The Heroic Manager

Why the leader who carries everything ends up holding the organization back

Hubert Saint-Onge

I have sat through the same presentation many times over the years, in different companies and different industries, given by different people. The details change. The shape does not. So let me describe the shape rather than any one instance of it.

A senior manager stands up to review his part of the business. It is a good business. The results are sound, and the delivery is fluent.

And something is wrong with it.

The account is told in the first person. His results, his decisions, his wins. Setbacks become the story of what he personally did in response to them. The scale of what he runs gets mentioned, and mentioned in the way one mentions a trophy. By the end, he has not named a single person who works for him.

The room is polite. Experienced managers quickly sense that this is not the time for questions, let alone debates. The boss is quiet in a way that is easy to miss and hard to forget: none of the usual back-and-forth between a presenter and the person he reports to, the half-joking exchange that tells you the two of them actually talk. The distance is there, and everyone can feel it.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming. Each time, what I had was an intuition, not a verdict. Discomfort came first; the analysis came later. But the discomfort was precise enough to trust, and the more often I examined it, the more clearly I recognized a pattern I have encountered again and again over thirty years of working with leaders.

Heroic management rarely announces itself as a problem. It shows up as a tone, then as a pattern, then as a culture.

A model, not a personality

It is tempting to reach for a label. Self-centered. Narcissistic. Those words are in the air, and there is a genuine research literature behind them. But a label describes a person, and a person can argue with it. What I have seen in those rooms is something more useful to name: a belief about how results are produced.

Heroic management is not a diagnosis, a character flaw, or a synonym for ambition and confidence. Plenty of confident, ambitious leaders build organizations that outgrow them.

Heroic management is a working assumption that results depend primarily on the leader’s own intelligence, drive and personal intervention, rather than on the quality of the system and the collective capability of the team.

That assumption has a legitimate place. In a crisis, a turnaround, or a start-up, heroics are often exactly what is needed and are rightly admired. The problem begins when the heroic mode stops being a response to circumstances and becomes the default way of managing.

The research on narcissism and leadership, the closest thing we have to an empirical study of the heroic model, makes the same point from a different angle. Grijalva and her colleagues, in a 2015 meta-analysis, found an inverted-U relationship: a moderate measure of self-belief helps a leader, and beyond a threshold it costs. Michael Maccoby, writing in Harvard Business Review, drew the line between productive and unproductive narcissists: the visionary who can still hear the truth and the one who no longer can. Dose and direction matter more than the trait.

Bradford and Cohen named the alternative four decades ago: the shift from the heroic manager to the post-heroic one, the manager as developer of people and of the system. That shift is not a change of personality. It is a change of capability, and like every leadership capability it is developed, not innate.

What to listen for

Here is something you will not find in a journal. A management presentation can be read as a diagnostic. The key is that the tells are absences. What matters is what never gets said.

The pronoun test. “I” and “my” carry the story. The team appears, if at all, as “my people.”

The anonymous team. Headcount is offered as an achievement, but no name is spoken and no role is described. Even the stories about time spent with the team leave the team faceless.

The missing structure. You cannot run a large group without structure, yet none is described. Either it does not exist, or the manager does not think it matters. Both are problems.

The silent boss. A presenter and his boss normally exchange some banter. It signals a working relationship. When the boss is detached and says nothing, the audience is watching a relationship that has stalled.

The one-way room. Little exchange with peers. It is a performance, not a conversation.

Wins without root causes. Results are presented as events the leader produced, not as outcomes of a system that can be explained, repeated and improved.

Next time you sit in a management meeting, four questions will tell you most of what you need to know. Did anyone on the team get named? Was structure described? Did the boss engage? Was this a conversation or a show?

Why organizations keep selecting for it

The uncomfortable part is that the heroic manager is not an accident. Organizations reward the pattern long before they suffer from it.

Heroics produce visible short-term wins, and promotion systems see only short-term wins. The research is blunt about this: the self-belief that gets a leader noticed predicts who emerges as a leader, not who is effective. The advantage comes from confident presentation in brief encounters, the interview, the pitch, the town hall, and it fades with acquaintance. Any selection process that rewards the pitch is the entry point.

