The post-heroic leader emphasizes collaboration, empathy, and collective achievement and adaptability. Post-heroic leaders champion inclusivity and value difference. In other words: The traditional image of the leader as a solitary, authoritative figure is evolving. Heroic leadership is outdated and strictly connected to a binary idea of masculinity (Nentwich et al., 2023).  Here is how organizations can foster this new leadership model to overcome the paradox of the post-heroic leader (Fletcher, 2004) and create more gender equity.

1. Develop your leaders to be post-heroic

• Empathy and emotional intelligence are key for post-heroic leadership. The good news — they can be learned! Successful leadership depends on a learning environment that creates conditions for collective learning (Fletcher, 2004). Therefore, programs that focus on developing empathy and emotional intelligence among leaders should not only be offered, but you should communicate to your (aspiring) leaders that they are important and should be taken seriously.
• Coaching for change: If you want to shift from heroic leadership to post-heroic leadership rather than just having new leaders, external coaching can help your organization and be a resource for your employees to use individually. External coaches, similar to external consultants, can benefit your organization by leveraging a different perspective. Employees may feel more comfortable speaking candidly to a coach and incorporating their advice. Projects such as Leaders for Equality right here at the University of St.Gallen can significantly impact your organization.
• Role-model nontraditional leadership: Use storytelling to share examples of post-heroic leadership within the organization who exhibit non-traditional leadership traits, such as leaders who have helped employees when it was not a required part of the job. For example, a senior leader in an organization once spent hours helping an employee who is a first-generation college student prepare for a business school entrance exam. While it was not required of the leader, this changed that employee’s life.

2. Use metrics to create accountability

• Feedback systems: Implement 360-degree feedback systems where employees at all levels can provide input on leadership performance. Use this feedback to identify and promote post-heroic leadership traits. Expect your leaders to model how to receive feedback well and implement change.
• Leadership metrics: Develop metrics to evaluate leadership based on team engagement, employee satisfaction, and collaborative success rather than solely on financial performance.

3. Make transparent decisions

• Use behavioral design to your benefit: Let behavioral design support your change process. Don’t only collect and track but also analyze your HR data to understand patterns and trends and make forecasts; use these as a basis for changing HR processes to make them more transparent (Bohnet, 2016). For example: Implement standardized evaluation processes to reduce biases. Use objective metrics and structured interviews to assess candidates for promotion. Measure progress and adapt if necessary!
• Clear criteria: Define clear and transparent promotion criteria that include technical expertise and leadership qualities, including emotional intelligence, empathy, and empowering others. Communicate these criteria widely within the organization and make their application mandatory in different HR decisions.
• Equitable hiring practices: Implement hiring practices that actively seek to include underrepresented groups. Use blind recruitment techniques and diverse interview panels.

4. Diversify career paths

• Expert career paths: Career paths can transcend traditional leadership expectations, for instance, by offering opportunities for experts who may not wish to lead teams. Individuals may then be promoted to management positions based on expertise rather than leadership skills, which usually represents an overlap of personnel responsibility and management function.
• People management and project management pathways: Conversely, good people managers could advance to leadership positions even if they do not have the most specific expertise in the field. Good project managers can be called upon to manage complex projects, bringing in a fresh perspective, without being in a formal supervisory position to the project team members.
• Skills-based recruiting: Recruiters and hiring managers should move away from a rigid approach to recruitment based on roles and elaborate job descriptions towards a more flexible approach based on skills and experience.

5. Rethink development opportunities

• Equity in development opportunities: Development opportunities must align with individual employees’ skills, goals, and motivations. This fairness in programs will allow leaders to develop their potential best rather than applying the same development to everyone.
• Redefine what it means to “develop”: Companies and their managers need to shift the focus of career conversations from promotion to developing in different directions. Development might mean shifting laterally into a new role, completing a rotation in a different team or different location, or a shift in responsibilities, such as giving up some people management responsibilities in favor of more expertise-based tasks.
• Rethink manager goals for development: The question should not be “How do I keep this person on my team?” but “How do I keep this person in my organization?” Empower managers to support their people in exploring opportunities beyond the boundaries of their existing team or business unit. Metrics matter in driving behavior changes, and managers need to be recognized and rewarded for enabling the internal mobility of their (diverse) talents. For example, managers should have goals tied to the number of development opportunities they sponsored outside their immediate team (Tupper & Ellis, 2022).

By now, we all know the business case for diversity, namely, that it provides a strategic advantage that positively affects the bottom line. But to reap these benefits, managers have to empower their diverse team members and colleagues to take ownership over their work. For managers, this means giving up power of their own, decentering themselves, actively championing others, and challenging their own assumptions. But how can empowerment be implemented into daily management business?

