The Trouble With Heroic Leadership
Superhero leaders are an outdated ideal. During a crisis, today’s most effective leaders know how to navigate complex emotions, find common ground, and stay flexible.
Crisis leadership is often cast in terms of people displaying extraordinary power, influence, charisma, and superhuman qualities.1 It is thus not surprising that we often assume that strong leaders have complete agency and control over making and executing decisions, especially during crises. Consider this definition of the term leaderism by Insead’s Gianpiero Petriglieri:
Leaderism is the belief that great leaders are the cure for every ill. It feeds on our desire for clarity and comfort, for a world of heroes and villains in which someone strong will keep us safe. The more anxious we are, the more leaderist we become. At the core of leaderism is an image of leadership that is popular in business and in business schools. Leaders influence and inspire. They portray confidence, tell a simple story, and promise to disrupt institutions.2
During crises, when anxieties and uncertainties dominate, the pull toward this brand of superheroic leadership intensifies. Yet today’s continuous trickle of crises tests our collective mettle and calls for an update to this outdated script on crisis leadership.
It’s time to stop idealizing the confident and charismatic superhero (or the AI-driven, quick-fix, action-oriented superhero) and start developing more humanized leaders — people who have emotional complexity and doubts but can forge an imperfect path forward through the storm.3 Unfortunately, the academic literature on crisis leadership has contributed to the idealization of leaderism in business and society by empirically overclaiming the value and influence of the superhero leader.4
Countless leadership training initiatives, development programs, and executive succession plans are based on untenable and unrealistic assumptions, favoring those leaders who project confidence and certainty, even when such qualities may be elusive at best and counterproductive at worst.
True leadership during crises calls for engagement with often messy, chaotic thoughts, intense emotions, and precarious relationships, both inside and outside the organization. Many leaders find themselves constrained by circumstances, limited information, and systemic factors beyond their control. Some recognize and acknowledge their limitations, as the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, did after leading the country through the COVID-19 pandemic, declaring that she no longer had “enough in the tank” to continue.
The most effective crisis leaders are not those who claim to have all the answers but those who show their humanity.
Ardern’s declaration drew widespread attention; admitting one’s limits is not the norm for powerful leaders. Rather, they are expected to maintain the illusion of complete self-control, with an endless supply of strength and certainty, to avoid being considered weak or indecisive. Many business leaders have told us that in times of disruption, they feel paralyzed, stripped of their agency, or compelled to act, which leads to hasty bets on the future.
Traditional superhero leadership expectations are increasingly untenable, given today’s polarized society and ongoing periods of turmoil. The most effective crisis leaders are not those who claim to have all the answers but those who show their humanity via an appreciation for paradoxes, emotional complexity, and what lies beyond their control.5
How Humanized Leaders Turn Disruptions Into Direction
While calls for humanized leadership have been made before, there is no clear blueprint for how leaders can wield humanity in roles that are traditionally defined by power, control, and agency. To address this gap, we followed 58 leaders over eight weeks during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing their biographical accounts of critical events and real-time leadership responses. From this analysis, we identified two sets of micropractices that these leaders demonstrated.
The first is sensemaking, where leaders interpret external disruption and create direction from chaos. The second is sensegiving, or communicating this meaning and direction to others. While some research on crisis leadership attributes a certain heroic bent to sensegiving (emphasizing the leader’s need to project machismo and a vision for a positive future), we find that sensegiving is best done in more humanized ways. Among them are helping others understand meaning by not treating emotion as noise but as data, and not pretending to have all the answers or guaranteeing a positive vision but rather focusing attention on cocreating a practical, meaningful way forward. How can you do this?
Three Practices for Better Sensemaking
1. Build your internal GPS for emotions. All emotion is information, so the ability to label emotions and acknowledge their complexity is a valuable leadership skill. Think of this as becoming literate in emotion knowledge.
For example, guilt can discourage unethical acts; fear induces us to avoid existential threats; anger can inspire corrective actions; disgust sensitizes us to offensive actions; and compassionate love evokes interdependence and connection.
While a bulk of earlier research in sensemaking calls for a focus on emotion, we argue that emotion labeling is the most valuable sensemaking tool for leaders: Evidence in neuropsychology indicates that emotion labeling prevents cognitive distortions and promotes adaptive functioning in high-stress situations. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella exemplifies such sensemaking via emotion labeling in his 2017 memoir, “Hit Refresh.” He names the sadness, frustration, and grief he felt after his son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and how acknowledging these emotions have made him a more empathetic leader.
2. Navigate the tension between business demands and human needs. Look outward and inward. Observe what is difficult for yourself and your team, then ponder how it changes what is required of you as a leader. This means continually updating your understanding of what it means to be a leader.6 One day you could be sending pizza to a sick team member, while another day you might be explaining why cost cutting is necessary for the common good. Both are authentically you, perhaps, but they involve context sensitivity and comfort with navigating paradoxes.7
This balance between business and human motives appears clearly in General Motors CEO Mary Barra’s response to the company’s ignition switch defect crisis in 2014. She pushed through tough safety reforms and financial discipline while also recognizing the fear and moral distress employees carried during this period. Instead of choosing one priority over the other, she treated both company performance and compassion for people as nonnegotiable. By pairing accountability with genuine listening and openness, Barra showed how leaders can hold the tension between hard business demands and human needs. In turn, she used that tension to rebuild trust and create more sustainable solutions.
