Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain

My favorite icebreaker trivia fact is that I was an actor extra on the movie, “The Dark Knight” (2008), directed by Christopher Nolan, which filmed in my home city of Chicago. I am in the film for maybe three seconds as a background filler, but it’s a fun fact, and it was a fun experience that I’m grateful to have been a part of.

The Dark Knight is a great, famous, legendary Batman movie, well-known by many people, and there is a line in that movie that has stuck with me, and with many of us, longer than even the writers of the film expected, they have admitted as such. Harvey Dent is sitting at dinner with Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes and they are talking about vigilantes, ancient Rome, and Caesar; and Harvey (played by the actor Aaron Eckhart) says:

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

How am I going to make an overly dramatic, dark, moody movie quote about Batman relate to business, leadership, and professional growth? Easy. If you’ve been in business leadership long enough, you will feel the truthful sting of this particular statement strongly.

You come into leadership as the hero. You’re going to be the best leader ever. The leader you wanted when you were on the team. You’re going to be kind, compassionate, flexible, and hard-working. Your team will appreciate you, and they will think “finally, we have the leader we’ve wanted for so long.” And you really do your best to be that great leader. You work long hours, you sacrifice your personal time and energy, you cover for your employees, you’re flexible and caring, and you get to know your employees, their situations, their families. You cheer them on, mentor them, try to encourage their career growth, you are, in fact, a great leader, your team agrees.

And yet, inevitably, if you have done this leadership thing long enough, you will have to hold a line, have a hard conversation, let someone go, facilitate a reduction in force, put someone on a performance improvement plan. Something that will be seen by an individual or your team as a betrayal of that trust, of that good leadership, of the camaraderie of the team as a whole. And you will now, and forevermore, be known as the villain. It might be just by that one individual, it might be by the whole team, but there it is: you have betrayed them, you have gone against their expectations for what should have happened, and how “cool” you should have been about a situation, and now….now, you are the villain.

First, the good news: you have officially lived long enough in this leadership cycle to make it to the hard part. “Dying” (leaving, transitioning out of a role, moving on, etc.) before the hard stuff means that you get to live forever in people’s minds as the great, friendly, amazing leader that you wanted to be. But staying in leadership for any length of time means being part of a company leadership team when things get hard, or even when you just have to enforce policy, or accountability, or boundaries, and it is almost always long enough to catapult you to the role of dreaded evil capitalist bad guy, despite all your hard work doing the best you can in a tough situation behind the scenes.

And second, the even better news: You will survive being considered a villain. It’s not easy, and it sure doesn’t feel good, but it’s part of being in leadership, and being a good leader means making the hard decisions for the betterment of the team, the individual, and/or the company when you need to make those hard decisions. Wanting better for someone sometimes means that they can’t stay in their current situation, as its not well-suited to them, or their behavior has to change in order for them to continue. Wanting better for your team sometimes means that you have to remove someone from that team that is causing damage to the other team members. Wanting to grow your business to give people opportunities for careers and advancement sometimes means pruning areas of the business that aren’t contributing to that growth. All of these are super tough decisions, and no one said this was going to be easy (in fact, they say that this—leadership—is why you’re making the “big”—or at least the “bigger”—bucks).

The caveat, of course, is that there are also just bad bosses out there, terrible people who hurt people in pursuit of a money goal, or power goal, or some other reason. Those people are the villains from the start, and I implore you to never be those people, the world is not better for their presence in it, nor is your business.

But take heart that even great, compassionate, wonderful leaders, even sometimes leadership “heroes” also sometimes have to be the villain. You can be both the hero and the villain, and more importantly, you can just be you—and YOU can learn to hold the tension of being both things, as long as you’re making your decisions with a clear heart and open mind and caring for people the best you can along the way. Sometimes leadership is about doing the hard things, and being considered the villain isn’t the worst thing in the world. Sometimes it even means you’re Batman.