September 4, 2025
I’ll admit it: I’m a Star Trek fan.
But not a hardcore, “go to the conventions” style fan. Over the years, I’ve watched The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), a bit of Voyager, Discovery, and lately, Enterprise. Never DS9, which is a flaw in me, I’ve been told.
Thanks to streaming services I can complete the canon anytime I want, which is a plus. Not like when I was a child, watching it in syndication (often after school), which perhaps explains my grades.
Colleagues (younger than me, mostly) will seek to divide by asking: “Star Trek or Star Wars?” But as an organizational behavior guy, I want to discuss how “Trek” illustrates leadership, optimism, and moral/ethical dilemmas one can encounter in real life, whereas “Wars” is a simpler, different tale: more about myth, the Hero’s Journey, destiny, and good versus evil.
Star Trek isn’t just sci-fi. It’s a masterclass in leadership, ethics, and adaptability. For those of us in IT, it offers surprisingly relevant lessons.
Leading with Values: Picard’s Moral Compass
In TNG, Jean-Luc Picard embodies principled leadership. He often pauses to consider the moral implications of actions, upholding Federation ideals even when expediency would suggest otherwise.
In the earlier (but later) “Enterprise,” you get to see “cowboy exploration” by Jonathan Archer. There’s no Federation yet, so there are no rules of engagement; no principles carved in stone. No ITIL? You can watch what happens when there’s no Prime Directive — there’s bumbling exploration, you might say.
Back in TNG, in the episode “The Drumhead,” Picard defends civil liberties during a witch hunt, showing the importance of constitutional principles in leadership.
From Kirk to Burnham: Leadership in Motion
In TOS, Captain Kirk is known for his decisiveness and instinct. He leads from the front, takes calculated risks, and adapts quickly under pressure. The solution to the no-win Kobiyashi Maru scenario is an example of resourcefulness and bending constraints while maintaining vision.
In Discovery, Michael Burnham grows as a leader through change. Her character arc starts as a mutineer but grows into a captain through evolving roles — from science officer to commander to captain. It represents adaptive leadership through personal growth — learning from failure, forging trust, and adjusting her style to suit new environments. Anyone whose career path has not been as linear as we’d like can relate.
Building Bridges: Diversity as a Strategic Asset
Regardless of series, Star Trek consistently features diverse crews working collaboratively, a metaphor for inclusive leadership. This was a BIG DEAL on TOS, in the late 60s. The captains don’t just give orders — they listen. As an example, Voyager’s Captain Janeway empowers a team with disparate backgrounds (Maquis + Starfleet) into a unified, mission-driven crew.
I’ve thought about this over the years as IT departments have followed the rest of the workplace and morphed into being more heterogeneous — it’s not the data processing department of my father’s era, made up of white men in white shirts and narrow ties. Various expressions of age, gender and sexuality have, in my opinion, produced a “better product” that supports a more diverse workplace.
Crisis Command: Grace Under Fire
The different eras illustrate this in different ways:
- Captain Kirk in TOS illustrates the classic crisis leader who must make rapid decisions under incomplete information. He projects certainty to keep his crew focused, even while improvising.
- Captain Picard in TNG is all about principles, moral clarity, deliberation, and again, projecting those values to his crew. When he is assimilated into the Borg collective, Picard’s earlier examples of calm allowed him to prepare Riker and the crew to function without him. Riker remarks that he learned command by watching Picard stay composed in impossible circumstances. Throughout a career as a leader, your #1 job is to model good leadership examples. In my earlier days, I fielded too many calls while at Disneyland with my family, because I hadn’t sufficiently trained people in the necessary skills to be effective leaders themselves. The day will come when you’ll move on, and you don’t want to leave an organization floundering.
- In Discovery, Burnham prepares to lead Discovery into the future. Despite knowing she might be lost to her own timeline forever, she keeps her focus, projecting steadiness to give the crew confidence. Burnham illustrates calm as courage in the face of personal sacrifice — accepting destiny while reassuring others.
I think of Kirk and the classic crisis leader model whenever IT is dealing with the early stages of an outage, where you may not yet fully understand the cause, but you nonetheless have to keep everyone focused. It reflects the military style of this period of Trek, projecting an outward calm and relying on the muscle memory of earlier drills. I used to tell one of my Assistant Directors: “never let them see you sweat.”
In IT, we have a lot of folks who learned tech in the military, and there’s much for IT departments to gain from their approaches: drills and testing environments provide opportunity to make the unusual more usual, and with fewer surprises.
Just as Picard models principled leadership, Burnham shows us how leaders evolve through adversity. These contrasting styles reflect the changing demands of leadership in IT — from steady stewardship to agile transformation.
I must admit that I feel Discovery’s leadership model is more dynamic and emotionally rich than earlier shows — watching this series last year that made me start thinking about this. I could probably do an entire article on the different leadership arcs that show up in different characters.
In Discovery, (much like in life) characters evolve into leaders rather than starting out as ideal ones, making it a great example of adaptive and situational leadership in flux — particularly relevant to today’s complex and fast-changing leadership environments.
In IT we have all types of people, united in their zeal for technology and creating elegant solutions. This is something that resonated with me when I was in charge of our buildings and all the physical plant assets: tech has become embedded in our built environment and isn’t that different. It’s just a tool, but a tool that we in IT have to be more conversant in, in order to help our colleagues in all disciplines do their best.
In all cases, not everyone aspires to lead teams or devise long-term strategies to move the organization forward. You have to provide tracks and resources for all sorts of folks, and grow folks into who they want to be.
Whether you’re leading a starship or an IT department, the mission is the same: empower your crew, adapt to the unknown, and lead with integrity. Star Trek reminds us that leadership isn’t about perfection — it’s about evolution. So, what kind of captain are you becoming?
