E03 | The Lone Leader Myth

Christal Duncan and Carol Vickers of the Whole Human Collective unpack one of leadership's most damaging stories — that the strongest leaders need the least.

 In this episode, they trace the "lone leader" myth back to its industrial-age roots, explore the real costs it creates for leaders, teams, and organizations, and make the case for a different way forward: interdependence. 

If you've ever felt like everything rests on your shoulders, this conversation will challenge how you lead and what you might be ready to put down. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Are people because that's why they wanted to lead? That's why they got into organizations. That's why they moved up from being a manager to what we call a leader. And yet they every day they're having to hurt the very people that they want to help because of the way that the system has evolved.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Yeah, that's actually so true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

The Lone Leader Myth is one of the most expensive stories that organizations tell themselves. It produces leaders who are chronically overloaded, teams that are chronically undertrusted, and cultures where asking for help feels like admitting failure. It's not a personal flaw, it's a structural design problem. And it's been inherited from an industrial-era belief that individual output is a measure of all value. And so today in this episode, we're going to be naming that myth clearly. We're going to trace where it came from, we're going to show what it costs, and most of all, we're going to offer a different story that our greatest leadership capacity has always been relational. We were never meant to do this alone. And the leaders who understand that don't just lead better. They lead differently. Welcome to Reclaiming a World That Works. My name is Crystal Duncan, and I'm one of the co-founders of the whole human collective.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

And I'm Carol Bickers. And we're going to talk about this lonely job. And it is, it really relates to our last episode where we were talking about what creates what where you most felt alive and where it starts to break down. Because as we look at our fragmentation as a leader, that's when it becomes really lonely. But this is a story that has been told, not in it didn't start with this generation. It goes many generations back about who are the strongest leaders, and they are the ones who historically need the least. They are the tough people. They are the ones who carry it on no matter what. They're forging ahead. There's so many stories, so many metaphors about leaders who are facing to the wind and in front of the leading the charge.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

Yeah. I think it's a myth that honestly shows up for everybody at some point in time. Sometimes life and it can feel like life requires that of us. But in particular, we see this a lot in the people that we're working with at in our leadership and our executive coaching. And it is not, it's not something that is inherently true to who we are, but it's something that has come to us and almost been handed to us in the work culture that we're a part of. I think that when you think, when you go back to the beginning, it's like an industrial age hangover. That that era now where it's a couple hundred years old, but so much of our world is still connected to that way of being. It's part of the traumas that capitalism has put on all of us in many ways, shapes, and forms. But it was built on a very specific equation. And many companies, whether they realize it or not, but I think they still push their leaders to think in terms of this equation. And it's that your worth measures equals your measurable output. That you have to, your value as a person in an organization is tied to what you produce or what you complete or what you close. And we can see how that happens, right? In factories and production lines, and there's always that's always been part of it. But when we take that logic into knowledge work and into service industries and into leadership itself, it doesn't number one, it doesn't scale, but it's also a really hurtful myth.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yes, it is. And the truth is it probably didn't fit even with the factories and the production lines when you think about it, because it's not how we are wired as human beings. We did not evolve if you look around the world. We did not evolve as a species this way. It's something that Dr. Gabor Mate has spoken about over and over again that indicates our trauma. Because we as a human species were designed to be part of a village where we're collaborative and we're cooperative and we have specific roles, but we work together. And that was not, if we look at it now, that is a model which has been discarded in so many ways. But it was it worked to survive the human species, but it also evolved into something completely different, which we're now really being forced to take a look at.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Yeah, yeah. And every everybody listening would understand this, like the difference between cooperation and competition. I mean, we know that. But when you think about everything in a leader's life, that how the messaging and the pressures that are put on leaders is antithetical to that concept, right? You have performance evaluations. And while these are while there's a necessity to understand how people are performing and what could be done better, it's often a point, something like that is often a point of great trauma for leaders. We we get promoted for doing well, but sometimes doing well in a way that is that is at other people's expense, often at other people's expense. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Yeah. Leadership is often measured by doing more with less. And if we look at the economy that supposedly is happening right now, that is exactly what leaders are expected to do. Trim the fat, create more efficiencies.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Oh, yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

And more and more gets loaded onto the leader. And the leader is then the person who is isolated. They are they're caught in a way that they have to make decisions which they are which are not healthy for anybody. And that kind of what we're asking leaders to do in today's world is completely antithetical to cooperation or collaboration or relationship. So they end up that idea of the ivory tower, the when we remember the Franklin, I think it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the thing on his desk, he said, the buck stops here. Yeah. We've been indoctrinated into a way of leading and expecting our leaders to be at the top, making the tough decisions without any dispersal or sharing of that responsibility. And that cuts off relationships. Because that's why they wanted to lead. That's why they got into organizations, that's why they moved up from being a manager to what we call a leader. And yet they every day they're having to hurt the very people that they want to help because of the way that the system has evolved.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