1. Redesign collaboration

• Cross-functional teams: Create cross-functional teams that combine diverse skill sets to work on specific projects. These teams should have the autonomy to make decisions and manage their workflows because of their unique dynamics. The unique dynamics of these teams are: 1. Usually have competing identities and loyalties 2. Undergo significant pressure and conflict 3. Face high-performance expectations (Holland et al., 2000)
• Decentralized decision-making: Empower teams and individuals at all levels to make decisions. Establish clear guidelines and boundaries within which they can operate independently.

2. Implement agile practices

• Adopt agile methodologies (Mishra et al., 2020): Implement agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban. Provide training and resources to ensure teams understand and use these practices effectively.
• Iterative processes: Encourage iterative processes where teams can continuously plan, execute, review, and adjust their work. This allows for rapid adaptation to changes and continuous improvement.
• Learn from your best practices: Many organizations have teams or units that already utilize (some) agile practices. Give them visibility, use them to track what works (and what does not), and roll out their successful practices elsewhere.

3. Make structural changes to empower all

• Flatten hierarchies: Reduce the number of hierarchical levels within the organization to promote a more democratic distribution of power (also sometimes referred to as “unstructuring”). This encourages leaders to be more accessible and collaborative. To be effective, this process needs to be managed carefully: Manage your employees’ expectations closely; purposively redefine leadership roles; reconfigure communication channels and decision-making processes (Anicich et al., 2024).
• Flexible leadership: Expect (and enable) your leaders to adapt their leadership style so that they can best serve their team and, in the process, respond to unforeseen scenarios. The combination of flexible leadership and culture offers a competitive advantage and improves communication and coordination among people (Anning-Dorson, 2021). Flexible leadership requires a constant openness to feedback, an eagerness to develop new habits and willingness to try new techniques. A few question you might ask yourself to increase your flexibility as a leader:
  – Am I dependent on a specific behavior or technique?
  – Do I respond to feedback or criticism with defensiveness?
  – Do I consider multiple approaches when solving an issue, and am I willing to change course?
  – Am I able to admit to personal mistakes?
  – Am I willing to try new strategies suggested by my (subordinate) team members?

4. Change the culture

• Promote team-based achievements: Shift the focus from individual to team accomplishments that highlight the team’s strength and enhance trust among members. This enhanced trust will impact the team’s performance (Verburg et al., 2018).
• Increase workplace experimentation: Currently, 91% of top management believes there is room for experimentation and creativity in the workplace, compared to 35% of lower management (Agile Business Consortium, 2023). Shifting organizational culture to allow employees to have the time to experiment will help lead to more creativity and innovation.

Recognizing and leveraging privilege to promote inclusion involves understanding how privilege operates within the organization and using it to create opportunities for underrepresented groups.

1. Help managers understand privilege

• Privilege training: Conduct training sessions on privilege and its impact. Help employees understand their privileges and how to use them to support others. It is also essential for employees to understand how their privilege may harm others (McIntosh, 1989).
• The Privilege Walk: DEI Facilitators use various illustrations to demonstrate the concept of privilege. While media is great for understanding privilege, an exercise that can get people involved is the privilege walk (Ma et al., 2022). This involves participants visually seeing the “head start” they may have due to privilege to increase awareness.

2. Take allyship seriously

• Ally Training: Develop programs that train employees to be influential allies in a post-heroic world. This includes understanding the experiences of marginalized groups and learning how to support them.
• Leverage Employee Resource Groups: Establish networks of allies to advocate for underrepresented groups within the organization. These networks can provide support and resources for inclusive initiatives.

3. Link leadership with accountability

• Ensure that post-heroic leaders understand inclusion: Leaders should model inclusive behavior and hold themselves accountable for promoting diversity and inclusion.
• Intersectional team diversity metrics: Track and report on diversity metrics beyond binary genders and what you may traditionally measure through your HR functions. Keep in mind an intersectional perspective of your employees that may offer dimensions not commonly asked but give them the agency to choose whether to provide the information. A key is including representation at different levels of the organization. Use this data to identify areas where privilege may hinder the organization (Rodriguez et al., 2021).

4. Understand your power

• Though the team helps support post-heroic leaders in being accountable, it does not absolve leaders of their responsibilities. Therefore, it is essential that you, as a leader, maintain accountability for your privilege and power. Here is a set of questions to ask yourself as a leader, manager, or team member.
  – How do I exert influence over others?
  – Who do I have power over?
  – Am I actively championing others?
  – Am I creating space for others?
  – Am I emphasizing co-creation over delegation?
  – Am I asking for and incorporating feedback?