don't always acknowledge publicly) that their success wasn't individual -- it emerged from a specific configuration of relationships, expertise, and collaborative intelligence. The "genius" CEO is actually channelling a "scenius" of collective capability. It's less lone genius, more jazz ensemble.
Yet we persist in writing the story as if one person did it all. And here's where it becomes genuinely problematic for organisations trying to create lasting change.
The Cost Of Hero Narratives
When leaders are positioned as heroes -- as the primary protagonists of every organisational story -- everyone else gets relegated to supporting cast at best, extras at worst. This isn't just about bruised egos (though those matter more than we might admit). It's about what it does to an organisation's capacity for distributed leadership and innovation.
If the narrative is always "our brilliant CEO saw the future and led us there," then what's the message to everyone else? It's essentially: wait for direction, follow the leader, your role is implementation not imagination. You become what one might call, borrowing from Star Trek, the "red shirts" of the organisation -- there to enable the hero's journey but not to have meaningful agency of your own.
The alternative is to position leaders not as heroes but as what they more often actually are: mentors, enablers, convenors of possibility. In this framing, the leader's role isn't to be the one who solves everything but to create conditions where others can solve things. They're not the protagonist; they're the catalyst that enables multiple protagonists to emerge.
Rewriting The Organisational Story
Consider how different it would feel if your company's success stories were told from the perspective of problems solved rather than leaders who solved them. Instead of "How Our CEO Transformed Digital Operations," imagine "How Digital Operations Transformed: A Story of 500 Contributors."
And here's what that actually looks like: The story might start with the customer service team noticing a recurring complaint pattern. Then follow the data analyst who created a dashboard that made the pattern visible to everyone. Then the developer who suggested the architecture change. Then the finance person who found budget for it in an unexpected place. Then the operations manager who ran interference with three layers of bureaucracy. Each of these people gets their moment as protagonist - not as a supporting player in someone else's story, but as an agent of change in their own right.
The CEO's role? They show up about halfway through as the person who noticed the dashboard, asked good questions, and made sure the developer got time to prototype. Important? Absolutely. The hero? Not remotely.
This isn't about diminishing leadership -- it's about recognising what leadership actually is in complex organisations. It's less about individual heroics and more about creating what one might call "narrative space" for others to step into. When people see themselves as potential protagonists rather than perpetual supporters, something shifts. Initiative increases. Innovation emerges from unexpected quarters. The organisation develops what you might call "distributed leadership capacity."
The Sustainability Question
There's also a purely practical dimension to this. Hero-based change is exhausting and ultimately unsustainable. (I've watched too many brilliant leaders burn themselves out this way.) When transformation depends on one person's vision, energy, and determination, you're essentially pushing a boulder uphill and holding it there through force of will. (Exhausting for you, alarming for everyone watching.) The moment that person leaves, gets distracted, or simply burns out, the boulder rolls back down.
You've seen this, I imagine. A charismatic leader transforms safety culture through sheer force of personality - constant visibility, personal follow-up, infectious enthusiasm. They leave for another role. Within six months, the old patterns have reasserted themselves. Why? Because the change lived in one person's energy, not in the organisation's structure.
But when change emerges from shifting the entire system -- from creating new configurations of relationship, new patterns of communication, new distributions of agency -- it tends to stick. You're not pushing against gravity; you're changing the shape of the hill itself.
A Different Kind Of Strength
Perhaps the most profound shift is recognising that stepping out of the hero role actually requires more strength, not less. It takes considerable confidence to share narrative space, to celebrate others' contributions without needing to be the central figure. (More confidence, actually, than it takes to be the hero.) It requires what you might call "narrative generosity" -- the ability to see your own success as emerging from and contributing to a larger story.
Some of the most effective leaders I've encountered barely feature in their organisations' success stories. They're mentioned, certainly, but more as facilitators than protagonists. These are often the leaders who create the most lasting change. Not in spite of what we might call their 'narrative humility' but because of it. "Sarah created the conditions for us to..." or "Marcus asked the question that helped us see..." rather than "Sarah/Marcus solved our problem." They understand that their job isn't to be the hero but to help others discover they can be.
And perhaps that's the ultimate irony: the leaders who resist the hero narrative often end up creating the most heroic outcomes -- not through individual action but through enabling collective capability that far exceeds what any individual could achieve.
So next time you're crafting a success story for your organisation, pause and ask: where have I positioned the camera? Whose journey are we following? Who gets to be the protagonist? The answer might reveal more about your organisation's capacity for change than any transformation framework ever could.
Because here's what I've learned: organisations don't transform because of heroes. They transform because ordinary people, given the right conditions and narrative space, discover they're capable of extraordinary things. And isn't that a rather more interesting story anyway? (I certainly think so. Though admittedly, it doesn't fit as neatly on a magazine cover or intranet headline.)
Image Source: Canva
