Why do we celebrate incompetent leaders? | Martin Gutmann | TEDxBerlin — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Transcriber: Méline R Reviewer: Raúl Higareda
2. 0:08I would like to invite you on a little thought experiment.
3. 0:12Let’s pretend that we’re going on a polar expedition together,
4. 0:15all of you and me.
5. 0:17And we need to hire a captain.
6. 0:20And we have two resumes in front of us.
7. 0:26One comes from a man
8. 0:28who has already successfully achieved all four of the major polar goals,
9. 0:33the North Pole and the South Pole,
10. 0:35and the Northeast and the Northwest Passage.
11. 0:37In fact, three of these, he was the first person to accomplish.
12. 0:42Let’s call him Candidate A.
13. 0:47Candidate B is a man who set off for the Antarctic four times.
14. 0:53Three times as the man in charge.
15. 0:56And every time resulted in failure,
16. 1:01catastrophe, or death.
17. 1:05Who should we hire?
18. 1:08It’s not meant to be a trick question.
19. 1:12I think it’s obvious we want Candidate A.
20. 1:15He’s the man for the job.
21. 1:17But in reality,
22. 1:20we often trick ourselves into hiring Candidate B or someone like him.
23. 1:26How do I know?
24. 1:28Well, both of these men were real polar explorers
25. 1:31who lived during the so-called Heroic Age of polar exploration.
26. 1:36And in the centuries since,
27. 1:38one of them has been consistently celebrated as a leadership role model
28. 1:44in best-selling books, blogs, documentaries, podcasts,
29. 1:49and an endless stream of social media posts.
30. 1:52But surprisingly, shockingly,
31. 1:56this is not Candidate A, but Candidate B,
32. 2:00the very much disaster-prone Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton.
33. 2:07Meanwhile, Candidate A, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen,
34. 2:13by any metric, the most successful polar explorer to have ever lived,
35. 2:19has been largely forgotten.
36. 2:21I did a quick search in my university's library catalog before this talk,
37. 2:27and I found no fewer than 26 books
38. 2:30that celebrate Shackleton’s leadership qualities.
39. 2:35For Amundsen, I found four,
40. 2:38two of which I wrote.
41. 2:40(Laughter)
42. 2:44What is going on here?
43. 2:45Why are we obsessed with a mediocre-at-best leader
44. 2:52and overlooking a truly gifted one?
45. 2:56Well, I’m a historian who studies leadership,
46. 2:59and I’m here to tell you
47. 3:02we celebrate the wrong leaders,
48. 3:05and not just in the realm of polar exploration.
49. 3:09Have you heard of Toussaint Louverture?
50. 3:11You probably discuss him around the coffee machines in the mornings.
51. 3:15Maybe not, but you should.
52. 3:18He was born an illiterate slave
53. 3:20and rose to become one of the most influential revolutionaries ever
54. 3:24and outsmarted the biggest empires of the day,
55. 3:27including Napoleon’s.
56. 3:31What about Frances Perkins? There she is.
57. 3:34What about Frances Perkins?
58. 3:36She was the pillar
59. 3:38in U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous New Deal.
60. 3:44We celebrate the wrong leaders.
61. 3:47And this is not just an academic or a trivial insight.
62. 3:53Leadership development today is a $60 billion industry.
63. 4:00For good reason, we need leaders, right?
64. 4:03All the challenges that we face today require people to work together.
65. 4:09And this, in turn, requires somebody who can motivate them,
66. 4:12inspire them, coordinate the work,
67. 4:14deal with whatever hiccups might arise along the way.
68. 4:19But for this reason, it’s important that we celebrate the right leaders,
69. 4:24because the leaders we celebrate are the leaders we learn from.
70. 4:28And so in this sense, the leaders we celebrate
71. 4:33has a direct impact on the success, or as it may be failure,
72. 4:38of our greatest endeavors today.
73. 4:44So why do we celebrate the wrong leaders?
74. 4:47Sometimes it comes down to pure racism and sexism.
75. 4:50We have a well-documented bias for associating leadership with white men.
76. 4:56But there is another culprit at work as well,
77. 4:59what I like to call the action fallacy.
78. 5:02Our mistaken belief that the best leaders are those who generate the most noise,
79. 5:08action, and sensational activity in the most dramatic circumstances.
80. 5:13In other words,
81. 5:14we confuse a good story for good leadership.
82. 5:20But the two are not the same.
83. 5:22As a matter of fact, very often,
84. 5:24good leadership will result in a bad story.
85. 5:29Let me explain.
86. 5:31Imagine leadership for one moment,
87. 5:32not as a polar explorer charting a new course
88. 5:36or a CEO motivating her staff,
89. 5:39but as the simple act of swimming across a river.
90. 5:44And not just any river.
91. 5:46Imagine a violent river with waves crashing together
92. 5:50and rocks lurking somewhere below the surface.
93. 5:55If a swimmer ventures in haphazardly,
94. 6:00without being aware of his own capabilities or the currents,
95. 6:05and nearly drowns,
96. 6:07but splashes around wildly, fights with all his strength,
97. 6:12and somehow, miraculously, manages to drag himself back to safety.
98. 6:17Those of us looking on will notice him.
99. 6:20And we will probably say, “Wow, what a guy!
100. 6:25He really fought hard to get himself out of that crisis.”
