Every good story is quietly telling you what happens next; you just have to know the signs. Authors lean on a shared toolbox of techniques to drive a story forward and give readers signposts of what is to come. The evil empire trope leans into our collective depiction of the far right: jack-booted thugs, surveillance states, secret police, sometimes even overt fascism. Before a single line of dialogue, it tells us these are the characters to fear. The Hero's Journey does the same in a gentler key. A lowly figure from a one-dimensional background (Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Eragon) is thrust into the plot beside an older mentor who brings them up to speed, watches them grow, and prepares them for the "big task" ahead. That mentor relationship is a signpost of its own, and a grim one: it tells us the mentor is inevitably going to die, clearing the way for the character to make the jump to their next stage of growth. Tropes exist for a reason. They are familiar story beats that let us contextualize ourselves and anticipate what comes next.
The trope I want to write about here jumps off the page for me, because I have watched it play out in real life more often than almost any other, and because I think it is one every manager should study. It is the "Lancer."
Classically, the Lancer is the foil: the one who stands beside the leader, or the whole team, and refuses to simply fall in line. More often than not they challenge the leader's plans or beliefs, overly confident in the correctness of their own convictions. In fiction the Lancer might be the main antagonist, an antagonist turned ally, or the leader's staunchest defender. Captain America and Iron Man have been all three, sometimes across a single film.
I enjoy the trope because I have seen it play out many times, within my own teams and those adjacent to mine, with the relationship between leadership and the Lancer falling across the entire spectrum: from transformative to disastrous. Especially in technology, where strong opinions abound, I am sure everyone reading this knows at least one Lancer.
So what do you do when you have one on your team?
A Lancer is defined by conviction. They hold strong ideas and stronger beliefs about the right course of action in any given situation, and that is precisely what makes them dangerous when handled badly. Left unheard, they cause discord, and sometimes they go further: so certain that leadership is wrong, they set out to get the job done on their own terms, within the bounds of their own world view, and go rogue to achieve it. They rarely mean any harm by it.
People, however, are not perfect tropes. They carry their own motives, and humans are inherently irrational, which means there is no perfect Lancer and, as such, no perfect playbook. So instead of a playbook, here are the lessons I have gathered the hard way, from my own mistakes and from those I have watched other leaders make:
- Investment is worth more than apathy. A team member who cares enough to challenge your thinking and push you to sharpen your ideas is far more valuable than a team of yes-men who follow the plan blindly, even when the challenge costs you time.
- A Lancer, handled correctly, is not a threat to your authority. They are a rare resource to be nurtured and directed towards the right outcomes.
- Lancers want to make a big impact, and without the right context and proper checks and balances, they can do more harm than good in their rush to act. They need clarity and a real measure of agency, but with guardrails. If they want to prove an idea, give them the space to do so within the structure of the team and the needs of the project. It forces them to slow down, to interrogate their own thinking, and to collaborate with the wider team. Lancers operate as lone wolves by instinct; collaboration and critical thinking, armed with the right information, have to be built into their process.
- Managing a Lancer should never feel combative. Left unmanaged for too long, it becomes "us versus them," and the whole team pays for it. Leadership has to practice tactical empathy early, to understand what is actually driving them before deciding they are a problem.
- Team relationships need as much care as work allocation. A Lancer's outspoken nature means their impact on team dynamics is outsized, and the relationship demands special attention because of it. Manage it early to set the tone and build rapport, both between leadership and the Lancer and between the Lancer and the team. An unclear leadership structure, or an unclear source of truth, will only surface as problems further down the line.
Leading a team that agrees with you is easy. A Lancer is harder, because they keep making you prove that your authority was earned rather than assumed. They will want the "why" behind a call you thought was already made, and you will not always have a good answer ready. That is uncomfortable, and it costs you time you would rather spend elsewhere. It has also taught me more than any smooth-running team ever has.
So when you find a Lancer in your ranks, the temptation is to manage them into silence. It is the wrong instinct. A conviction that strong is rare, and whether it serves the team or damages it depends almost entirely on how you handle it. The leaders I have watched fail quietly are almost always the ones whose teams had long since stopped arguing with them.
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