- By Renée Schnitzler
For decades, modern organisations have quietly relied on one dominant leadership image: the heroic leader.
This leader is expected to carry the vision, set the direction, motivate the team, make the decisions, manage the emotional temperature, sustain performance, absorb pressure, communicate clearly, remain resilient and somehow keep everyone else aligned.
It is an impossible role.
The problem is not that leaders are failing to become strong enough. The problem is that the model itself asks too much of one human being.
At the same time, organisations are facing a deep leadership and engagement crisis. Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the steepest drop in 12 years. The report estimates that this decline cost organisations $438 billion in lost productivity. Manager engagement fell most sharply of any group.
The leadership strain is also personal. Businessolver’s 2024 State of Workplace Empathy Study found that 55% of CEOs reported experiencing a mental health issue in 2024, up 24 percentage points year-on-year.
These figures point to something deeper than a temporary workplace mood shift. They suggest a structural mismatch between what organisations demand from leaders and how human beings are actually designed to work.
The False Promise of the All-Carrying Leader
The heroic leader model assumes that one person can initiate, direct, sustain, guide and monitor the health of a whole system.
But these are different functions. They require different rhythms, different forms of intelligence and different types of energy.
Some people are natural initiators. They open doors, start movements and catalyse change. Others are builders. They create sustainable energy through consistent response and execution. Others move quickly, adapt, combine ideas and generate momentum. Some are natural guides, able to see patterns, systems and direction with unusual precision. Others are sensitive monitors of timing, culture and collective health.
When organisations collapse all these functions into one leadership role, leaders become overloaded and teams become misaligned.
The result is familiar: burnout, disengagement, confusion, weak ownership and the constant search for the next leadership framework that promises to fix the problem.
Why Flat Structures Have Not Solved It
In response to the failures of traditional hierarchy, many organisations have experimented with flatter structures, distributed leadership, self-management and holacracy.
These experiments often begin with the right instinct: the old pyramid is not working.
But removing hierarchy does not automatically create coherence. Without a clear alternative structure, organisations can replace top-down pressure with ambiguity, unclear decision-making and diluted accountability.
The deeper question is not whether organisations should be hierarchical or flat. The question is whether they understand the different human functions required for a healthy leadership system.
Leadership is not a single role. It is a constellation of roles.
The Missing Human Question in the Age of AI
Artificial intelligence is now adding a new layer of urgency.
For many professionals and leaders, identity has long been built around competence: what they know, what they can produce, what they can analyse, what they can decide. AI is beginning to challenge that identity by automating, accelerating or augmenting many knowledge-based tasks.
This raises a more profound question for organisations:
What is the irreplaceable human contribution in leadership?
The answer is unlikely to be found in more productivity hacks or generic leadership competencies. It may require a more precise understanding of human design, energy, role and relational intelligence.
From Pyramid to Constellation
In my book, The Constellation Code: Know Your Design. Find Your Constellation. Lead From Who You Are., I propose a different way of looking at leadership.
Rather than expecting one heroic leader to carry the whole system, the book introduces the idea of constellation leadership: an interdependent model in which different people contribute different leadership functions to the whole.
The model draws on innate design as a systemic method for understanding leadership, collaboration and role alignment. It uses five different energy types to explore why people are not all designed to lead, work or contribute in the same way.
In this model:
- The Manifestor initiates and catalyses movement.
- The Generator builds, sustains and creates durable energy through response.
- The Manifesting Generator moves quickly, adapts and multiplies momentum.
- The Projector guides, sees systems and directs energy with precision.
- The Reflector senses timing, coherence and the health of the collective.
Each type contributes something the others cannot replicate in exactly the same way.
The leadership question then changes. Instead of asking, “How can one leader become everything?” organisations can ask, “Which leadership functions are needed here, and who is naturally designed to carry them?”
That shift changes the conversation.
A More Human Model of Leadership
Constellation leadership does not remove responsibility. It clarifies it.
It does not suggest that every person should simply do what feels comfortable. It asks organisations to become more intelligent about how people actually function, where they create energy, where they drain energy and what role they are naturally suited to play in the wider system.
For leaders, this can be liberating. It removes the pressure to become a mythical all-purpose figure and replaces it with a more precise inquiry: What am I actually here to contribute?
For teams, it creates a more coherent language for collaboration. Instead of rewarding one dominant leadership style, it allows different forms of leadership intelligence to be seen, valued and positioned.
For organisations, it offers a possible way beyond the exhausted choice between hierarchy and flatness.
The future of leadership may not be another pyramid. It may be a constellation.
About the Author
Renée Schnitzler MA is a strategic communications consultant, founder of Damselfly Consulting SAS, founder of Profile to Presence™ and creator of The Constellation Code™. She has more than thirty years of experience in strategic communications, internal communications and transformation communication for major European and international organisations, including ING, Rabobank, KPN, McDonald’s and FMO Dutch Development Bank.
Her work combines strategic communications, leadership identity, personal positioning and innate design-based insight. She works with leaders, entrepreneurs and leadership teams across Europe in English and Dutch.
The Constellation Code: Know Your Design. Find Your Constellation. Lead From Who You Are. is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.
More information: www.theconstellationcode.com
