Leadership Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

The fantasy of the lone rescuer is still one of leadership culture's most durable addictions, and Wheatley is trying to break it. Her line targets a familiar cycle: crisis hits, the organization panics, and the leader responds by tightening their grip, centralizing decisions, and performing competence at high volume. It looks like strength. It feels like control. It also quietly sabotages the very conditions that make a system resilient.

The intent is corrective, almost clinical: stop mistaking heroics for responsibility. Wheatley isn't simply warning that burnout is bad; she's arguing that the "savior" posture is structurally self-defeating. When leaders "take back power", the phrase implies something already existed in the collective and was yanked upward. That act creates dependency below and isolation above. The leader becomes the bottleneck, then the martyr, then the cautionary tale.

The subtext is moral as much as managerial: hero leadership is ego in altruist clothing. By positioning themselves as indispensable, leaders get the emotional payoff of being needed while outsourcing agency from everyone else. The cost shows up as stress, but the deeper damage is cultural: people learn not to lead, not to decide, not to own outcomes.

Context matters. Wheatley emerged as a prominent voice in late-20th-century organizational thinking that pushed back against mechanistic command-and-control models, emphasizing complexity, relationships, and self-organizing systems. Her warning lands especially hard in an era of perpetual emergency, when performative leadership is rewarded and steadier, shared forms of power can look like absence rather than maturity.