Yeah, that's actually so true. Yeah. So when you think about the costs, Carol, what would you say is the if we were to assign a value to it, one of the highest value costs to being in this kind of a system and to staying as a leader, being caught in the almost like the cycle of that kind of leadership style?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

There's three really. And for the leader themselves, it is something that I think a lot of people will feel resonate with depletion, just exhaustion. There, they are constantly the leader. We feel that we are indefensible. We've got to justify every single decision that we're making. There is the loss of strategic capacity. And if there's one thing we hear over and over again with our leaders, you've got to be more strategic, but there's no time to do that. So they're always up against that particular rock. And for the team, it develops a psychological unsafety. So instead of what we leaders really want to create, which is a safe space, many of them say, This is a safe space, you can tell me anything. There's disengagement from the team because they don't feel safe. They don't trust the leader. The leader doesn't trust them. So that echoes back and forth. And then for the organization, people are frustrated. They're they are they're not allowed to be innovative. They are questioning the organization, it loses the capacity for creativity with their people, and their leaders are feels like their hands are tied. But this is not hypothetical. This is happening right now.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

All the time. I did not, I wouldn't believe it, actually, to be honest with you, if it wasn't part of the conversations that we're that we're having with leaders all the time, right? And look, we're not therapists, and that's not what coaching is, but we're looking at, we're working with people who want to build their capacity and they want to understand the patterns that are showing up and how they can change them and how could they lead and how they can truly reclaim the leader that they're capable of becoming. Just a few weeks ago, in with one of the engagements that we have right now, I was working with a very high-level leader in an organization, about 100 people, very fast-paced. Everything is, everybody's hair is on fire all the time, it feels like. And this leader was in their late 40s, and they had actually a health challenge. I can't remember if it was a stroke or heart attack at 39 because of the stress of leadership. And so that there's the physical depletion, there's the depletion of what you you talked about with strategy. And there's just, I think that there becomes a depletion when we think that everything rests on our shoulders and that we're the lone leader. There becomes a depletion of an ability to see how anything could ever change.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Yeah. There's they lose hope. Yeah. Yeah. There's like an expectation of almost an expectation of disappointment, or that I'm just going to continue to have to just be in what would be almost survival mode, really, as a leader.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Yeah. And it's grinding. And it, and like you said, there are physical health challenges, there are emotional challenges. We know that there's a mental health crisis among our leaders and among most individuals right now, based on the world that we have. There is, if we refer back to something that Gabor Mate was speaking about, about being in a village, there is a principle that is almost like the solution to this. And it's relatively straightforward. It's the term interdependence. And interdependence, the first time I heard it was in relation in a relationship, about having an interdependent marriage. But it's a state where two or more people or groups or things rely on and support each other. So unlike complete independence, which we're often told is the right thing to do, which is doing everything alone, or dependence, which is relying entirely on others, this is a different state. This is a state that's somewhere in between, which truly balances the reliance with personal responsibility. So in leadership, it really means approaching everything from a different perspective. If your leader is bringing interdependence to the table, there is begins to be this possibility of building trust, shared responsibility, and shared opportunity. Yeah. It is a way of being in the workplace that can reframe this idea that the leader is has to be the loneliest man in the company or the loneliest woman on the planet.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

So the yeah, and as you're talking about that, I'm thinking about here locally, I'm based in Toronto and I'm an Indigenous woman. I'm a member of the Metis Nation. And we have what we call a local council here in each of our regions. We have local councils. And I have been observing, I'm not a I'm not a council member, but I have been observing how the local council works. And it's a very healthy local council. So we have elections that we hold inside, and people are elected for leadership. And it's actually a really big role for this particular council. It's their volunteer. And there's a it's a heavy role. And there's like all the regular people that you think of the in our council, we have the president, the vice president, all the things that would be in a regular structure. But watching how they operate together is very different. And it is, and it's built on the concept of interdependence. And in and how that plays out is that they there's they reach a consensus that nobody's having there's an agreement that we don't have side conversations about what people are doing wrong. We bring everything back into circle and into the council, and we talk about it, and we get buy-in, and we're very transparent. Everything is very transparent. And I think that one of the things, and not to drag this out anymore, but one of the things that comes alive for me when we've talked about the almost the difference, the myth of this, the individual leader, and what independence is that the individual leader who thinks they can carry everything can secretly also heap shame on themselves because they feel like if they were to be honest about the weight or if anybody knew that it would be seen as a sign of weakness. And when you've built interdependency into your structures and into your teams, which is like how we can lead from within an organization, you don't need to be the C, you don't need to be C-suite to to be able to do it within the capacity of where you find yourself. When we build interdependence, that looks like, and how it builds trust is one of the big things is it looks like people feel like they can sit at the table and they can say, they can be honest about something that's working or not. Yes. They can, they can, they have a sense of of authenticity around the projects. And that our human nature wants, we want to get behind each other, we want to support each other. But when we continue to perpetuate this myth that I can do it alone, I'm this super strong person, all the things that the systems in this in the structures that we've grown up in push us to believe, even today in business, in in a business education, it's still the myth of an individual. It's amazing how so many things have never caught up in the education that people are getting. So I think that one of the ways, one of the things that we have seen personally, you and I and the team and our different coaches that work with us at Whole Human Collective, is that when our clients start to recognize all the ways and the possibilities and the potentials that they have to build interdependency with their teams, yes, things change inside of them.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

