Roll For Insight

Tag: situational leadership

  • Alien: Romulus and the Horror of Accidental Leadership

    Alien: Romulus and the Horror of Accidental Leadership

    The thing about the Alien franchise is that it keeps reminding us of the same workplace lesson: you are never as far away from a facehugger as you think you are. You can be minding your own business, fixing a leaky pipe, and suddenly you’ve got HR’s nightmare octopus trying to forcibly promote you into a parent. Alien: Romulus doubles down on this idea. Instead of seasoned veterans like Ripley or Marines who at least pretend to know what they’re doing, we get young, mostly unprepared characters who find themselves in a leadership vacuum. It’s not a story about heroes rising to the occasion—it’s about what happens when authority collapses and people who barely know how to pay rent have to improvise strategy while monsters are literally chewing through the walls.

    And that’s where the leadership lesson lives. Because most of us, at some point, get shoved into the “Congratulations, you’re in charge now” moment without training, guidance, or even a clean job description. It doesn’t feel like a promotion; it feels like something clawing its way out of your ribcage.

    Imagine you’re suddenly asked to run a restaurant, but nobody gave you keys, half the staff doesn’t speak the same language, the fryer’s on fire, and the health inspector is already seated in the corner, writing down notes like “severe violation: cook being eaten alive by kitchen monster.” That’s Alien: Romulus in leadership form—crisis with no map, no mentor, and no time to Google “how to manage people.”

    Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership theory becomes uncomfortably relevant here. The model argues that leaders need to flex their style depending on the competence and commitment of their followers. If someone has no skill but lots of enthusiasm, you direct. If they have skill but no confidence, you support. Easy to say in a classroom. Harder when the follower in question is holding a flamethrower backwards and screaming about acid blood. Romulus shows how clumsy this gets when young people are thrust into command roles—they don’t have the flexibility because they don’t even know the base settings yet.

    Then there’s authentic leadership, as described by Bill George. Authentic leaders win trust by being consistent, transparent, and rooted in values. The problem is, if you’re nineteen years old and have never even managed a car payment, you don’t have a leadership philosophy yet. Some of the Romulus crew try to fake it—raising their voice, giving orders, posturing like someone who knows how to run a horror movie. And the movie punishes them for it, because authenticity can’t be faked. You can trick your friends into thinking you’re cool, but you can’t trick a xenomorph into believing you’re in charge.

    And if we’re talking about punishment, Barbara Kellerman’s work on negative leadership fits right in. She breaks bad leaders into categories: incompetent, rigid, callous, corrupt, insular, and evil. Romulus gives us a buffet of those. You see incompetence in people who freeze under pressure, rigidity in those who can’t adapt when the plan falls apart, and callousness when survival turns into betrayal. And the result is predictable: higher casualty rate than a team-building ropes course supervised by velociraptors.

    Here’s the uncomfortable real-world echo: Alien: Romulus feels familiar because many of us have lived some version of it. Maybe not the acid-blood monsters, but the promotion you weren’t ready for, the absent boss who left you holding the bag, the chaotic project where everyone’s improvising until it collapses. The film makes it literal, but the truth is that leadership vacuums don’t stay empty. Someone always steps up. Sometimes they grow into the role. Sometimes they get eaten.

    Surviving your first leadership role won’t burn holes through the floor plating, but the scars last just the same. The question isn’t whether you’ll be terrified or unprepared—that part is guaranteed. The real question is whether you’ll figure out how to flex, to be authentic, and to avoid turning into the kind of rigid disaster that costs lives. In space, no one can hear you scream. But in the office, everyone can hear you panic. And it smells just as bad.

    References

    Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Sage.
    Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training and Development Journal.
    George, B. (2003). Authentic Leadership. Jossey-Bass.
    Kellerman, B. (2004). Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. Harvard Business School Press.

  • 28 Years Later: Leadership Lessons From a World That Just Won’t Stay Fixed

    28 Years Later: Leadership Lessons From a World That Just Won’t Stay Fixed

    I didn’t expect to walk out of 28 Years Later grinning like I’d just seen the year’s best comedy, but here we are. The movie is bleak and brutal in all the ways you’d expect from a sequel to 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, yet every so often it throws you a lifeline: a Swedish soldier cracking deadpan jokes, or the sudden introduction of the Jimmies—the tracksuit-clad hooligans led by Jimmy himself, who was introduced in the opening scene and then gone for basically the entire film until the Jimmies dropkicked their way into the finale like they’d been promised a spin-off and were fully prepared to beat the producer with folding chair until they got one. It’s a weird, awesome blend of relentless despair and absurd comedy, the kind of tonal whiplash that makes the whole thing feel like a fever dream.

