Dave Kashen explains how the hero-victim dynamic poisons teams. When leaders treat people as victims needing rescue, they disempower them, lock them into that identity, and breed resentment when their heroic efforts go unrecognized.
Heroes require victims. So, um, if you're in the hero role, you are seeing other people on the team as victims. Like they, you're not seeing them as empowered, responsible, you know, humans, leaders, um, you know, contributors. And so even just seeing them that way will affect the way they see themselves. Like you're kind of complicit in the story that they're a you know, that they're a victim. And then over time, um, you know, the victims don't feel— because they feel like victims, they don't tend to feel, um, grateful and appreciative. They feel, uh, diminished. And so the heroes keep heroing and then they expect to be, uh, celebrated and appreciated for their act of heroism. And when they're not, they get really resentful. Yeah.
