Reimagining Leadership with Epic the Musical | Chapter 1 | Part I
Updated: 6 days ago
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 I of Epic the Musical Leadership, a series exploring leadership through story, power, consequence and the human experience of becoming.
What Does the Journey Make of a Leader?
I've become less interested in how leaders perform. I'm more interested in what leadership does to them. Perhaps that's why I love EPIC The Musical.
I first discovered EPIC The Musical when my daughter shared this interest with me. Immersed in the most beautiful music and story, I was taken by the extraordinary emotional range, and Odysseus journey resonated deeply with my experience and observations of life, love and leadership.
While monsters, Gods and heroism visibly fascinate, what captured my mind was less visible… the choices.
The choices we make when the stakes are high, the options are imperfect and someone else will have to live with the consequences.
We are familiar with leadership metrics like team size, revenue raised, budget managed, engagement scored. We have competency frameworks, 360-degree feedback, leadership assessments, performance ratings, potential matrices. We can tell if someone is strategic, decisive, commercially minded, collaborative or influential. We can also tell if they display toxic behaviours.
Since all these have value, then what is the gap between what we know, and what we don’t yet know?
Are we measuring what’s important, or are we measuring just so we can tell a good story?
Competencies can tell me that someone is able to make a difficult decision. It doesn't tell me what they will sacrifice to make it.
I can tell when someone is resilient, but peel the layers and ask, has that resilience morphed into stubbornness or an inability to listen?
Evidence can show me if someone is influential, but on the surface, it won’t tell me whether their influence creates agency or dependence.
Performance measures can tell me someone delivers results, but it doesn't tell me what those results are costing the people and systems around them. Ultimately, it doesn't tell me who the leader is becoming.
The journey does something to us.
What’s compelling about Odysseus is he has a destination. He wants to get home. But the journey keeps confronting him with questions that have very little to do with navigation:
What are you prepared to do? What are you prepared to lose?
What does survival require? What does loyalty require?
Where does strategy become ruthlessness? How much are you willing to compromise?
The extraordinarily elusive thing about such a journey is that the first person any leader must lead, is the Self, and although the destination may change, what changes the most is the person travelling towards it.
To me, this feels remarkably close to the true meaning of leadership, and what leading with depth means.
Have you seen versions of this in organisations?
Because much of the working world has been built and structured around productivity and performance, performative ways of behaving or being gets rewarded. Over time, extrinsic motivation overrides intrinsic.
I have experienced leaders with a façade of having it all together, but in reality, have an army of family members supporting them on the home front while they casually cheat on their spouses to cope with pressures, or out of sheer addiction to distractions, or simply as surrogates to quench cravings for intimate validation, because they haven’t been able to summon the courage to look deeper within and lead themselves out of their predicaments.
If that reality is a stretch, you may know of senior executives who lead with tyranny and positional authority, to the detriment of individual lives and long-term viability of the company but is one who keeps delivering the promised quarterly and annual profits so loved by unquestioning investors and shareholders, that the company simply ‘cannot afford to lose’ them.
Perhaps a more accessible example are leaders who are genuine, curious and generous with power, who manage the team well enough in a balanced way and more willing to admit what they didn’t know… but who are unseen in systems that do not recognise nor reward such leadership behaviours.
Or perhaps you may have known leaders before they were appointed into senior positions… you may have a sense for the ground with which their careers grew, and how emotional stagnation turned into emotional illiteracy, that brought about their downfall whether in greed or pride, due to their breaking psyche, yet they are still put in positions with enormous responsibility, entrusted to be able to lead the organisation into wellness and good health.
You see, the question isn’t whether behaviours demonstrate good or bad leadership, or capability gaps. Instead, it is an inquiry into what leadership has taught them about the person they are becoming.
The choices between the milestones matter.
In organisations, difficult decisions arrive as leadership moments. They are not clearly labelled but arrive disguised as a difficult quarter, a restructuring, a demanding client, a difficult employee, a target that seems just out of reach, a political decision, a deadline, a piece of information that nobody really wants to hear… And then we choose.
Sometimes quickly. Sometimes reluctantly. Sometimes without fully understanding what we are choosing. But every choice leaves a trace.
If a leader repeatedly chooses expediency over truth, people learn something. If a leader protects a high performer at the expense of everyone else, people learn something. If a leader listens when it would be easier to dismiss, people learn something. If a leader protects someone's dignity when doing so comes at a cost, people learn something too. This is how culture is made. This is also how character is built and legacy gets laid. All of these do not come through values statements but through repeated choices that espoused behaviours can never neatly cover.
What happens around you?
Do people become more capable, more courageous, or more truthful?
More willing to challenge, or more willing to take responsibility?
Or do they become cautious, dependent, political, silent, or drained?
Because whether we like it or not, leaders produce conditions alongside results. And those conditions shape what becomes possible for everyone else.
The leader who makes themselves unnecessary.
There is a particular kind of leadership I find increasingly compelling. It isn't the leader who makes everyone dependent on them. It is the leader who makes everyone more capable without them. That is a very different proposition.
A leader can build a team that constantly needs their approval. Or they can build a team that learns to exercise judgement. They can become the person with all the answers. Or create an environment where better questions emerge. They can protect their position. Or grow people who may eventually become better than they are. Perhaps that is one of the quieter measures of leadership, do the people around you become more powerful because you lead them?
Not more powerful over others, but powerful in themselves. More able to think, to speak, to decide, to challenge, to act.
And then there is Truth. Not so much whether the leader tells the truth, but how truthful can people be with the leader?
A leader can be personally honest and still create a culture where nobody feels safe enough to challenge them. And once that happens, an unhelpful shift begins.
The leader hears agreement, as reports become more polished and dissent becomes quieter. Information gets filtered and the leader becomes increasingly confident, and simultaneously increasingly disconnected from reality. Increasingly isolated.
Maybe leadership development has spent too much time asking what do leaders need to learn, and not enough time asking what is this role drawing out of this leader… what are they becoming?
Are they becoming more controlling because there is more at stake? More impatient because everyone needs an answer? More detached because it feels safer? More certain because people around have stopped challenging?
Or perhaps the opposite… More grounded. More curious. More generous with power. More comfortable saying, "I don't know." More capable of holding complexity without rushing to resolve it.
Looking beneath visible performance to understand the human architecture producing it, means understanding what the system is rewarding the leader for becoming. It is different from tackling leadership capability because even the most capable leaders still carry the risks of causing an organisation’s downfall because the culture and characters allow and reward their becoming.
The journey makes the leader. The question is not where or how you are taking people to the destination, but who are you becoming as you take people there. And who are the people around you becoming because you are taking them there?
I don't think there is a neat answer, nor am I suggesting there should be one, because leadership is lived in the tension between ambition and consequence, between responsibility and humanity, between what must be done and what we are willing to become in doing it.
I keep returning to the journey because the destination may inform us of what a leader wants achieved, but the journey tells us who they became. And perhaps that is the leadership assessment worth paying more attention to.
What is your journey making of you?
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