UK Brewer’s Cultural Hangover Highlights the Perils of Hero Leadership

News broke recently that James Watt, co-founder and CEO of BrewDog, one of England’s latest brewers, was stepping down after a drip feed of stories in recent years that pointed to a disconnect between the brand image of the organization and the apparent reality for many on the inside.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of stories about a purported culture of fear within the business and toxic attitudes toward junior staff, Watt is a charismatic figure. He in no small part was the public face of a brand that sought to play with the notion of what it means to be edgy, and you can decide for yourself whether they succeeded on that front. 

Portraying yourself as a punk and rebel brand becomes harder to do, for example, when you become a behemoth in your own right and start partnering with global brewing giants to break into new markets.

The face of a brand

Watt is a good example of what it means to become the face of a brand, where your name and image, even your personality, become both synonymous with and extension of your company. Indeed his personal website does a good job of ensuring that connection is made. The grayer-haired reader will remember American entrepreneur Victor Kiam, who loved Remington electric razors so much he bought the company and made himself the center of the marketing.

What strikes me about the energy and force of personality that Watt presents is that it runs the risk of falling into the trap of heroic leadership. In fact, his website makes that explicit with phrasing like, “… James was at the front of the pack, leading the way and carving a new path for the beer world.”

I half-expected him to say Odysseus was saddling up beside him. There is a sense here also of the heroic leader doing all of this “good stuff” out of a desire to help others or of being of service to wider stakeholders. Politicians, regardless of political hue, often fall into that trap, too.

In theory, servant leadership is the antithesis of much of the muscular heroic leadership that is increasingly prevalent in wider society today. There is also a darker version: the leader who purports to serve, using the rhetoric of service to justify a more subtle totalitarian or selfish agenda. As Paul Babiak and Robert Hare — the latter renowned for his work on psychopathy — observed in their 2007 book “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” “The general state of confusion that change brings to any situation can make psychopathic personality traits — the appearance of confidence, strength and calm — often look like the answer to the organization’s problems.” That may show up as heroic leadership, and at the manipulative end, it can hide in plain sight as service.

Let’s not give heroic leaders too much of a hard time, because the rest of us are just as culpable: Every time we say we do not like a leader because they are “not strong enough” or “too dull to be a leader,” we collude with this zombie form of leadership. Heroic leadership is the ultimate cop-out, because it enables us to have our cake and eat it, too. When things go wrong, we get to judge leaders for not being heroic enough and blame them for everything because they confidently said they were going to fix it all, right?

To be a hero, or not to be a hero, that is the question

On the assumption that we do want to wean ourselves off this unhealthy addiction, what are the options? It is all too easy to make it the responsibility of leaders to do more work on themselves. I am a big advocate, for example, of encouraging leaders to develop deeper levels of reflexivity, of inquiring more deeply into how they show up and the impact they have, of cultivating a both/and mindset rather than a binary either/or one and of getting more comfortable with not knowing and through all of this working more consciously with the shame and anxiety that arises when we do not meet the standards they and others have set for them.

But heroes need followers, or at the very least a willing audience who will buy into the narrative of the leader who comes with silver bullets, quick fixes and all the trappings of certainty. Followers who, when faced with the cognitive dissonance of finding that their hero does not, in fact, have the answer we all believed they did, need to sign up once again to the myth because otherwise they might need to accept they, too, find it unbearable coping with not knowing what to do or what the answer is. 

Weaning ourselves off heroic leadership means facing up to our own stories of omnipotence and omniscience, and given that humans have a long association with stories grounded in the belief that all powerful gods and monsters exist, that will take time. My sense is that we have more work to do on this front than we think. It means we need to develop our own capacity for reflexivity, to eschew either/or thinking, admit our terror that there may not be someone who has all the answers and wrestle with the resultant anxiety and shame that we cannot control reality as much as we wished.

The risk, ultimately, with a conversation about heroic leadership is that we make it abstract and disconnected from what it means to be human. I would argue that the real conversation lurking here is an existential one that does not fit neatly with the soundbite nature of much of the rhetoric around leadership and organizations.