Reimagining Leadership with Epic the Musical | Chapter 1 | Part IV
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We spend a great deal of time assessing what leaders can do. Perhaps we should spend more time asking what leadership is doing to them. Through EPIC: The Musical and the journey of Odysseus, I explore leadership not as a destination, but as a process of becoming.
This is Part IV of Epic the Musical Leadership, a series exploring leadership through story, power, consequence and the human experience of becoming.
What Happens to People Around You?
We ask a lot of questions about leaders.
Are they strategic? Can they make difficult decisions? Can they inspire people? Can they deliver? Can they handle pressure?
In this series, there is one question I am holding, “What kind of person do people become because they work with you?”
Not what leaders achieved, or if people described them as a good leader.
But what happens to the people around the leader.
Do they become more capable, courageous, willing to speak, curious, willing to take responsibility…?
Or do they become careful, dependent, silent, politically cautious, exhausted…?
That, to me, is where leadership grows to be much bigger than the individual leader, because eventually, every system starts shaping the people inside it.
Systems work on us.
Something I've observed repeatedly is people arrive with a certain amount of confidence, curiosity, ambition, a willingness to contribute… and then they encounter the system.
They learn what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, what gets punished, who gets heard, who gets promoted, who gets protected, what questions are welcome, and which questions are better left unasked. Nobody necessarily sits them down and explains the rules, but they simply learn and adapt.
This is the workings of Culture; it is experienced. It is not shaped by a company’s espoused values but through what people experience repeatedly. People become what the system makes possible.
Imagine a person joining an organisation who is naturally curious. They ask questions. They challenge assumptions. They want to understand why things are done a certain way. But every time they challenge something, they are told “That is how we do things". Eventually, they stop asking.
Not that they turned less intelligent, but they became less expressive of their intelligence.
Another person who is generous and collaborative joins, and watch people who take credit get promoted, and so they learn.
Someone speaks up about a problem and gets labelled "not a team player". They learn.
Someone takes a principled stand and finds themselves isolated. They learn.
A high performer behaves badly, and nothing happens. They learn.
None of these lessons may appear in any employee handbook, but people are paying attention. They are learning what it takes to belong.
This is how leadership becomes systemic.
We often talk about leaders as though they operate independently of the system, but leaders are both products of systems and producers of systems.
Leaders inherit structures, targets, incentives, hierarchies, policies, cultural norms… and they make choices within them. Some choices reinforce what already exists, some change it. This is why I don't think leadership can be understood purely through individual behaviour.
A wonderful leader inside a system that systematically rewards the wrong things can only change so much, and apparently ordinary leader can have an enormous impact when they change the conditions around them. So, the question becomes, “What are you reinforcing every time you make a decision?”
EPIC: The Musical is particularly useful for reflective leadership learning about this topic, because Odysseus's journey isn't experienced by Odysseus alone. His decisions have consequences for the people travelling with him. They are not simply supporting characters in his heroic journey. They are people whose lives are being shaped by the choices of the person leading them… And that is true of leadership everywhere.
A leader may experience a difficult decision as a strategic dilemma. The people around them experience it as a changed workload, a lost opportunity, a new fear, a new expectation, a new rule, a new way of behaving, or a new understanding of what matters.
The leader experiences the decision. The organisation experiences the pattern. That distinction matters because eventually, people start doing it to themselves. It is the single most powerful thing systems do.
At first, someone must tell you what is expected. Eventually, you internalise it. Nobody tells you not to challenge, or to stay late, but you know. Nobody tells you which opinions are safe, and that the number matters more than the consequence, but you know.
The system has moved from external control to internal behaviour, and this is when culture becomes powerful… because people begin policing or self-governing in themselves.
Perhaps you remember a colleague who was different when you first met them. Perhaps more outspoken, more hopeful and playful, more curious and courageous, more willing to question. Then something happened… I know I have.
Whether they hit the walls of the departmental culture, or the boss changed or they got promoted and created jealousy around them, or maybe they failed and found that they failed alone… what happened was they simply learned what the system rewarded, and gradually, they became different.
What kind of people does your organisation produce?
This is a question I wish more leadership teams asked. Not just what results are we producing but what kinds of human beings are we producing in the process.
Are people becoming more autonomous, more thoughtful, more capable of making judgements, more willing to take responsibility or more confident in their own voice?
Or are we producing people who wait for permission, optimise for visibility, avoid risk, manage upwards, protect themselves, keep their heads down, etc.?
