Beyond the Lone Hero: Why Leadership Must Evolve into a Collective Practice
For generations, leadership has been shaped by the belief that its power lives within a single individual’s strengths, traits, and resilience. Accordingly, the individual leader has been expected to carry the weight of responsibility, make the tough calls, and navigate complexity alone. But a quiet revolution is underway. A new understanding is evolving that values collective sense‑making, relational dynamics, and shared responsibility.
The Birth of the Lone Hero
The idea of the leader as a lone hero, who has the attributes to lead, goes back to the Great Man theory of the early 20th century and the subsequent trait theory developed in the 1940s (Stodgill, 1948). Through the use of psychometrics, much of today’s leadership assessment and development work is still founded on this 80-year-old theory. We still see leadership as residing in a lone hero.
Why Leadership Must Change
But the world has changed, and leadership must change with it. Today’s challenges in the areas of ecological sustainability, social well‑being, and economic resilience are not problems that any single individual can solve. They are complex, interconnected, and systemic. They demand a new understanding of leadership that goes beyond the leader as the lone hero.
Leadership Becomes Community
Fortunately, a new understanding of leadership is evolving. It is one that recognises that no single person can hold all the answers, and that our greatest possibilities arise not from individual brilliance but from collective intelligence. This evolving understanding honours the power of shared insight, relational depth, and the wisdom that emerges when people think, feel, and act together. This is leadership as a living, breathing, co‑created force, which invites us to sense together, learn together, and shape the future together. Research increasingly supports models that conceptualise leadership as dyadic, collaborative, relational and fundamentally social (e.g. Corbu, 2025; Klasmeier, et al., 2025; Kniffin, 2025; Park, 2025; Sajjad et al., 2024). These models require that leaders lead ‘with’ rather than ‘over’ others.
Organisations as Living Systems
This shift signals a deeper evolution in how we understand organisations themselves. Rather than machines to be optimised, organisations are now seen as living systems that are embedded in and responsive to broader social and ecological networks. In this ecosystem metaphor, leadership becomes distributed, coordination becomes dynamic, and learning becomes mutual.
Regenerative Leadership
Regenerative Leadership (Aoustin, 2023; Hardman, 2010) typifies this new evolving understanding. Relational, embodied, and deeply contextual, it invites leaders to embrace paradox, contradiction, and dissonance, not as obstacles to be removed, but as catalysts for innovation and discovery. It recognises that everything is interconnected and that leaders have a responsibility to create economic value while contributing to the well‑being of society and the environment. Inspired by natural systems, Regenerative Leadership focuses on cultivating organisations that are restorative, resilient, and adaptable. This is not about leaders being heroic individuals. It is about leadership as a collective sense‑making process, with shared responsibility, and co-created transformative action.
The Future of Leadership Development
Leadership development, therefore, can no longer be about acquiring skills in isolation. Identity, agency, and capacity emerge through participation in communities, dilemmas, and environments. Leaders must develop ‘within’ complexity, not just learn ‘about’ it. The future of leadership is not heroic. It is regenerative, relational, and collective.
If you would like to develop your leadership as a collective practice, take a look at our Changemaker Circles.
Author
Terence Sexton. Leadership Psychologist, PhD Student at Liverpool John Moores University and Director at Natural Systems Coaching and Development Ltd.
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References
Aoustin, E. (2023). Regenerative leadership: what it takes to transform business into a force for good. Field Actions Science Reports. The journal of field actions, (Special Issue 25), 92-97.
Corbu, I. (2025). Collective leadership in a multipolar world: between principles and necessity. Journals of Business & Management Studies, 1(2), 01-13.
Hardman, J. (2010). Regenerative leadership: A Model for Transforming People and Organizations for Sustainability in Business, Education, and Community. Integral Leadership Review, 10(5).
Klasmeier, K. N., Güntner, A. V., & Schleu, J. E. (2025). Leadership dynamics in teams: The reciprocity of shared and empowering leadership. Journal of Business and Psychology, 1-17.
Kniffin, L. (2025). Collective leadership development in the civic arena. Journal of Leadership Education, 24(3), 305-320.
Park, J. G., Kwon, B., & Park, K. (2025). Understanding collective forms of leadership through text mining-based review of literature. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance.
Sajjad, A., Eweje, G., & Raziq, M. M. (2024). Sustainability leadership: An integrative review and conceptual synthesis. Business Strategy and the Environment, 33(4), 2849-2867.
Stodgill, R.M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership. Journal of Psychology. Vol. 25, 35-71.
