You Are Not the Hero of Your Team's Story | What Donald Miller's StoryBrand Gets Right About Leadership

Okay, before we start, I have my pink slash Alani new in my hand because we are going somewhere today that I have needed to sit with myself. And honestly, I just want to be fully caffeinated and fully honest with you for it. So let me ask you something, and I want you to actually answer this in your head. Not the polished answer, but the real one, the first one that comes to your brain. When you picture your team. Maybe it's your department, your church staff, your company, whatever it is you lead. When you picture it succeeding, who is standing in the middle of that picture? Be honest. Is it them or is it you? Because here is what I have learned slowly and not very gracefully. For years, I thought good leadership meant being the strongest person in the room, the one with all the answers, the one who saves the day, the one the team could not function without. I thought that was the goal. I thought if they needed me this much, man, I must be doing it right. And then I read a little business book about marketing, of all things, and it quietly took the floor out from under everything I believed about leading people. We're going to talk about that book today, and we're going to talk about why the thing that made me feel important was the exact thing that was keeping my team small. Let's talk about the moment it hit me. I was sitting in a meeting, a meeting that I had called about a project that I had basically built, surrounded by a team that I had hired and one of my best people. She stopped me in mid sentence and said, well, I figured I should just ask you since you should usually and probably have the answer anyway. Guys, she did not say that as a compliment. When I say that, that's literally how she said it to me. She said it in. In the way that you say when you've just stopped fighting, when you've kind of just stopped caring and you're just like, eh, whatever, I'll have a. I'll go to my boss, she'll take care of it, right? And I smiled and answered the question, because, of course, guess what? Julie had the answer. I always had the answer. And on the way home, it landed on me like a ton of freaking bricks. She'd stopped thinking. Not because she couldn't think, because I had trained her not to. I had been so busy being brilliant that I had made a brilliant woman go quiet. That is the day this episode started, even though I would not have the words for it for many years. Well, hey, welcome back to leadership. Clearly, I am Julie Wagner, and this show is where we Clear the noise so you can lead with your real voice, with clarity, with conviction, and with Christ at the center of it all. If you're new here, the whole heartbeat of this show is in the name clarity. I believe most of the pain in leadership is not a competence problem. It's a clarity problem. We are not unclear because we are not smart. We are unclear because we are carrying things we were never meant to carry and standing in places we were never meant to stand. And that is exactly where today's episode lives. So let me set it up. Here's the roadmap so you know where we are headed. First, I want to introduce you to the idea that wrecked me and the man behind it. Then we are going to look honestly at what it actually costs you to insist on being the hero. And I'm going to be very specific because vague conviction never changed anyone. Then we're going to go to scripture because what I'm about to tell you is not a business hack. It's 2,000 years old and it came out of the mouth of Jesus himself self. Then we're going to get practical, what a guide actually does, hands on. And then we'll go to the heart level, to the fear that makes us grab the hero role in the first place. Because if we don't deal with that, my friends, none of the practical stuff is going to stick. So grab your coffee or your Aulani Nu or drink water, whatever you're drinking, grab your journal or note taking device and then let's go. If you have spent any time in the business world, marketing world or leadership world in basically, let's say the last decade, you have almost certainly most heard the name Donald Miller. He wrote a book called Building a Story Brand and he built a whole company story brand around the one deceptively simple idea about communication. Here's the idea in plain English. Miller noticed that companies constantly get the story wrong. They make themselves the hero. They talk about how great they are, how long they've been in business, how many awards they've won, how impressive their founder is. And it doesn't work because customers tune it out. And so this was his fix. Stop making your brand the hero of the story. The customer is the hero. Your brand is the guide. You are not Luke Skywalker, my friends. You are Yoda. You are not Frodo. You are Gandalf. The customer has the problem and the customer goes on the journey. The customer gets the win. And you are the trusted guide who hands them the tool, points them down the path and then steps back Now, Miller built that from marketing. But the second I read it, which I am absolutely obsessed with this book, I didn't think about it in only a marketing aspect. I actually thought about every leader I've ever known who couldn't figure out why their team would not step up. And then I thought about myself in all honesty, because if you swap the word customer for the word team, the whole thing turns into the most convicting leadership lesson I have ever encountered. Your team is the hero of the story. You are the guide as the leader. And