3. Expect uncertainty, and get comfortable with not having answers. Many failed leaders have been derailed by two factors: feeling overconfident and overpromising results. Overconfidence can lead to unrealistic expectations, setting followers and organizations up for failure. A humanized leadership perspective emphasizes embracing uncertainty and acknowledging that not all problems have a clear or immediate solution.
All emotion is information, so the ability to label emotions and acknowledge their complexity is a valuable leadership skill.
Such realism, in turn, fosters greater trust and team resilience. During the pandemic, Ardern repeatedly reminded the public that decisions were being made with incomplete, evolving information. Rather than projecting overconfidence or offering perfect answers or a clear unilateral vision for the future, Ardern embodied experimentation, trial, and error.
Three Practices for Better Sensegiving
1. Forge authentic emotional connection. As virtual worlds, AI bots, and efficiency-focused work cultures create psychological distance between people, leaders must actively bridge that gap through authentic emotional connection. Emotions are deeply personal — they arise from either the fulfillment or violation of our most cherished goals. A huge body of research in emotions and leadership has documented that leaders are expected to be adept at handling people’s emotions.8
In our previous research, we found that leaders can engage in interpersonal emotion regulation, which involves acknowledging others’ emotions via empathy, validation, or mirroring techniques and finding ways to soothe the distress caused by negative emotions. Such actions create more trust and better relationships in the workplace.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon’s response to a shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 exemplifies this practice. In a letter to employees, he explicitly mirrored the shock, anger, and grief that the Walmart community was experiencing. He then connected with employees via shared gratitude for the first responders and pride in the employees who had stepped up to help. By matching the emotional tone of those affected and creating space for their pain, McMillon helped regulate collective distress at a moment of profound organizational trauma.
2. Lean out of perfect solutions, and find common ground. In making and communicating difficult decisions, balance instrumental motives (like “Will we make a profit?”) and humanistic ones (like “Who will this decision help? Who will it hurt?”). Develop a vocabulary that reflects what people are experiencing and can serve as a framework to navigate disagreements. By doing this, you acknowledge your limitations and communicate your intent to cocreate meaningful solutions rather than impose a predetermined plan. This approach facilitates finding common ground through transparent discussions.
Former Unilever CEO Paul Polman’s leadership on building a sustainability strategy at the consumer goods company demonstrates this balance. Rather than framing sustainability and profitability as opposing goals, Polman treated them as interdependent and invited stakeholders — including nongovernmental organizations, investors, suppliers, and consumers — into open dialogue about trade-offs. He emphasized that no solution would be perfect, signaling both fallibility and shared responsibility. By treating sustainability as an ongoing negotiation, Polman showed how leaders can bridge competing interests and cocreate more morally grounded, mutually beneficial outcomes.
3. Communicate impermanence. Crises disrupt how we understand our work roles and what is expected of us. For example, the hybrid work model continues to evolve in the post-pandemic world, with some CEOs enacting return-to-office mandates while others embrace a flexible hybrid style work. Any change can seem like an upheaval when we assume stability as a key feature of our working world. Leaders need to communicate flexibility and resilience. Research shows that demonstrating mindful awareness of impermanence enables leaders and organizations to handle disruptions by pausing or discarding outdated routines and embracing novel, context-sensitive responses.
Brian Chesky embodied this principle as he guided Airbnb through the near collapse of the company in 2020. Rather than pretending that the pandemic demanded permanent solutions, he told employees that the company was entering a temporary, turbulent phase — and that the routines they were used to would keep shifting as the situation evolved. He reminded teams that Airbnb had reinvented itself before and would do so again, framing the disruption as part of a larger cycle rather than an end point. That message helped employees let go of rigid expectations, stay flexible, and focus on what the company needed in the moment instead of clinging to the idea that any one way of working would last forever.
Lasting Implications for Leadership
When combined, these six interconnected sensemaking and sensegiving practices can help leaders operate in a humanized fashion during a crisis — and they represent a concrete alternative to the superhero ideal that dominates crisis leadership discourse.
This humanized leadership model carries important implications. For organizations, it means reconsidering talent selection and development programs that reward people for projecting unwavering confidence. For leaders, it means giving themselves permission to acknowledge their own limitations without viewing them as weaknesses. For researchers, it suggests the value of further examining how vulnerability, doubt, and uncertainty might coexist with effective leadership.
Ultimately, redefining crisis leadership in more humanized terms benefits not only the people being led but also leaders themselves, who no longer need to maintain an impossible superhero facade. As crises become more frequent and complex, the leaders who thrive will be those who can acknowledge imperfect information, uncertainty, and limited agency and then forge ahead anyway, bringing others along through humanity rather than invincibility.
Fonte: sloanreview.mit.edu
