Title: What ‘Wicked’ Teaches Us About How to Be a Good Leader

On Nov. 21, Wicked: For Good premieres in theaters and continues the story of Elphaba as she must rally from her exile to defeat the Wizard.

Once portrayed as the evil Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba is cast in a new light as she leads the people to liberate Oz in the retelling of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. 

For Bob Bies, professor in the McDonough School of Business, the hit musical-turned-movie offers the perfect vehicle to showcase lessons in leadership.

Bies is an expert on organizational behavior and management who also teaches a popular first-year seminar, Heroes and Villains: Character and Leadership in a Global Context. In the class, students explore what makes a hero and a villain and how those lessons can be applied to their own careers. An avid lover of films, Bies has students watch movies like The Dark Knight and The Devil Wears Prada to illustrate lessons in leadership.

“I think in the reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch is actually the good witch. Elphaba is the real hero,” he said. “What do heroes and villains have to do with business? Well, our concepts of good and bad leaders are grounded in our concepts of heroes and villains.”

Explore Bies’ lessons in leadership through the characters in Wicked and what separates the heroes from the villains and makes ordinary people into leaders.

Ask a Professor: Heroes, Villains and Leadership in ‘Wicked’

How do you define hero and villain?

Heroes are people who inspire and uplift. Villains are those who demean and diminish. Heroes step up to do good, and villains step up to do bad.

Do you believe people are born as heroes and villains?

We had this conversation [in class]. The reality is that it’s more nurtured. Whatever happened in your life, usually there’s some traumatic thing or the group that you’re a part of that shaped who you are. All of us were shaped by our families and the environment we lived in. It gets developed. You turn into somebody who’s evil. You’re not born evil. All children are born good, but sometimes life happens, and it’s not always good what happens to them. 

Elphaba is originally the evil Wicked Witch of the West. What makes audiences root for her in Wicked?

Because people see her intentions. They see her actions and how she’s always trying to do good, particularly by those who are not held in high regard, like the monkeys. She’s always looking for the good rather than diminishing.

What about Glinda? Is she also a hero?

What’s the difference between a hero and celebrity? Glinda wants to be a celebrity. Her story is not yet fully told, and we’ll find out in Wicked: For Good. I have a sense of where it’s going to go, but I think it’s about authenticity. It’s about integrity. It’s about trying to uplift other people. Villains are all about themselves. It’s more of a selfless versus selfish.

How do the leadership lessons in Wicked translate to the world of business?

The results piece is obviously the most important. If you’re a business leader, results are important because everybody likes to win. Very few people like to lose, but what they also get judged by is how they go about doing it. How did they go about getting people to follow, to inspire them to follow and work longer hours because they believe in the mission? Usually, the people we see as heroes are mission-driven leaders. The mission isn’t only about making money, it’s about making the world a better place.

Elphaba puts others first. And the monkeys and others know that. In organizations, leaders who put people first and help them succeed as a team, working together, achieve success! As Michael Jordan once said, ‘Talent wins games. But teamwork and intelligence win championships.’

What role does storytelling play in defining heroes and villains and elevating leadership?

Storytelling is one of the most important leadership skills. It’s the language of leadership. The ability to not only create a sense of urgency but to make people feel that they’re a part of something important and that they have a role. People have to believe their actions matter. If you can get people to believe their actions matter, you unlock incredible amounts of motivation.

Elphaba was portrayed as evil in The Wizard of Oz but is portrayed as good in Wicked. Who gets to decide who truly is good and evil?

When the original Wizard of Oz came out, there was no other story. You were told, this is the wicked witch, and this is the good witch. Glinda was beautiful, and the Wicked Witch of the West, she didn’t look pretty. When Wicked the musical came out, it retold the story in a way that was richer, more powerful and unpacked the fact that Elphaba is the good witch. 

I often say let your life speak and unleash the greatness of who you are. That’s what you’re going to see in Elphaba but also Glinda. She’s going to unleash the greatness of who she is because she realized that the good witch is actually Elphaba. Not that Glinda isn’t a good witch, but that Elphaba is a good witch. I think this is going to be a more truthful retelling of The Wizard of Oz.

People are going to see the other side that was hidden. It was hidden because the Wizard distorted, denied and eliminated it to tell a very narrow description of Elphaba.

Why are retellings that flip the script on heroes and villains, like in Wicked, becoming more popular?

With storytelling, it’s more multidimensional now in the 21st century than it was before. People see multiple aspects of an individual today. They love that they can see the good and the evil in both. People are comfortable with that, that heroes are not perfect. They make mistakes. They sometimes do bad. But at the end of the day, they inspire and uplift.

We like to stereotype them, but most villains have multiple dimensions too. If you look at the movie Schindler’s List, Oscar Schindler, for most of his life, was a schmuck. But for two and a half years, when he saved over a thousand Jewish lives from death, he was a hero.