A messiah complex (also known as the Christ complex or savior complex) is a state of mind in which an individual holds a belief that they are destined to become a savior. The term can also refer to a state of mind in which an individual believes that he or she is responsible for saving or assisting others.

It has been a few months since the company I am with welcomed a couple of senior hires. The time since they joined have been nothing but interesting — and to the staff affected by the hires, challenging: We’ve had mass resignations, client defections, staff reorganizations, and well, no new business acquisitions.

There could be another entry that would need to be written to try to justify and rationalize the management team’s decision to continue working with the new senior hires — but for now, let me focus on something else.

Let’s focus on these new hires’ messiahnic complex.

The messiahnic complex — or messiah complex, according to Wikipedia — is all about “me wanting and being obligated by some unknown force to save the world”.

It appears that our new hires are afflicted by the messiahnic complex: They want to save the company from itself by changing as much as they can within the first six months of their stay in the company. For them, nothing was working before they joined — everything was wrong up until they joined and discovered the ails of the company.

And hence, their desire to save the company.

Such a desire is not necessarily bad — if indeed the company is in deep trouble. I myself would be the first to raise my hand and stir trouble amongst the management team if I observed the company to be in deep trouble.

The thing is, we were doing just fine.

Sure, we were not blazing trails and growing as fast as we wanted. We were coasting along — which given the challenges we’d had to face, was just normal: It was a cycle — and we were on the bottom after having been on the up and up for a few years.

We were doing just fine — and we were fine with doing just fine, because we were trying to catch our collective breath.

But then happened the new hires.

New hires with the desire to save us from… something.

 

Many times, I would like to shout at the top of my lungs, “We are not a problem to be solved! We are not in deep doo-doo! We don’t need to be saved”.

But what will that do?

Nothing.

 

One thing that the management team doesn’t realize is this: When people start to feel that they are a problem to be solved, they will morph into problems to be solved.

Leadership was one of the reasons I joined this company — it seems that it will be why I will leave it.

 

Nada sigue.