so many of us had those two roles completely backwards. Think about the guides that we love in the stories that we love. Why do we trust Gandalf? Because he's older? Because he's been down the road. He has wisdom and a little bit of power that he uses sparingly. And this is the key. He's not trying to take Frodo's place. He never once tried to carry the ring himself. He could not, and he knew it. And most importantly, he knows it wasn't his to carry. The entire role is to get the right person to the right mountain or to keep that person alive and moving when it gets hard. The victory is Frodo's. Gandalf wouldn't have had it any other way. Now ask yourself honestly this, okay. Is that how I lead? Or do I keep trying to grab the ring because I don't trust anyone else to carry it? And now you know a little bit what a nerd I am. By the way, I do love me some Lord of the Rings, love me some Star wars, but that is a whole nother discussion for a whole nother day. So I want to make sure that I give credit where credit's due. And I want to be really fair to Donald Miller here, the way I try to be fair to every thinker like Brene Brown that we've unpacked on this show before. Donald Miller is not wrong. The framework, guys, it is genuinely brilliant. And I am not here to take it down. I promise you that. I am here to take it further than a marketing book is allowed to go, because Miller is teaching you how to position a message. I want to talk to you about what that does to a human being, to your people, to you, when the leader insists on being the hero. And I want to say one more thing in Donald Miller's favor, because this really does matter. Miller did not pull this out of thin air. He built it on the bones of how every great story across culture has always worked. There is a hero. Hero meets Guide. The guide gives hero a plan and a tool and the hero then goes and wins. That structure is so deep in us that we feel it even in a 30 second commercial. Miller's genius was naming it and saying out loud, leader. You keep casting yourself in the wrong role. And the reason it works for marketing is the exact same reason it works for leadership. Because it's true about people. People don't want to be rescued. People want to be equipped and then trusted. That is true of your customer and it is ten times more true of the person who works for you. So I want to dive in about what being the hero actually costs you. Let me describe the hero leader and I want you to tell me if you recognize her. Maybe in someone you have worked for. Maybe like me, in the mirror. The hero leader is the one who has to be in every meeting or it does not feel real. The one who redoes her team's work because it's faster to just do it herself. The one who answers the question before anyone has the chance to think. The one whose calendar is a disaster is exhausted, but is also a little bit proud about how exhausted she is because exhaustion is proof that she matters. I am going to be very transparent with you right now. That was me 10 years ago. Shoot, that was me like five years ago. In all honesty, for a long stretch of of my leadership, I confused being needed with being effective. And those are not the same thing. They are actually almost opposites. Here's what being the hero actually costs you. We're going to go over three things. You ready? Get your notes. One, it keeps your people small. If you are the hero, there is no room in the story for anyone else to be the hero. A team can only rise to the level of responsibility you actually release to them. If you're catching every ball, if you're solving every problem, making every call, your team is never going to develop the muscle to do it themselves. And it's not because they can't. It's because you will not let them go long enough for them to try. You're not protecting them, you're stunting them. And while it might feel like love, that's also what makes it dangerous. I think about that woman in my meeting all the time. She was not less capable than me. In some areas, she was sharper than me. But I had built a system without meaning to where the fastest path was for her to just always ask Julie. And every time she asked, I answered. I got a little feeling important, right? But then she also lost a little bit of her own initiative each time. Multiply that across an entire team for a whole year, and you don't have a team anymore. You have an audience. Watching one person perform, you see a capped leader that caps everyone underneath her. Your ceiling becomes their ceiling. Worst part is, they often don't even know that they've stopped growing. Because being managed by a hero, it feels safe. It's comfortable to let someone else carry the weight. You're not just allowed to grow. You have been gently relieved of the need to. Here's the second one. It makes the whole thing fragile. A team that is built around a hero has a single point of failure. And guess what, my friends, it's you. If everything runs through you, then everything stops when you stop. You can't get sick. You can't take real pto, a real vacation. You can't have a hard season. We've talked about this in a few episodes in the past. In the rest conversation that we recently had, if your whole operation collapses the moment you step away, that is not a sign of how important you are. It's a sign of how fragile you have built it. The hero leader has not built a team. She has built a dependency. And here is the cruel irony of it. The very thing the hero leader is most proud of. I am so essential. Nothing works without me. Is the clearest evidence that she has failed at