Reimagining Leadership with Epic the Musical | Chapter 1 | Part III
Updated: 3 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 III of Epic the Music Leadership, a series exploring leadership through story, power, consequence and the human experience of becoming.
What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Win?
There is something uncomfortable about leadership that we don't talk about enough. Sometimes there is no good choice. Sometimes someone will lose. Sometimes the business cannot have everything. Sometimes survival really does come first. Sometimes a leader must choose between two things they genuinely care about. I don't think leadership can eliminate trade-offs. It can only make us more conscious of them.
This is one of the reasons I find EPIC: The Musical fascinating as a lens through which to study leadership, the cost of leadership.
Odysseus is constantly faced with choices where there is no clean answer. Get home. Protect the crew. Survive. Keep moving. Make the difficult decision. And then live with what that decision costs. That last bit is important, because leadership isn't just about making the choice, it is about living with the consequences of the choice, and every decision has a cost.
But we don't always call it that.
We say, ”It’s a trade-off”, “It's commercially necessary", It's the least bad option", "There was no alternative"… and sometimes those things are true.
But I have become wary of the language of necessity because once something has been described as necessary, it can become surprisingly difficult to ask who is carrying the cost.
A restructuring is necessary. A target is necessary. A cost reduction is necessary. A transformation is necessary. A difficult conversation is necessary.
But necessary for whom? And paid for by whom?
Those two questions can take us somewhere very different.
The leader sees the decision. Others live the consequence.
This is one of the tensions I keep noticing. At the leadership table, a decision might look like a strategic necessity. At the other end of the organisation, it can feel very different.
A number becomes someone's workload. A cost saving becomes someone's job. A productivity target becomes someone's evening. A policy becomes someone's daily reality. A supply chain decision becomes someone else's working conditions.
Both perspectives can be true, and the decision can be necessary, but the consequence can still be very painful.
Leadership doesn't make that contradiction disappear, BUT it makes it the leader's responsibility to see the contradictions, and implement choices made, consciously.
This is where Odysseus becomes interesting. I don't think the useful question is whether Odysseus makes the "right" decisions. That would reduce the story to a morality tale.
What interests me is the accumulating cost. One decision led to another. One compromise created another problem. One act of survival changed what becomes possible next. And eventually, the leader is no longer simply trying to reach the original destination. He is also trying to deal with the person he has become along the way.
That is a much richer way of thinking about leadership because the consequences of our decisions don't always arrive immediately. Sometimes they follow us.
The danger of becoming good at sacrifice.
There is a less than shiny, even broken, side to this that I find disturbing. We often celebrate leaders who sacrifice… the founder who works through the night, the executive who never switches off, the team that "goes above and beyond", the “agile” employee who absorbs another responsibility, the leader who puts the business before themselves. I acknowledge that sometimes that is courage. Sometimes it is commitment. Sometimes it is exactly what the moment requires. But sometimes we are simply rewarding people for tolerating a system that should have been redesigned.
And that raises a pertinent question, when does sacrifice stop being leadership and start becoming extraction? I think this is an important distinction.
Because a culture can become very good at celebrating sacrifice without ever asking why so much sacrifice is required. So, what are you willing to sacrifice?
This question may sound noble. And perhaps we should make it more specific... Are you willing to sacrifice time, money, comfort, reputation, certainty, or your own career progression?
Those are difficult enough, and we haven’t even talked about truth. And what about trust, dignity, someone else's wellbeing, the ability to challenge you, or the long-term health of the organisation?
That is where the question becomes important, because perhaps mature leadership isn't about being willing to sacrifice more. Perhaps it is about knowing what must never be sacrificed.
When a company-organised event held over employees’ rightful resting weekend is ‘mandatory’, no amount of justification can eliminate the true cost of sacrifice owed to the employees and their families and friends.
When a role asks a leader to sign-off on what is unethical or unsustainable for the business, but not signing off means career suicide or loss of livelihood, who becomes the sacrificial lamb, and at what price?
When a meeting is meant “to clear things out” so the guilty party can offload their conscience, is it worth sacrificing one’s self-respect, wellbeing and sanity to become their cleansing object?