    That’s the heart of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s theory of adaptive leadership. Their big idea is that the hardest problems we face aren’t “technical”—the kind you solve with a known fix, like calling IT when your monitor won’t turn on. The hardest problems are adaptive, where the rules themselves have changed and no one has the answer. When rage zombies overrun London, it doesn’t matter how much you know about first aid protocols or where to find bottled water. You’re making judgment calls in the fog,. trying to figure out the difference between survival skills and suicide notes dressed up as wisdom. 

    What the movie shows us—and what Heifetz & Linsky emphasize—is that leadership in these moments isn’t about heroically swooping in with the solution. It’s about holding people together long enough that solutions can emerge. That’s why the Swedish guy’s humor works as more than comic relief. He’s practicing a form of situational leadership (Hersey & Blanchard, 1969): shifting his approach based on the immediate needs of the group. Sometimes he’s lightening the mood, sometimes it’s played as dead serious. Either way, he’s paying attention to what the team needs in that exact moment.

    It’s easy to dismiss comic relief as just nonsense, but think about your own life. In the middle of a tense family dinner, there’s always that one relative who cracks a joke about the mashed potatoes being weaponized. In a D&D session, it’s the bard who pipes up with a one-liner when the dragon’s about to eat the cleric. At work, it’s the person who points out that the coffee is strong enough to strip paint. You roll your eyes, but everyone relaxes just enough to keep going. That’s adaptive. Humor buys the group another five minutes of cooperation before somebody snaps.

    And then there’s Jimmy. He starts by losing everything—family, friends, any shot at normal—and then ghosts the movie for what feels like forever. Just when you’ve forgotten him, he blasts into the last scene with the narrative subtlety of a golf club through a plate-glass window. It’s ridiculous and perfect. Because how many times in your own life have you seen the “forgotten” person, the one everyone assumed was out of the picture, suddenly reappear like they were hiding in the ceiling tiles, ready to drop down and steal the spotlight? The Jimmies represent the survivalist version of what a lot of groups become after too much upheaval: a stitched-together tribe of rituals, slang, and inside jokes that don’t make sense to outsiders but function as glue for insiders. They swagger like they’re in control, but under the surface, you can tell they’re improvising as much as anyone else.

    This is the piece leaders often miss. We love the myth of the solitary figure who knew the path all along. In reality, most progress comes from people stumbling forward, testing half-baked ideas, and then acting like it was intentional afterward. As Peter Northouse puts it in Leadership: Theory and Practice, adaptive leaders tolerate ambiguity and resist the urge to slap a quick fix on what’s really a systemic wound (Northouse, 2021). That’s as true for a ragtag survivor gang as it is for a PTA board that just realized their big fundraiser is scheduled for the same weekend as homecoming.

    I think back to my own experiences in warehouses and delivery networks. There were plenty of times when the corporate “solution” was nothing more than a PowerPoint full of buzzwords. But at the ground level, the only reason things kept moving was because frontline teams invented their own processes—borrowing equipment, making ad hoc spreadsheets, redesigning workflows with sticky notes and duct tape. From the outside, it looked chaotic. From the inside, it was the only way to survive. That’s adaptive leadership.

    Another thread the movie pulls on is resilience. When characters keep going after loss, or keep fighting when it’s clear they’re outmatched, that’s resilience theory in action (Luthans, 2002). You see the same thing in a burned-out sports team that still shows up to practice, or in a group of friends who keep making movie night happen even after everyone’s schedules have collapsed into chaos. The Jimmies aren’t admirable because they’re powerful; they’re admirable because they’ve found a way to keep showing up—even if it means vanishing for two hours and then reappearing like they just respawned from a glitch in the Matrix.

    And let’s not overlook psychological safety. Amy Edmondson (1999) describes it as the freedom to speak up, take risks, and fail without fear of punishment. In 28 Years Later, every group that survives does so because they’ve built just enough trust to admit fear and share ideas without instantly fracturing. That’s why you’ll never see a solo hero in this franchise succeed for long. The moment someone tries to go lone wolf, they’re either eaten, abandoned, or left clutching their ideals while the world moves on. Survival is a group project. The same is true whether you’re planning a heist, running a campaign, or trying to survive a school group project where half the team ghosts after the first meeting.

    So what does this mean if you’re not dodging infected hordes? It means that if you’re waiting for perfect information before you act, you’ll get eaten. The people who make it through adaptive challenges—whether it’s a viral outbreak, a corporate restructure, or your trivia team trying to win without a single person who knows geography and realizing too late that confidence does not, in fact, equal knowledge about state capitols—are the ones willing to experiment, pivot, and sometimes fail loudly in front of others. You don’t survive by clinging to the manual; you survive by writing the manual as you go, then tearing it up when the situation changes.

    That’s the lesson I didn’t expect from a movie where people’s faces explode in fountains of rage-blood: leadership isn’t about having the cure. It’s about helping people stumble forward together, half-blind and bleeding, like we’re all extras in someone else’s zombie movie. 