the actual job of leadership. Because an actual job of leadership is not to be indispensable. It's to build something that outlasts you, that outgrows you. If your team would be fine without you for a month, you have not become unimportant. You have become a good leader. Yes, they're going to miss you, hopefully. But, guys, this shows that you are building something that will outlast yourself and it's going to outgrow you, which is the. At the end of the day, that is the main point. If you're not growing, you're dying. So let's go with the third one. It is quietly about you. This is the hardest one, so I'm going to say it as gently as I possibly can. When we insist on being the hero, we tell ourselves it's about service. I'm just trying to help. I'm just trying to make sure it's done right. But underneath, and very often, it's just about us. It's about being needed. It's about the identity we get from being the one who saves the day. And if our sense of worth is wrapped up in being indispensable, we will subconsciously keep our people dependent because their dependence is feeding something in us. So I want to be careful here because I'm not saying every hard working leader is secretly an egomaniac. Okay. I'm saying that the line between I serve because I love them and I serve because I need to be needed is a lot thinner than we are comfortable admitting to. And I think that most of us have never once stopped to check to see which side of it we're standing on. So here's a quick test. And yes, this is going to be uncomfortable. How do you feel when your team succeeds without you? Not how do you act? You know how you act. You know, you smile and say great job, but I'm talking. How do you feel in the private place when nobody is watching if there's a little sting? A little. I guess they didn't need me after all. That sting is the tell. That sting is the part of you that was getting something out of being the hero. And naming it is not condemnation. Naming it is the first step to freedom from it. I told you we were going somewhere. I had to sit with. Right. That third point is the one that actually got me. I found the sting. I felt it so deeply and I had to take it to the foot of the cross. I had to talk to God about the sting. And that is what actually turned this from a leadership tip into a heart thing, which is where we're going to be headed into next. Here is what undid me. When I finally saw the hero problem clearly, I realized it wasn't a new idea at all. Donald Miller didn't invent it. He rediscovered something Jesus said 2000 years ago to a group of leaders who were arguing about exactly this. Who gets to be the hero in Mark chapter 10? The disciples are basically jockeying for a position, right? They want the best seats. They want the status. They want to be the heroes of the story. And Jesus pulls them together and says this. You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people and the officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant. And whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many. You can find that in Mark 10:42,45. That is NLT version. Now I want you to read that again, but with the story brand lens on the rulers of this World make themselves the hero, and they lord it over people. They flaunt their authority. They stand in the center of the picture. Jesus says, but among you it will be different. The greatest among you is the servant, and the leader is the guide, not the hero. And then he does the most staggering thing. He points to himself, the one person in human history who would have been entirely justified in being the hero of every story. And he says, even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. He had every right to be in the center of the picture. He chose to be the guide who lays his life down so the people he loves can carry that victory. This is the model. This is the whole thing. The most secure leader who ever lived was the one most willing not to be the hero. I sat with that word different for a long time. But among you, it will be different. Jesus was drawing a hard line between two entire operating systems for leadership. The world system says, leadership flows upward. You climb, you accumulate, you get people under you. The higher you go, the more you are served. Jesus flips the whole narrative. In his kingdom, the leadership flows downward. You descend, you serve you. The higher you go, the more people you're responsible to lift. The world says a leader is someone with a lot of people beneath her. But Jesus says a leader is someone with a lot of people she is underneath, holding up. Those are not two flavors of the same thing, my friend. They are completely opposite directions. He is dismantling the throne that we keep trying to climb onto. I want you to sit with how radical that is. Jesus was the hero. He's the only one in the whole story who actually earned the center seat. And he spends the entire account giving it away. Washing feet, making breakfast on the beach, kneeling in front of men who would abandon him. The one person who could have demanded to be served, chose a towel and a basin. If Jesus led from the position of a guide, what's our excuse as to why we're not doing that? That's the model. That's the whole thing. The most secure leader who ever lived was the one most willing not to be the hero. I don't know about you, but I find that so freeing because it means stepping out of the hero seat and is not a demotion. It's not you becoming less important. It's you becoming more like Christ. The guide role is not the consolation prize. It's the