There are moments that define your leadership, and in the definitive moment when the leader decides, “I don't want to win this way”, they set the path right back onto the wellness track... The track that lets leaders grow, leaders who know what the sacrificial cost is, and deeply understand what it means to live with the consequences of their choices.
When sacrifice becomes a measure of commitment.
There is another pattern I've seen in organisational life. We sometimes confuse how much someone is willing to sacrifice with how committed they are. The person who stays latest is committed. The person who says yes to everything is committed. The person who never complains is committed. The person who can "take it" is resilient. But what if the healthiest person in the room is the one who says, ”This isn't sustainable”?
What if the strongest leader is the one who refuses to normalise unnecessary sacrifice? What if saying no is an act of stewardship?
That changes the leadership conversation because people learn what leadership values.
Every decision is a teaching point. If someone is rewarded for hitting the number while damaging everyone around them, every member of the system learns that the number matters more than the people.
If a leader protects a high performer who behaves badly, every member of the system learns that performance excuses behaviour.
If someone raises an uncomfortable truth and is punished for it, every member of the system learns that silence is safer.
But if a leader says, “Yes, we need to deliver, but not at any cost”, people learn something else. They learn that ambition has boundaries. That results matter, BUT how we achieve them matters more.
Who gets to decide what is an acceptable sacrifice?
This may be the most important question in the whole piece because sacrifice is rarely distributed equally. The person making the decision may not be the person bearing the consequence.
A senior leader may decide that the organisation needs to "stretch". Someone else may be working another three hours every evening. A board may approve a cost reduction. Someone else loses their livelihood. A company may demand greater efficiency from a supply chain. Someone else absorbs the pressure through wages, hours or working conditions, including threats and verbal abuse.
The distance between decision maker and consequence matters. The greater the distance, the easier it becomes to call something a necessary sacrifice. This is why I think leadership is ultimately a question of power and proximity.
How much power do you have to make the decision, and how close are you willing to get to the consequences?
The leaders I trust the most don't pretend there is no cost, they acknowledge it. They don't hide behind the language of necessity. They don't pretend everyone will be fine. They don't make difficult decisions painless through better communication. They don’t say the business is not performing to target, we need to do more with less and be prepared for less bonuses, while posting annual profits to the tune of billions.
The leaders I trust say, “This is what we have to do, this is what it will cost, this is what I am going to do about that cost, this is what you will hear in the market, and this is why.”
That is a very different kind of leadership. It doesn't remove the difficulty, but it creates accountability for the consequence.
Perhaps the real test isn't what you will sacrifice. Perhaps it is what you will refuse to sacrifice.
Your ambition doesn't need to disappear. Neither does your commerciality nor your appetite for growth.
Leadership is not about becoming endlessly nice. Sometimes people will be disappointed. Sometimes decisions will hurt. Sometimes the right thing will still be unpopular. But we need leaders who can hold two truths at once, “we need to win, and how we win matters”. That tension is the beginning of maturity.
And this brings me back to Odysseus’ journey.
Odysseus wants to get home. The objective matters. But the story doesn't allow us to look only at whether he gets there. It asks us to look at what happens along the way. Who is lost. What is broken. What is learned. What is justified. What is regretted. And ultimately, who Odysseus becomes.
Perhaps that's the deeper leadership lesson I take from the story. The destination does not absolve the journey, and success does not erase the cost, but the question I would leave every leader with is not are you willing to make difficult choices, but what are you willing to sacrifice to win, and what are you unwilling to sacrifice, even to win?
Who gets to decide what is an acceptable price, and who gets to live with it?
Can your destination still love who you have become in your journey there?
I think those questions belong in every serious conversation about leadership, because leaders don't simply decide where organisations go, they determine what people have to give up getting there, and that is a responsibility we should take much more seriously.
I want to turn the question around in Part IV. Away from the leader, towards the people living inside the conditions that leadership creates. Because to me, the ultimate test of leadership isn't what you achieve, but what happens to the people around you.
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