These are rational responses to the environment, not personality traits. And this is totally why culture deserves more serious attention than another set of Values posters.
The leader who creates followers vs. the leader who creates leaders
There is a distinction here that I think matters enormously. Some leaders are very good at creating followers. People know what the leader wants. They align. They execute. They don't create trouble. The organisation can look incredibly efficient.
But take the leader away and the system struggles. People wait. Decisions slow down. Nobody knows what to do without permission. That is one kind of leadership.
Another kind leaves something very different behind. People know how to think. They know how to exercise judgement. They can disagree. They can make decisions. They can lead others. They don't simply know what their leader would do. They know how to think for themselves. This is a very different legacy.
Perhaps leadership is the transfer of agency
One of the deepest responsibilities of leadership is not to accumulate influence but to distribute agency. To help people become more capable of acting without you. To make your own authority less necessary over time. To create conditions in which people can say I can do this instead of Tell me what to do.
This is not abandoning direction or accountability. Quite the opposite. It means creating enough clarity and trust for people to exercise judgement responsibly. And perhaps one of the clearest measures of leadership is, does your presence increase other people's capacity to act?
But what if the system itself is the problem?
This is where I think the conversation needs to go further. Because sometimes we ask individuals to be more resilient when what they actually need is a different kind of system.
We tell people to speak up. But have we created consequences for speaking up?
We tell people to bring their whole selves to work. But what happens when their whole selves are indigestible in the system?
We talk about psychological safety. But who holds the power to create conditions deemed unsafe for people?
We celebrate wellbeing. But what does the incentive system reward?
We ask people to be ethical. But what happens when ethical behaviour gets in the way of the number?
These aren't really leadership questions… they are governance questions.
And this is where my work started very early on to look deeper and beyond the individual, because if we only coach the person, we miss the architecture that is producing the behaviour; we are only 'washing the fish' and 'putting it back into the dirty tank'.
The uncomfortable truth about culture
Culture isn't something that happens to an organisation. It is continuously being produced by what people do, tolerate, reward and repeat. Every leader contributes to that. And so does every system.
Every policy. Every target. Every incentive. Every promotion decision.
Every silence. Every exception. Every time someone says That's how things work here.
And perhaps the most important question isn't what does your organisation say it values, but what does someone have to become to succeed here?
That question can be revealing. Because if the answer is “Someone who can navigate complexity, exercise judgement and create value responsibly,” perhaps you've built something worth protecting.
But if the answer is, “Someone who knows when to stay quiet, who to please and how much pressure they can absorb," then you have learned something about the sustainability of your people and organisation.
The people who follow are not simply following
They are learning. They are adapting. They are becoming. And that means leadership is never only about the person at the front. It is about the human consequences of the conditions they create.
This brings me back to Odysseus. The question isn't simply whether he reaches Ithaca. It isn't even whether we think every decision he makes is right. The deeper question is, what happens to the people who travel with him?
And perhaps that is the question we should ask of ourselves.
So instead of Did my team hit the target? Did the organisation grow? Did people follow me?
The more generative questions are Who did they have to become to hit it? What did people have to give up, to make that growth possible? What became possible for them because I was there?
What kind of person do people become because they work with you?
This is one of the most important questions a leader can ask, because eventually, your leadership disappears, you leave the room, you leave the organisation, you retire, you move on. Someone else takes your role. What remains is what you have embedded in other people. The confidence you gave them. The judgement you developed. The courage you modelled. The agency you created.
Or perhaps the fear. the silence, the dependency, the compromises they learned to accept… That is your leadership legacy too. And perhaps this is where I would end the first chapter of #ETMLeadership, leaders don't simply produce results, they produce conditions, and those conditions shape who people become.
That is why I believe leadership is ultimately a social question, because the real measure of leadership is not really what happens because you are in the room, it is what happens when you are not, it is what happens after you leave the room.
This is where the conversation needs to be.
Because if systems shape people, then we need courage and boldness to look beyond individual leaders. We must look at the structures around them, the incentives, the power, the economics, the policies, the data, the value chains, the expectations… the things people are quietly being asked to tolerate to belong.
This is why leadership development must play in a bigger arena, because the high value question really is: What kind of work are we creating, and what kind of human beings does that work allow us to become?
That is the inquiry I want to bring into the next chapter.
We need to dig into whether the systems within which we work actually allow people to exercise voice, agency, dignity and choice, because what is needed for a system to thrive is not necessarily more freedom, but agency.
And perhaps reimagining work begins there. But before that, allow me to distil some leadership lessons in the final part of this chapter.
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