calling we act like. Servant leadership is the humble little sideways move you make when you're trying to be noble. Guys, it's not sideways. It's up. It's the highest form of leadership there is because it's the form God himself chose. Now, let's talk about what a guide actually does. Now, here's where I want to push back on a misread of this, because I've seen leaders take the be the servant idea and turn it into something passive and weak. And that's not what this is at all. Being a guide instead of the hero does not mean that you disappear. It doesn't mean that you don't have authority. It doesn't mean that you stop leading. Gandalf is not passive. Yoda is not a pushover. A guide is not less powerful than a hero. A guide is arguably more powerful because a guide creates other heroes instead of just being one. So let me give you what a guide actually looks like, practically in let's do four moves, okay? The first, a guide gives the tool, not the answer. When someone on your team brings you a problem, the hero solves it. The guide hands them what they need to solve it themselves and then lets them solve it. Yes, it is slower the first time. It can be much faster by the 10th time, because now you have a person who can do it without you. The hero collects problems. The guide builds problem solvers. Here's a practical version. When someone brings you a question, before you answer it, try this one sentence. What do you think we should do? And then be quiet. And I know how hard the quiet is. I've talked about this previously in many different episodes, but the power of the pause is definitely my. One of my favorites. The hero wants to fill it immediately. They want to fill that silence and immediately sit in it. Nine times out of 10, they already have an instinct, but they wanted you to validate it. And over time, if you keep handing that question back, they're going to stop needing the validation that is you. Building a leader in real time with a single sentence and a discipline to stay quiet after it the next. A guide gives clarity, not control. This is the heart of this whole show, okay? Your job as a guide is to make the path clear. Here's where we are going. Here is why it matters. Here is what winning looks like. And then you let them walk it. Control says, do it my way. Exactly. Clarity says, here's the destination. I trust you to find the road. Clarity empowers people. Control suffocates. And most of us reach for control because, let's just call it. It feels safer when what our people actually needed was clarity. And hear me out on this one. Because leaders mix these up constantly. Okay. When your team keeps coming back to you, you probably think you have a control problem. You need to loosen. Okay, sometimes. Sometimes. But just as often, you have a clarity problem. They keep checking with you because they genuinely do not know what winning looks like. So they can't move without you. The fix for that is not to step back further. It's to get radically clearer about the destination so they can run towards it without needing you to confirm every single step. Clarity is what makes letting go safe. Third, a guide gives the win way. When the team succeeds, the hero leader finds a way to make it about her leadership. The guide points to the team and says, look what they did. That is not false modesty. It's accurate. They did do it. Your job was to guide. Their job was to win. So let them have the win. Out loud, in front of people. Few things grow a person like being publicly credited for their own victory. And watch. Just watch what it does in a room when you stand up in front of your boss, your board, or your whole company and you say the name of the person who actually did the work, not the team did. Great. But Sarah figured this out. This was Sarah. Something shifts. Sarah stands taller. Everyone quietly notes that in your world, the people who do the work get the credit, not the leader who hovers over it. You will never have a loyalty or motivation problem on a team where the leader is famous for giving away the win. Never. Okay, here is the fourth practical move. A guide stays in the story when it gets hard. Here's the part that keeps it from being just a delegation trick. A real guy does not hand off the tool and then vanish. Gandalf shows up back at Helm's Deep. When your person is in the hard middle of things, you release to them. You don't swoop in and take it back, but you don't abandon them either. You stay close enough to encourage, but far enough to let them lead. That's the tension of guiding, present but not central. Here is the lazy counterfeit of this whole message, and I do not want you to walk away with it. Okay? The counterfeit says, great servant leadership means I dump everything on my team and then call it empowerment. No, guys, no. That is not guiding. That is abandoning. And your people can feel the difference instantly. Delegation without support is just abdication. With better branding, the guide hands over the real responsibility and then stays in the relationship. Checking in, removing obstacles, encouraging in the dip, catching them if they truly fall. You gave away the wheel. You did not leave the car. Okay, so I could leave it at four practical moves. And I think that you would have a decent leadership episode today. But you didn't come here for decent. The practical stuff does not stick unless the heart underneath it changes. So let me go one layer down, okay? We're going to peel back some onion layers. The reason we grab the hero role is almost never strategy. It's identity, it's fear. We are afraid that