They do. Yes. It changes inside the individual and it begins to filter out and change the whole, it can has the potential to change the whole organization. Yeah. And it's possible in each level. Because you said there this can be taken on anywhere you find yourself in an organization because you have influence with the people that you work with. Yeah. And if we see it being replicated, particularly for those middle management folk who are both leading, they both need to lead up, but also lead down. So they are managing stakeholders on both sides. If they begin to display this and to and to practice this, then what happens is there are results that which are notable, which goes back to how we are measured, is by our results. Yes, totally. It isn't that we're going to take away performance measures because those will be, those are important. Those are important ways that we know how healthy a business is, how successful it is. But it also has it will have more far-reaching effects in the people that are working there, in retention, in morale, in loyalty, all of those softer skills or softer ways to measure the success of an organization.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Yeah. I even think in terms of strategic creativity as well. That is something that we hear is if I had more, if I had more time, or if I had this or that, I could be more strategic because one of the things our clients often say is, I am actually a strategic thinker. I know I have it in me. And so if someone, I'm gonna put you on the spot, and I didn't, we didn't talk about this before this conversation, but I'm curious. If you are in a conversation with someone or someone's listening to us right now, and they maybe that's what they're thinking, if I had more time or if I didn't have all this carrying, if I wasn't carrying all this weight, I could be so much more strategic, or I could build these things. What is a coaching question that you would ask them to consider or leave with them when they feel like they are trapped and backed, almost painted into a corner? Yeah, that everything's resting on their shoulders? What's a question you would offer them a different way to see it?

SPEAKER_00 17:55

I think the a key question in those kinds of conversations is really to take a look to get more granular, to be more specific. What is realistically on your plate in the next three hours? And which piece of that is it possible to hand to somebody else to ask for help on or to create a committee, a combination, somebody else that you can brainstorm with it on. Because quite often when we look at our to-do list, it is what we have to do. And if we actually look at that, we honestly look at that, there are often things that somebody else could do. And I know delegation is another one of these things that gets put on leaders of not only do I have to be strategic, but I have to delegate, which means which also doesn't resolve the challenge. But my coaching question is really, what could you put down?

SPEAKER_02 18:56

Oh, I love that. I love that because I think that would be also a little disarming for people. And who doesn't love a good disarming question? Because when we think of got a drum up strategy, we've got to be more creative, we're we're we're scrounging and we're scratching. And that's just really no, rather than taking on more, what could you put down? Love it. Absolutely love it.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

And what that builds, and this is really the where where you can where I've I know that you and I both use this in our coaching, is to ask people to think about a time when they were involved with a DM that truly felt like a team. Yeah. Because one of the pieces that I love about our work is we take these terminologies which are being thrown around everywhere, strategy, delegation, team, and break it up to really what does that mean? Because if we look at it, a team is about individuals who are interdependent. It doesn't work without each other. So the invitation for those who are listening is to consider when is the time that you were on a team that really truly felt like it worked. We were you work together.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

Yeah, I love that. Great question. And it's a great place to leave, leave you, dear listener or viewer, right now for something for you to think about. And we would love to hear from you if you have an answer to that. Please, please leave us a comment and let us know. A couple of quick things is if you are someone who is looking for coach training, if you're interested, or you think this might either be something that would be you want to make a career move into coach, into becoming a coach, or you're looking for coach training for your your organization. You want to maybe create more of a coaching, a coach approach in your organization. We have some really exciting things happening over at the Whole Human Collective. Carol, do you want to just talk about what coach, whole human coach training, what it can provide, just in a couple sentences for people to understand.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

The one big thing that I would say that people acquire from becoming getting formal coach training is who they become for themselves. And that references and it reflects out into who they are as a leader.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

So the opportunity to get the foundational pieces of coach training, which gives you some real solid tools and capacity to be able to ask great questions, but to also create space and to really hold another human being as complete and capable directly translates into how you can be as a leader. So internally, what we find is people who are leaders who have coach training become more accessible as leaders. They get feedback that they are someone who can be trusted. Yeah. It is an amazing. addition to the tools that most leaders are looking for.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Yeah, I love it. You can find out more about that at wholehumancoach training.com. And as well, if you're interested in learning about what what it would look like to work with us as an individual or with your organization, you can find us over at wholehuman.global. Thanks for tuning in today wherever this finds you and we look forward to being with you in our next episode. Bye for now.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Bye bye.