By Mike DeGrosky
Many years ago, I taught supervision and management courses for a community college. It was night school and few of my students were seeking degrees. They showed up because they were motivated by a central idea –that I would help them craft a role model for their own effectiveness.
At the time, I was acting on my belief that people aspiring to effective leadership needed positive role models as well as my knowledge that many working adults had come up under people who had been excellent technical performers who may not have been fully prepared for organizational leadership.
{This article first appeared in Wildfire Magazine}
These days, I can lean on some solid research around the power of positive role models. For example, a 2023 article in Forbes, by Tracy Bower, a PhD sociologist, cited a Gallup/ Amazon poll of 4,000 early to mid-career adults that found that people with positive role models were more likely to say their careers were fulfilling, that they felt established in their careers, and had careers that paid them enough. The poll also found that young people who had mentors were “more likely to have jobs with authority and autonomy and to experience more intrinsic rewards from their jobs.”
Role models are people we look up to so much that we consider them examples to be imitated. Finding people whose values and behavior inspire us to want to lead like them can accelerate a person’s development as a leader. However, leadership role models can be elusive. Leadership is complex. We want leaders to be credible, build trust, have vision, lead by example and with compassion, be authentic, act with transparency, value learning, communicate well, and inspire, motivate and direct us all while maintaining a positive environment. All those attributes can be hard to find in one person. If you have identified such a person, if you have said “I want to lead just like that,” by all means, please start emulating that person immediately, if you haven’t already.
“All leaders are incomplete leaders, works-in-progress. Stop looking for the flawless leader and build your own.”
But what if you do not have that role model, that person who meets all your leadership expectations? Build your own role model of leadership excellence. At some point in my career, I stopped looking for a single leader on whom to pattern my leadership. I’ve worked for a lot of people. Many had remarkable leadership strengths and were effective leaders but all were regular human beings with regular human-being shortcomings. None was that ideal leadership role model. I believe that is reality for most people. I have previously called attention to a classic Harvard Business Review article titled In Praise of the Incomplete Leader by Deborah Ancona, Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski and Peter Senge in which the authors said “It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be.”
I started noting who, in my experience, would be my benchmark for key leadership skills and attributes and building my concept of an ideal leader – a kind, compassionate human here, an excellent decision maker there, a person who had earned my trust and respect over here, an excellent communicator there. My experience inspired my college classes way back when, and later in training for fire personnel, and it has remained a big part of my leadership development philosophy.
Wildland fire is a great leadership crucible, and the sector has invested heavily in leadership development so, if we are paying attention, we can observe and draw from many good leaders, even if they are incomplete. I have also had to fill in gaps and I expect that anyone taking my approach would. I have pulled from my training and education when I had no role model for what I considered a leadership essential. There exists a mountain of academic research to draw from, against which we can benchmark our experiences. We can learn from historic figures. We can watch a good movie or TV show. Honestly, as a person who views darned near everything through a leadership lens, I consider the show Ted Lasso to be terrific leadership training. We can ask friends and trusted colleagues to tell us about their leadership role models.
I believe now, more than ever, that people aspiring to effective leadership need positive role models and having one will accelerate development as a leader at any level. But I suspect that few of us will find a single person who meets all our leadership expectations. I have embraced the idea that all leaders are incomplete leaders, worksin-progress if you will. I encourage anyone asking to stop looking for the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out. If you are not one of the lucky few who have found that single leadership role model, build your own; I believe you will be glad you did.
{This article first appeared in Wildfire Magazine}
Mike DeGrosky is a student of leadership, lifelong learner, mentor and coach, sometimes writer, and recovering fire chief. He taught for the Department of Leadership Studies at Fort Hays State University for 10 years. Follow Mike via LinkedIn.
Andrew Vanden Heuvel is a professor of physics and astronomy who experiments with innovative approaches to science education. This work was carried out with his three research students, Rigel Reynolds, Zachary Meyer, and Samuel Ntadom, physics students at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI, United States.