if we are not the most important person in the room, we won't matter. We are afraid that if they can do it without us, they will not need us. And if they don't need us, then who are we? Paul speaks right into that fear in Philippians. Listen how he frames it. Okay, this is Philippians 2, 3, verse 4. Of course. NLT version. Don't be selfish. Don't try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don't look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. Friends. Don't try to impress others. That's the hero impulse, and it's been named and exposed. Okay? So much of the need to be the hero is just the need to impress, to be seen as capable, essential, brilliant. And Paul says. Paul tells us to lay that down. To be humble, take a genuine interest in other people's growth. Even when it means they outgrow their need for you. Gosh. Especially when it means that. And here's the freedom in it. You do not have to be the hero, because in the real story, the one that's being written over your life and over your leadership, you already have a hero. That's God. You are not the savior of your team. You already have a savior, and so do they. That takes the crushing weight off your shoulders. You were never supposed to be the one holding it all up. You get to be the guide. Because guess what, my friends, the throne is already occupied. And guess what? It's not by you. And honestly, I gotta tell you, thank goodness, I do not want to be the one that's sitting on that throne. So remember the woman in my meeting from the beginning of the podcast? The one who went quiet after she snarked at me a little bit, which I totally deserve that snark, by the way. I went back to her later and the next day and we had a very awkward conversation because I had to own something. I told her that I realized I had been answering questions that were hers to answer and that I was going to stop and that when she brought me something, I was going to hand it right back to her. And it's not because I stopped caring. It's because I finally started trusting her. And do you want to know what she said to me? She said, I wonder if you would ever notice. Dude, that stung so many needles. I was like. I felt like I was slapped in the face and punched in the gut and it was all my own fault. But I am so thankful for the words that I was able to speak to her and the fact that we were able to have that, that meeting of the minds. And she accepted my apology. And guess what? That was also the beginning of the best season that my team had ever had. Within a year, she was leading opportunities and projects that I never even touched. She did not need a hero. She needed me to get out of her way and stay close while she flew. Okay, I want to pause just for one second because this episode connects directly with something I have built for you. If today's episode is landing hard on you, if you're realizing that you have been carrying the hero role and it is exhausting and it's quietly capping your team, that is exactly what my flagship course, the Leadership Clearly Foundations course, I was very original with the name there. This is what the course is built to address. It's a five day course that's built around my proprietary Leadership clearly method. And it starts by clearing the noise so you can lead from your own real voice voice instead of leading from performance. A huge piece of stepping out of the hero seat is learning to delegate from clarity instead of clinging out of fear. And that's the work that we do together inside of it. So just FYI, there's no pressure at all if you're there and you're like, hey, this sounds pretty awesome. The link is in the show notes or you can find it over at julie wagner or leadershipclearly.com and the course kicks off on July 1st. I cannot believe it. Just like a couple weeks away. So anyways, back at it. Okay, so let's close this out. Here is your one thing this week. I'm not going to give you 10, I promise. Just one. Because clarity means less and it means done deeply this week. Find one place where you have been the hero and choose to be the guide instead. One problem that you would normally solve. Hand someone the tool and let them solve it. One meeting you would normally run, one win that is about to happen. Plan right now how you are going to give it away in public. Just one. Notice what stirs up in you. Notice if it's harder to let go than you expected and get curious as to why that feeling? That feeling is the actual lesson. Because your team doesn't need another hero. They're surrounded by people trying to be the hero. What they have never had enough of is a guide. Someone secure enough in who she is and whose she is to step out at the center and point them towards their own victory. That is leadership, my friends, not standing in the middle of the picture helping someone else step into it. If this episode landed with you today, would you do me a favor and send it to one leader who needs to hear it? I'm guessing you probably already thought of her name. And if you just love leadership, clearly do me a favor and subscribe to this podcast either on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you're listening to. And also, if you want to leave a review, I would be so amazingly thankful and grateful if you did, because leaving a review helps this podcast get found by others as well. So again, thank you so much for being here. Remember, you are are not the hero of your team's story. And that is the best news you're going to hear all week, my friend. I will see you next week. Keep leading clearly, because clarity is an act of love.