Jeffrey W. Hull, Ph.D.
Jeffrey is the director of
education and business
development at the Institute
of Coaching, a Harvard
Medical School affiliate;
a clinical instructor in
psychology at Harvard
Medical School; and adjunct
professor of leadership at
NYU. He has served for
more than 20 years as a
coach and consultant to
hundreds of organizations
across the U.S. and
internationally, specializing
in leadership development
and organizational strategy,
design and transformation.
28 Coaching World
Coaching the Post-heroic Leader
This is a tough time to be a leader. It is no longer enough to be charismatic, visionary and
decisive. Leaders today are asked to be inclusive, collaborative consensus-builders with
high levels of emotional intelligence and self-awareness. As inhabitants of the C-suite
become more diverse, the paradigm of patriarchy is crumbling. Industrial and social
psychologists are observing the emergence of a new post-patriarchal, or “post-heroic,”
breed of leadership that is democratic, empathetic and communitarian. Leadership
Coaches are tasked with supporting clients as they build this broader set of competencies.
To support coaches in accomplishing this goal, I developed a framework for assessment
based on recent research in nine specific domains of leadership that represent “shifts”
from a pre- to post-heroic leadership landscape (see above). In this article, we’ll take a
quick tour of the nine shifts addressed in the assessment.