Followers play their part. Gruda and Hanges found that agreeable, harmony-seeking people and anxious people are the most likely to attach themselves to such leaders. The enabling is systemic, not a failure of individuals.

And there is the organization’s own memory. It admired heroics in hard times, and admiration becomes a habit it cannot switch off when the hard times end.

Heroics displace accountability

The cost is not a list of side effects. It is a chain, and each link produces the next.

Personal expertise replaces priorities and alignment. The hero decides; the team executes. No one else needs to understand why, so no one does.

Which displaces accountability. When results are attributed to one person’s intervention, there is nothing left for anyone else to be accountable for, and the hero himself is accountable to no one. Accountability is not a strength of the heroic manager, and his boss usually senses this before he can name it.

Which produces compliance rather than commitment. People do what they are told, avoid risk and wait for approval. The culture becomes one of dependence.

Which means performance drops when the hero is absent. The organization has built no capability of its own. Nothing scales beyond the hero.

Meanwhile, short-term wins mask unaddressed root causes. The hero has no time to consult and trusts his own judgement more than any conversation, including with his boss. As Maccoby observed, he succeeded by not listening, and he keeps not listening as the stakes rise.

And the damage outlasts the hero. O’Reilly, Chatman and Doerr studied the cultures narcissistic CEOs leave behind and found the mechanism is omission. These leaders fail to install the norms of fairness, collaboration and accountability that would constrain everyone, themselves included, and the culture keeps those gaps long after the leader has gone.

Until the flame-out. Heroic managers tend to burn out, blow up or get found out. Chatterjee and Hambrick showed that their bolder, more volatile strategies produce big wins and big losses. By the time the loss arrives, the organization has already lost the capable people, who left first, and kept the dependent ones, who stayed.

What to do

The answer depends on where you sit.

If you report to a heroic manager. It is never about you. The behaviour is a belief about how results happen, not a judgement of your worth. Protect your own footing; the research shows the pattern does its worst damage to followers whose self-regard is already fragile. Frame your ideas in terms of the leader’s goals, and disagree privately, with facts, never in the room. Make the team visible yourself: name colleagues, describe structure, share credit sideways. You cannot change him, but you can model the alternative. And decide in advance how long you are prepared to wait for that to be noticed.

If you are the heroic manager’s boss. Silence confirms the pattern. A boss who disengages is endorsing by omission, the very mechanism that lets the culture absorb the damage. Stay in the conversation. Ask for the names. Ask about the structure. Ask how the win was produced and whether it would happen again without him. Test early for self-awareness. The heroic manager who can tolerate a truth-teller can be developed; the one who cannot will flame out, and the only question is how much he takes with him.

If you lead the organization or sit on its board. Treat it as a capability and governance problem, not a personality problem. The organizing principle is simple: verify, don’t trust. When heroics displace accountability, the organization has quietly lost its normal checks and must restore them independently. That means an in-depth financial audit, an operational review, and skip-level conversations with the team that never gets named. This is not distrust of the person. It is the replacement of checks that heroics have removed, and it is also how you find out whether the intuition was wrong. After a while in their position, the Heroic Leader comes to feel that they are the organization. They don’t make a distinction between what is theirs and what is the organization’s.  This explains why audits are a must.

 Then look upstream. Reference checks that go beyond the candidate’s own list. 360 feedback that reaches the top. Compensation tied to developing others and to collaboration, not only to results. And act on the pattern before the numbers deteriorate. By the time they do, the capable people have already left.

Can a heroic manager change?

Sometimes. Kets de Vries argues that coaching can work where there is real motivation. Maccoby is more skeptical and reserves his hope for the leader who accepts a truth-teller at his side.

My own view, from watching many leaders attempt it, is that the move from being seen to seeing others is the hardest developmental shift in leadership. It usually happens only when the leader experiences the cost personally, and by then the organization has often paid it first.

Which is why the organization cannot wait. The post-heroic shift is a capability the organization builds around the leader, in structure, in accountability, in the development of others. It is not something it waits for the leader to discover.

Final Thoughts

I keep coming back to those presentations. The problem was never the slides. It was what the slides revealed about where the leader’s attention lives.

The hero carries the organization. The leader builds one that can carry itself.

If it only works when you are in the room, it isn’t working.