Managing Leadership^®

We’ve visited, at one degree or another of remove, the subject of heroism in the past week. Let’s just make one more observation, a direct one, before moving on.

Steve Roesler touched on it in a comment to a recent post along these lines. He noted what happens so often to reputed hero-leaders once their mortality is revealed.

It is probably worth pointing out that there is another thing about these high-visibility, grandly-celebrated products of the modern leadership movement: we look for evidence of their mortality. And the more deflating it is the better. What’s more, once we find it, and once they deflate, it is their fall for which they are remembered – not their preceding presumption.

And that brings us to the other – unburnished, but truly glimmering – side of this coin: the real heroes among us.

These are the ones we never hear about. They may be known among their friends, family, or peers – or not at all.

Their heroism may be unsung, un-noted by wider society. It may even slip away – as, in truth, it so often does – into the sands of time, leaving no apparent impression whatever.

But their legacy is not in their fall to a mortality which they never presumed to scornfully rise above. Nor is their contribution to be picked out from somewhere among the blinding facets of arrogance in an all-consuming pride.

After all, they are us – enfolded in flaws, positively pocked with shortcomings. No need to peer sneeringly past the glamour for a glimpse of mortality here – we would be pleased enough to find some hint of promise.

And so, we miss it – real, breathtaking heroism – when it is displayed. We often don’t notice it when we, ourselves, are its inspiration, its origin, or its beneficiary. It is not observed, it doesn’t rise above the background noise of our daily lives. It is not singled out for attention. It is just repeated.

Surely, there is no need to belittle those who have justly earned renown for their actions. But the stories untold are the most powerful. They are all the more so for their anonymity, and their ubiquity.

And these unsung acts of self-denial, of extraordinary effort and contribution, are indeed all around us. We need not belittle them, either, by singling them out for the sort of attention that undermines their meaning.

Because that meaning arises from their entrenchment in the very mortality which defines them and which they serve – not from an ethereally superhuman detachment.

So, leave them alone. Enjoy them. Be thankful for them. Pause now and then to acknowledge them.

But make note of the truth that some of the greatest acts of heroism are precisely so for their being conducted in private. Respect that privacy.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of unsung heroes, the great management thinker of all – Mary Parker Follett – is surely one of these, but of the sort that just as surely needs to be studied and acknowledged. As it happens, another step has been taken to aid that by Mathew Shapiro, who has established a forum for discussing her work and its meaning today. Stop over and check it out!

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