The Parallels Between The Hero’s Journey and The Manager’s Journey Are Strong

Joseph W. Campbell’s description of The Hero’s Journey has 17 distinct stages, starting with The Call to Adventure, navigating The Road of Trials, and ending with the Freedom to Live. Of course, the action occurs between those stages, with untold challenges, exhilarating highs, and soul-crushing lows. Campbell might have been writing the story of The Manager’s Journey.

Several times yearly, I kick off a cohort in my New(er) Manager Development Program. I am always humbled by the opportunity to help great, motivated individuals launch and progress on their unique Manager’s Journeys. I take this work seriously. After all, each cohort contains the future organizational and team leaders charged with solving big problems, starting new businesses, and guiding others through our volatile world. 

Having lived my Manager’s Journey with all the highs, lows, and lessons, I know what they will encounter. There’s no avoiding The Road of Trials on the way to the Freedom to Live. 

Today’s generation of new managers faces the unenviable task of redefining what it means to manage in a volatile world where advancing technologies will increasingly drive change. The most important thing that can be accomplished in my or any organization’s manager development program is to teach individuals how to think and not what to think. After all, thinking and thinking differently are our only and best chances of success.

Redefining the Role of Manager

I’m excited about the role to be played by tomorrow’s managers. In almost all ways, it must be different from the one yesterday’s managers filled. The primary adversary is the persistent lack of engagement in our organizations. Solving that problem demands a blended role of leading, guiding, coaching, teaching, and helping. Notice that I left ‘supervising’ off that list. If you need to supervise, your system is broken.

Navigating volatility, busting bureaucracy, identifying the need for change, and guiding and leading that change are core tasks of our new manager role. Along the way, these individuals must break down barriers, topple siloes, and redefine organizational processes for decision-making and innovation to leverage or defeat the unexpected challenges that dominate our world.

It is my hope that the individuals entering my programs today are the ones who will be revolutionizing how we engage the hearts and minds of the people who come together in an organization to pursue a vision and live and guide with purpose.

The Call to Adventure

We all have different precipitating events that launch us on our journeys as managers. Some pursue the role motivated to scale their impact. Others are clumsily thrown into the role with little context on what to do, much less how to do it. A few want to test themselves. Others move from integrator manager roles—think product or project managers to the formal role.

This Call to Adventure as a manager is exciting, partly because it’s new and feels important. (It is important!) As you contemplate starting down the path in this role, you see the opportunity for honor and glory for you and your team members. There are big problems to solve, targets to chase, and innovations to generate. Yes, the opportunity for heroic accomplishments is there on this adventure as a manager. Yet, if every new manager understood the trials before them, I doubt most would volunteer for this role.

The Road of Trials

In most instances, the Call to Adventure quickly transitions to The Road of Trials. One of my clients’ trials started on her first job approximately twenty minutes after she was presented as the manager of her new team.

When you’re new to managing, it’s impossible to understand that trials are the substance and seeds of success. The people issues are the most challenging. Others—dealing with unexpected shifts in markets, chasing innovation, facing challenges to your strategy, and needing to make sense out of chaos—are all relatively easy compared to the people issues.

There is no movement to Campbell’s Master of Two Worlds (contributor and manager) and Freedom to Live (victory) without navigating the Road of Trials. These unexpected and mostly unknowable challenges are where hope turns to possibility, and possibility evolves into success. Of course, progress is not possible without struggle. 

I once told a mentor that my role as a manager felt like a never-ending uphill run with the wind and driving rain in my face and my feet encased in concrete. He laughed and offered, “Now you get it. What are you going to do about it?” I spent much time pondering and working out the answer to his question. (Answering this question is, of course, what we strive to do in my programs.)

The Freedom To Live

As described, this step is about freedom from the fear of death. I love the parallel for The Manager’s Journey. In this case, death is less existential and more about the fear of failing or being fired. It takes stick-to-itiveness, intellectual agility, personal adaptability, and an insatiable drive to learn to succeed as a modern manager. It also takes cultivating a strong sense of purpose and bringing this purpose to life with the tools (soft skills) essential for harnessing the hearts and minds of your team members and colleagues. Get this right, and you will be free to live without fear.

Get it Right, and You Will Marvel at What You and They Accomplished.

For everyone embarking on their unique manager’s journey, you can only look forward into the fog of uncertainty. Yet, at some point, typically a long way and time removed from the start of your journey, you get to peer backward. If you get it mostly right and persevere through the Trials, you’ll marvel at what you and those with you on your Manager’s Journey accomplished. Here’s wishing you strength for the road ahead. 

Art's Signature