Outstanding leaders are willing to play a supporting role on the team.

Managers in high positions are prone to falling into a protagonist mindset, used to dominating the team from their own perspective, bound by cognitive biases, which undermines team trust and performance. By adhering to a supporting-role mindset, maintaining curiosity, promoting job crafting, and stepping out of egocentrism, they can empower their subordinates to build their own growth narratives. This ability to deeply connect with and motivate others is the precious leadership in the AI era.

In 2024, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote an article arguing that Silicon Valley leaders must impose their own vision directly on their employees, a leadership style he called the "founder mode". The article garnered 20 million views on social media, spawning dozens of in-depth commentaries, and *Harvard Business Review* also published related reviews.

Graham pointed out a real existing problem: too many leaders are disconnected from the company's daily operations. He put forward several specific measures to reverse this situation, such as holding skip-level meetings and listening more attentively; but he also predicted: "Once the founder mode becomes mainstream, some people will start to abuse this concept." This prediction is quite prescient. Nowadays, many leaders practice the founder mode with such an idea: the leader's vision should be the entire narrative of the whole organization, implemented from top to bottom.

This is the "protagonist mindset" — an egocentric trend originating from social media that has been applied to the field of management. Once leaders fall into this mindset, everyone will suffer losses.

The protagonist mindset is extremely destructive, partly because it amplifies a dangerous cognitive bias: people often believe that the world in their eyes is accurate and objective, ignoring their own prejudices and cognitive blind spots. This will hinder empathy and intensify conflicts. The higher the position, the more obvious this tendency is. Studies show that people in power are especially prone to being trapped in their own perspectives.

Leaders who regard themselves as the protagonist of the story will indulge cognitive biases instead of actively restraining them. This will harm the team: when managers lack curiosity and have strong narcissistic tendencies, employees have lower trust and worse work performance. When leaders see themselves as the protagonist, the surrounding narrative will soon collapse, and the physical and mental health of the leaders themselves will also be damaged. Social media encourages people to create seemingly "authentic" personal brands, but studies show that long-term indulgence in self-examination will exacerbate feelings of depression and loneliness over time. According to the latest Gallup *State of the Global Workplace* report, the engagement rate of managers dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. As the protagonist mindset becomes more prevalent, the connection between leaders and their own jobs continues to weaken.

This coincides with the views I have studied for decades: people think that focusing on themselves can lead to growth, but the opposite is true. When serving others, we are most effective and most fulfilled inside. A powerful way to practice this is to build a supporting-role mindset. The core is to let go of egocentrism, and instead think: what kind of role should I play in other people's life narratives.

Having a supporting-role mindset requires lowering your stance. You may consider yourself an active fun person in the team, but in the narrative of your introverted colleagues, your behavior may be more like an offense. At the same time, the supporting-role mindset will also foster inclusive and clear guidance to fully stimulate the potential of others.

The Supporting-Role Mindset

To cultivate a supporting-role mindset, leaders can take two key actions:

1. Proactively maintain strong curiosity

A supporting role cannot compose the protagonist's story independently. If you want to be a supporting role, you need to understand the protagonist you are supporting, and experience the work and life in the other person's eyes. You need to eagerly pay attention to others, and clearly see the blind spots in your own cognition.

Humility is the natural antidote to cognitive bias. Studies show that leaders who can face up to their own cognitive limitations lead teams with better performance. Part of the reason is that humility is contagious: it pushes everyone to learn from each other, stimulates creativity, and improves performance.

Humility has many benefits but has long been underestimated, yet cultivating humility is not difficult. Try to explain how a bicycle (or a laptop, a democratic system) works, and you will find how little you know. The same goes for interpersonal communication. Last year, Jeff Weitzler published an article in *Harvard Business Review*, suggesting doing a "curiosity check" before major communication: ask yourself, what information do I not know about the person I am about to talk to? Will my behavior bring unexpected impacts?

The curiosity check can awaken humility, prompt leaders to ask better questions, and offset cognitive biases. By doing this, we can better understand other people's stories and see our own position in them.

2. Carry out "job crafting"

Decades of research have proved that when people look at their lives from a different perspective, their emotions and behaviors will change accordingly. Many years ago, Professor Amy Wrzesniewski of the Wharton School found that this logic is also critical in the workplace. She interviewed cleaners in a large hospital and found that the most fulfilled and efficient employees did not just regard their work as cleaning. They saw this job as care work: in addition to cleaning, they took the initiative to learn about the patients' conditions, and even moved the wall decorations to continuously change the scenery in front of the patients.

In Wrzesniewski's view, these employees are carrying out job crafting: building a clear narrative, and binding their own work with the values they value most. Existing evidence shows that job crafting helps people's mental health and improves output.

Everyone can do job crafting for themselves. And leaders can use the supporting-role mindset to help their subordinates build more meaningful work narratives. There is a very convincing research case: researchers conducted an experiment in an IT call center in India, where employees worked long hours, had to deal with emotionally dissatisfied customers, and the turnover rate was very high.

To solve this problem, researchers suggested that managers adjust the idea of new employee onboarding training: instead of unilaterally presenting the company introduction, ask new employees about their "ideal self", set aside time for new employees to share their own strengths with the team, and how to bring these traits to work. This small change has remarkable effects: even after a tough workday, the job satisfaction, performance and willingness to stay of the call center employees have all been improved.

This conclusion seems counterintuitive at first glance: the best way to improve employees' loyalty to the enterprise is not to praise the company's values, but to explore the employees' own values. But it is not strange when you think about it carefully. Humble and supportive mentors do not impose power on others — and this is exactly the root of their strong influence. By understanding and boosting the life narratives of subordinates, you can inspire everyone to take the initiative to give more: for themselves, for the team, and for the leader.

A Timeless Core Competency

The supporting-role mindset is a timeless core competency for excellent leaders, and it will become even more important as the AI revolution continues to advance.

Part of the reason is that AI will fuel the protagonist mindset: the model will cater to users and confirm their inherent ideas. For example, a large-scale study in 2026 found that after people discussed interpersonal conflicts with chatbots, they were less willing to apologize to the other party and less considerate of the feelings of the conflicting party. AI weakens people's humility and amplifies cognitive biases; as this technology becomes popular, we must fight against such negative impacts.

The deeper logic is that AI forces us to rethink the positioning of leaders. Leaders may have more knowledge reserves than frontline employees, but large language models possess far more knowledge than any individual human being. In the future, leadership will no longer be judged by the standard of imparting knowledge and skills. The irreplaceable core competency of leaders lies in deeply connecting with, inspiring and motivating others — which is exactly the value of the supporting-role mindset.

Keywords: #Leadership

Jamil Zaki | Text

Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

Zhou Qiang | Editor

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Harvard Business Review" (ID: hbrchinese), written by HBR-China, and released with authorization from 36Kr.