Heroic CEO will go the way of the dodo: Employees no longer want to be choiceless doers'.

(From Financial Post)

Byline: SANDY COHEN

Popular business media outlets and the public, by and large, have been infatuated with the chief executive who has drunk from the Holy Grail of heroic leadership.

But there may be signs the era of the heroic CEO is coming to an end. To be sure, a single person can make a difference at critical times, but even heroic leaders such as Jack Welch, onetime chief executive of General Electric, emphasize the power of team leadership in action.

However, there are lessons to be learned from the rise of the heroic CEO. The biggest of those is how to avoid the ego trap, according to Robert Rogers, president of human resource consulting firm Development Dimension International. While leaders need strong egos, too big a one can hurt them. Chief executives with large egos are not receptive to feedback: Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, Bernard Ebbers of World Com and the discredited Enron executives, were immune to reality and out of touch because they saw themselves as bigger than life.

Such leaders deceive themselves with the belief a single person can make or break a company, George Fisher, a former chief executive of Kodak and Motorola, has claimed. They often barricade themselves in fortress-style offices and sink into seductive cocoons of management meetings and yes-men, only to find themselves at risk of making big mistakes. At the same time these bossses are feeling on top of the world, their information sources are drying up and their relationships are atrophying.

Chief executives need to engage with their employees and customers. That may be messy because it often means cutting through layers of senior managers who seek to preserve their versions of the truth. But chief executives need to throw off their army of enablers who are passionate about keeping their leader in isolation. Accountants, journalists, investment bankers, public relations gurus, lawyers and consultants all want to hitch their wagon to the chief executive's fame and overwhelm him or her with adulation. Soon that person believes what people are saying.