    References:

    • Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. Harvard Business Review Press.
    • Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training and Development Journal.
    • Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
    • Luthans, F. (2002). Positive organizational behavior: Developing and managing psychological strengths. Academy of Management Executive, 16(1), 57–72.
    • Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and Practice (9th ed.). Sage.

  • You Don’t Need to Know Everything—Just Stop Faking It

    There’s a particular kind of boss that’s worse than just a micromanager. It’s the kind who micromanages badly—hovering over tasks they don’t actually understand, second-guessing decisions with no context, inserting themselves into workflows like a toddler grabbing the steering wheel from the backseat. At least a competent micromanager might know what they’re interrupting. But this flavor of leader doesn’t know the work, won’t admit it, and compensates by managing through vague questions, performative stress, and ominous calendar invites titled “Touch Base.” If you’ve never had a boss like that, congratulations on your peaceful life. The rest of us are still flinching every time someone asks if we “have a minute.”

    I’ve worked under those managers, and—cards on the table—I’ve been one, too. Not in the mustache-twirling villain sense, but in the more common and less cinematic way: I got put in charge of something I didn’t totally understand, so I backed off too far because I didn’t want to come across like a dumbass. That’s the inverse version of the same mistake. Instead of meddling, I ghosted. I figured giving people space was the respectful thing to do, when what they actually needed was presence. Not command. Not control. Just the sense that I was there, paying attention, invested, and ready to help.

    Running a team without understanding their work is like Game Mastering a system you’ve never read. You might be able to fake it for a session or two. Maybe you’ve got the vibe down—narrating like Matt Mercer on half-speed, throwing in enough “roll for initiative” moments to keep everyone entertained. But sooner or later, your players are going to do something mechanical. They’ll try to shove a goblin off a bridge, or cast a spell that interacts with a system you didn’t prep, or—God help you—start asking about grappling rules. And now you’re scrambling through the Player’s Handbook like it’s a cursed tome, bluffing your way through it while everyone quietly starts texting under the table. Because nothing kills trust like a GM who pretends to know things they clearly don’t.

    Leadership theory has a name for this balancing act: Situational Leadership. Hersey and Blanchard laid it out in the late ’60s, but the idea still hits. It says your leadership style should adapt based on how competent and confident your team is at a given task. Some people need direction. Others need support. Some just need you to get out of the way and let them work. But the only way to figure that out is to actually know where they’re at. And that requires something micromanagers and absentee leaders alike tend to skip: asking questions and listening to the answers.

    Most micromanagers don’t think they’re micromanaging. They think they’re doing due diligence. Staying informed. “Driving results.” But what they’re actually doing is disrupting Self-Determination Theory—a cornerstone of motivation research that says people thrive when they feel autonomous, competent, and connected. Micromanaging undercuts autonomy. But if you also don’t know the work, it undercuts competence too—yours and theirs. You’re not just in the way; you’re actively creating friction, the same way a GM does when they override the bard’s plan just because they didn’t understand how Bardic Inspiration stacks.

    And on the flip side, disappearing because you don’t understand the work doesn’t help either. That just makes people feel unsupported, especially when things start going sideways. It’s the equivalent of a GM saying, “Well, that’s what your character would do,” and then zoning out on their phone while the players roleplay around them. Sure, you’re not interrupting, but you’re also not engaged. You’ve become the leadership version of ambient tavern music.

    So how do you do it better?

    You get curious. You name what you don’t know. You ask your team what they need from you today, not just what they needed when the project started. You ask, “What am I doing that’s helpful?” and brace yourself for the silence that might follow. You sit with it. Then you try again.

    You stop treating questions like traps and start using them like torches. You stop assuming that being “the boss” means you have to be the expert. And you realize that your credibility doesn’t come from having all the answers—it comes from helping the people who do their best work.

    If you’re running a campaign and you don’t know every mechanic, that’s fine. But don’t fake it. Bring in a co-GM, hand off to someone more familiar with the system, or prep more next time. In the moment, the best thing you can do is own it. Say, “I don’t actually know how this rule works—can you walk me through it?” And suddenly, you’ve transformed from an authority figure faking competence into a leader modeling collaboration.

    When you’re a leader and you don’t know the work, your job isn’t to disappear. And it’s not to overcorrect by smothering your team with bad advice. Your job is to learn just enough to be useful, to ask the right questions, and to create an environment where people feel like they can do their thing without you pretending to be the expert on everything. Because when people know you’ve got their back—not their keyboard—that’s when trust actually starts to build.

    And the next time you do have to give direction, it won’t sound like interference. It’ll sound like support.

    Citations:

    Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

    Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K.H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training & Development Journal, 23(5), 26–34.