Every leader wants to guide their organization to success and create a positive culture, but how can we do more? The achievement of hero status is what Jeffery Hayzlett explores in, The Hero Factor: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations and Create Winning Cultures.
Achieving The Hero Factor
A lot of focus has been placed on creating top-performing organizations and creating cultures that win in recent years. The Hero Factor: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations and Create Winning Cultures looks at what it takes to go beyond great and strive for an even higher level with the hero factor.
Creating a successful business and contributing to a positive company culture are covered extensively by countless books, articles, inspirational speakers, and more. But Jeffrey Hayzlett doesn’t think great is enough. The focus of The Hero Factor (and that of The Hero Club) is exploring what it takes to push further, and go above and beyond.
So how do we go about achieving hero status? It’s not overly clear. While the book champions the idea of doing more and striving to reach this goal, it doesn’t do a great job of defining what it really means, or what’s exactly necessary in the achievement of such a title. You need to do much more than just create a winning organization with a great culture, but how much further isn’t overtly defined. All we know is that it requires giving it your everything and then giving a bit more.
Repetition To Ruin
Everyone wants to be a hero. From childhood, we look up to heroes and want to be one ourselves. When we become adults, that pursuit of being a hero is still there. That can mean being one to ourselves, our families, or other.
That goal of being a hero likely drives us to pickup books offering to show us how to become one. But it can also become far too overused.
The word “hero” is found more than 680 times throughout the book. In just 220 pages, that’s more than 3 times per page. It gets used so often that it becomes meaningless. Semantic satiation kicks in, and the word temporarily loses meaning. Hero status, hero culture, hero attitude, hero, hero, hero. It gets to be too much.
In addition to the overuse of the word, the book begins to feel like an enrollment tool for The Hero Club, a group lead by the author. He mentions it often and you soon feel you’re almost being pitched. Though their website claims it’s by invitation only, there’s a big button you can click to apply to the club directly below it atop their website. That’s a little strange.
Becoming A Hero
The values touted by hero companies and leaders shouldn’t only apply to such organizations, they should apply to all organizations and leadership. They shouldn’t be reserved for only those that achieve at the highest level or in the greatest organizations. Though The Hero Factor looks at how top organizations can get the most from their people and their business, we should look to apply these ideas to business at all levels.
Grab a copy of The Hero Factor: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations and Create Winning Cultures from Amazon now and see learn how you may be able to bring your organization and culture to a higher level of success and satisfaction.
