Why I have stopped talking about mindsets and definitely don’t have a superpower

Last week I wrote about why I have gone off the word mindset.

This week I realised there is a close cousin I have also quietly fallen out with.

Superpowers.

I see them everywhere now. On LinkedIn. On conference stages. In leadership brochures. Apparently everyone has one. Sometimes several. Usually “unlocked” after a workshop.

I have worked for long enough, in enough difficult organisations, to be fairly confident about one thing. If leadership really came down to discovering your superpower, most transformation programmes would have finished years ago and we would all be home by lunchtime.

The problem is not that the language is playful. A bit of lightness is fine. The problem is what this framing quietly smuggles in.

A superpower suggests something innate, fixed, and individual. You either have it or you do not. It also suggests effortlessness. Superman does not do reflective practice. Wonder Woman does not need a quarterly feedback loop.

That is not how real capability works.

Most of what actually matters in leadership is slow, learned, and slightly uncomfortable. It is judgement under uncertainty. It is noticing weak signals. It is asking better questions when the data is incomplete. It is staying calm when the room wants certainty you cannot honestly give.

None of that fits nicely on a slide with a lightning bolt.

Mindset has a similar problem. Whatever its original intent, it has drifted into something dangerously close to magical thinking. If only we could “shift” the mindset, things would improve. Culture would follow. Performance would rise.

But a mindset is not a lever you pull. It is an outcome of systems, incentives, habits, power structures, and lived experience. People do not think differently because they have been told to. They think differently when their environment changes and they are given permission, capability, and safety to do so.

I have seen extraordinary people behave badly in broken systems. I have also seen fairly ordinary people do remarkable things when the conditions were right.

Calling that a superpower misses the point.

It also lets organisations off the hook. If leadership is about individual superpowers, then failure becomes personal rather than structural. We start looking for better heroes instead of better decision processes. We reward charisma over clarity. We confuse confidence with competence.

There is another quiet side effect too. Superpower language can be exhausting. If everyone around you is supposedly operating at superhero levels, the only acceptable response is to perform. To posture. To hide uncertainty. To keep flying even when you are running out of fuel.

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The leaders I most respect do not talk about superpowers at all. They talk about trade-offs. They talk about what they do not know. They talk about how decisions were made, not just whether they worked. They build teams that compensate for their weaknesses rather than pretending they do not have any.

None of this is as marketable as a cape.

But it is far more useful in the messy middle we are all operating in now. The space where old models no longer quite work, new technologies are accelerating faster than understanding, and decisions have consequences that unfold over years rather than quarters.

In that world, I am less interested in your mindset and not at all interested in your superpower.

I am interested in how you make sense of complexity, how you notice change early, how you stay human under pressure, and how you help others think more clearly when the future refuses to behave.

Those are not superpowers.

They are learned capabilities.

Which is both less glamorous and far more hopeful.

Because it means we can all get better.

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How do you feel when you hear leadership framed in terms of mindsets and superpowers?