Four tips to address your “tragic” leadership

Once upon another life, I taught literature to secondary and university students. I did not know it at the time but it was handy preparation for a career in leadership development.

Literature teaching and leadership development are both professions that encounter heroes on a journey, elevated by their strengths, and struggling with their flaws. Literature aims to understand these heroes; leadership development tries to grow and develop them.

I like to think about literature as a fossil record of the human condition. Great stories that capture humans encountering timeless struggles. An examination of these stories and their implied lessons can act as a stimulus for leadership development, if you know where to look.

One helpful place we could start is with the genre of tragedy. The Ancient Greeks invented it but Shakespeare made it memorable. Tragic narratives go like this:

A promising hero sets out on a journey but is undermined by an unchecked personal flaw which leads to their unnecessary and untimely death.

Consider these famous characters from myth and drama. Icarus, who learns how to fly, becomes overconfident, flies too close to the sun, and plummets to his death. Pride, it would seem, comes before a fall. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Romeo's impulsivity leads to suicide and destroys two families. Hasty decisions create chaos. In Macbeth, Macbeth’s unchecked quest for power swiftly results in alienation and mass murder. Power corrupts absolutely. It is not simply that these heroes have flaws, what destroys them is their refusal to address them.

Tragic heroes are not popular amongst modern audiences for obvious reasons. We struggle to understand why anyone would want to watch their hero slowly and painfully die. But the Ancient Greeks had a good answer, and one that leaders could learn from.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought tragedy was cathartic (1997). Like an effective massage, it hurts while it is happening but you feel better afterwards. For Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy was to teach the audience a collective lesson so that the audience was not compelled to repeat the hero's error.

Modern audiences are different. We prefer our literary and filmic entertainment to be much less like a painful massage and more like a deep-fried doughnut. It should taste delicious even if it does not make you a better person.

On a bad day, leadership development practices also suffer from an unhealthy emphasis on pleasure rather than pain. It feels a lot better attending a workshop celebrating your signature strength rather than strapping up your Achilles heel and heading back onto the muddy field when it's cold, wet and windy.

As someone interested in high performance, I have always wondered whether leaders should focus on their strengths or weaknesses. Management guru, Peter Drucker, is quoted as saying:

"One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence" (2008).

This is sage advice but I want update it. Your strengths are the fingerprint of your leadership. It is important to know them and leverage them. It is also critical to develop competence across your weaknesses too. But most importantly, you must not let your “flaw” derail your career. That's the lesson from tragic literature.

Let Barcelona Football Club's Lionel Messi, famed for his mercurial left foot, stand as an exemplar. He has finished a number of his greatest goals with his right foot. And that wouldn't have happened by accident. Messi has become competent on his right foot but "magisterial" on his left. It's the right balance of strength to competency. And, at least for now, Messi seems to have counterbalanced the hubris that can afflict the world's best with a healthy dose of humility.

Although “flaws” are specific to people, and their struggles, there are a few common leadership flaws that are worth attending to. They are listed below with some suggested antidotes.

Micromanagement. Are you scared you won’t be perfect? If you try to manage all interactions with a magnifying glass, you decrease productivity, limit creativity, demoralise co-workers and burn yourself out. Could you get better at distributing tasks, teaching and energising others?

Avoidance. Are you afraid of being disliked? If you avoid having difficult conversations with people about the things that matter to you because you don't want to offend anyone, you'll build a culture that is no longer safe for those you sought to nurture. What would it take to be more courageous in your leadership? To walk towards the situations you fear and share your concerns for the greater good?

Narcissism. Do you need to be loved? We all need to be loved, validated and appreciated. That's just the human condition. But in leadership, this need cannot be prioritised as your team’s number one goal. Could you find other ways, apart from work, to feel more appreciated? Could you use your leadership to shine a light on the work of others?

Martyrdom. Do you feel a need to save or serve others? The impulse and commitment to serve rather than save others is a wonderful attribute of many leaders. It is purposeful and rewarding at the right dosage. But any organism that constantly gives out also burns out if it is not refueled. Could you find a way to sustain your energy by investing in yourself and others in more sustainable ways? Would this allow your leadership to burn strong not out?

The genre of tragedy reminds us that our flaws will engulf us if we do not courageously address them. This is not an invitation to kick yourself harder – a flaw in itself – it is permission to pro-actively focus on your growth without feeling ashamed for ever missing the mark. You are human.

Long ago Tim Gallwey observed that the child learning to walk does not see themselves as a failure when they fall (1976). They are enthusiastically evolving from crawling to a new state, walking. Echoing the messages of performance coaches like Gallwey and Ben Crowe, I'd argue that in the quest for improvement, which is common among leaders, leaders should not see themselves as broken, but already-enough. If we see ourselves as already-enough, as already loved, then working through our flaws is less like tip-toeing through shattered glass and more like learning a new tune on a cherished instrument.

References

Aristotle., Baxter, J., Atherton, P., & Whalley, G. (1997). Aristotle’s Poetics. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Crowe, B. (2021). https://www.mojocrowe.com/

Drucker, P. F. (2008). Managing oneself. Harvard Business Review Press.

Gallwey, W. T. (1976). Inner tennis: Playing the game. Random House Incorporated.

Zander, R. S. (2016). Pathways to Possibility: Transforming our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world. Penguin Books.