Leadership Viking Style

Our great longing for genuine leadership is fulfilled by watching warrior soap operas like The Vikings. It would be great to have our needs met in reality, instead of waiting to see what Viking King Ragnar Lothbrok will do next season.

It’s not so much that we crave the bloodthirsty violence of the Vikings. What we want is to be passionately inspired and called to seek the highest level of ourselves, both individually and collectively as a culture. We want someone strong enough and brave enough to harness our ultimate power as individuals and as a whole people. We want to be part of something greater than ourselves.

The Vikings had a mission-in-common:survival. They weren’t only raiders and pirates, but entrepreneurs and tradespeople opening new routes of commerce throughout the world.

In this age of new media, we experience fragmented bits and bites of messaging and information, but no one leader is able to call us together to have a single unified goal, a mission-in-common. 

In a 2014 Stanford Leadership Quarterly, the article “Narcissistic CEOs and executive compensation” noted that of “CEOs with long tenure in their organizations, those who are high in narcissism receive more than 3 times as much total compensation as those who are low in narcissism.” While narcissists can command more attention, they aren’t necessarily willing to go into battle with their spectacularly less compensated troops. As a matter of fact, there is found to be a far greater discrepancy between the high earnings of narcissistic CEOs and what the rest of the team is getting paid. Even more alarming: the highly paid narcissistic CEOs do not get better results for their companies.

A Narcissistic leader is not Viking King Ragnar Lothbrok.  The people who have the ultimate jobs in our culture, CEOS and high government officials, offer us bits of well packaged charisma and platitudes in sound bites, but when they call a war, they aren’t willing to fight in battle along side of us. What we have is George W. Bush on the aircraft carrier USSAbraham Lincoln proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” which later became fodder for late-night TV and stand up comics.  Who can forget that George W. Bush deftly managed to get out of going to Vietnam? There are many others in leadership positions who are just like him.

If we are a culture that rewards narcissism instead of one that rewards accomplishment earned from a mission-in-common, it might help explain why we have so many leaders who have not earned battle scars, stripes, honors or victories. They never put their own skin in the game.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether our leaders are left, right, boys, girls, gender precise or gender neutral.  A true leader has a god-like quality that transcends ordinary human boundaries and inspires us to believe we can attain the same ideal for the common good.  We want to have a passionate mission that connects the dots, is greater than any one person, and brings out the best we can be as human beings.  We want leaders who are willing to fight alongside the rest of us.

Patricia Vaccarino has written extensively in every professional format, including award-winning film scripts, press releases and press materials that get picked up by the media, articles, speeches, website copy, and marketing collateral. She has over 20 years’ expertise working with a wide range of national and international clients, in all areas of public relations: managing worldwide campaigns for global companies and developing strategy for small companies, startup ventures, non-profits, foundations, and individuals. Ms. Vaccarino owns Xanthus Communications and its subsidiary, PRforPeople® . In her spare time, she writes books, essays and articles.