101. 6:31And if instead we have a swimmer who has studied the river for years
102. 6:38and knows just where and when to enter the water,
103. 6:41and how to turn her body in subtle ways,
104. 6:45and so lets the current carry her across,
105. 6:48we probably won't notice her.
106. 6:51And if we do, we would probably say, “Huh! That looks pretty easy.”
107. 7:01Shackleton and Amundsen are a case in point.
108. 7:05Shackleton, our Candidate B,
109. 7:08is best known for his ill-fated endurance expedition,
110. 7:11which set off in the summer of 1914,
111. 7:13and saw his ship become trapped, and eventually crushed
112. 7:17by the ice of Antarctica.
113. 7:19And he and his men were then forced to undertake
114. 7:22a dangerous trek across the ice,
115. 7:24and braved some of the stormiest seas on Earth,
116. 7:26before finally reaching the safety of South Georgia in the summer of 1916.
117. 7:32Now, Shackleton was a tenacious man, no doubt.
118. 7:37And his is a captivating story, fit for Hollywood.
119. 7:42In fact, it was made into a TV series, starring a young Kenneth Branagh.
120. 7:47But it is not a story fit to draw leadership lessons from.
121. 7:53Because, admirable those efforts were,
122. 7:58the crisis that beset him was largely self-inflicted.
123. 8:02He overlooked the advice from local whalers,
124. 8:05who told him the ice was particularly dangerous that season.
125. 8:09And he overlooked massive deficits in his equipment,
126. 8:13preparation, crew selection, and training.
127. 8:17And it gets worse.
128. 8:19Rarely highlighted in the many books that celebrate his leadership qualities,
129. 8:24is the fact that the expedition’s other ship, the Aurora,
130. 8:29suffered an even graver crisis, the result of which was three lost lives.
131. 8:35In contrast,
132. 8:37the expeditions of Roald Amundsen make for boring reading.
133. 8:42Not because he was lucky,
134. 8:44but because, based on his intimate knowledge of the polar environment,
135. 8:49his careful and deliberate planning,
136. 8:51and his authentic and innovative leadership in the field,
137. 8:54he managed to reduce the problems that his team encountered
138. 8:58to a bare minimum.
139. 9:01In 1905, he achieved, in a tiny fishing vessel,
140. 9:06what the mighty British Navy had failed to do the previous eight decades,
141. 9:11to find and navigate the Northwest Passage above the Canadian mainland.
142. 9:17In 1911, he reached the South Pole,
143. 9:20a journey of 3000 kilometers across hazardous and uncharted terrain,
144. 9:25and arrived back at his camp after 99 days,
145. 9:29just one day off his planned schedule.
146. 9:34If Shackleton is the swimmer who rushes recklessly into the water
147. 9:39without understanding the currents or his own capabilities,
148. 9:43Amundsen is the swimmer who has spent a lifetime humbly studying the river
149. 9:49before entering the water in just the right spot
150. 9:52at just the right time,
151. 9:53and so he makes it look easy.
152. 9:57Now, the action fallacy causes real problems,
153. 10:02and not just for our interpretation of the past.
154. 10:06I arrived at it through my work as a historian,
155. 10:08interested in why we celebrate some leaders of the past,
156. 10:12but not others.
157. 10:13But it’s a dangerous feature in our offices today as well,
158. 10:18because, after all, the same biases and misconceptions
159. 10:22that we bring to our reading of the past
160. 10:24are one and the same with which we view leadership in our offices today.
161. 10:29It is the Shackletons of our offices, rather than the Amundsens,
162. 10:34who serve as role models, who get promoted, and who get rewarded.
163. 10:38In fact, this is something studies in organisational psychology
164. 10:43have confirmed.
165. 10:45We see leadership potential in people who speak more,
166. 10:49regardless of what they say.
167. 10:51(Laughter)
168. 10:52In people who appear confident, regardless of how competent they are.
169. 10:58And we have an unyielding admiration for people who are perpetually busy,
170. 11:03regardless of what they're actually doing.
171. 11:06I see some of you are imagining specific people in your office right now.
172. 11:10(Laughter)
173. 11:11Don’t worry, we won’t tell them.
174. 11:14In other words, appearing to be a good leader,
175. 11:18rather than actually being one behind the scenes,
176. 11:21is the path to fame and bonus and promotion today.
177. 11:25And this causes all kinds of problems.
178. 11:27With the wrong leaders in charge,
179. 11:29organisations are obviously not performing at their full potential.
180. 11:33And it creates a toxic culture
181. 11:35in which those actually doing good work feel overlooked and demotivated.
182. 11:41And perhaps worst of all, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle,
183. 11:47because by celebrating these flawed, action-oriented leaders,
184. 11:51we’re actively creating more of them.
185. 11:54So this is a problem that we need to solve.
186. 11:57The good news is, we can.
187. 12:00And it starts with re-imagining what good leadership looks like.
188. 12:04And there’s two sides to this.
189. 12:06First, we have to learn to ignore what we can call the captains of crisis,
190. 12:12the shackletons, those who are lurching from one dramatic circumstance to another.
191. 12:17Because while some crises can be avoided-- They can’t be avoided.
192. 12:22While some crises can't be avoided,
193. 12:25many are self-inflicted or amplified by poor leadership,
194. 12:30or sometimes just a figment of their imagination.
195. 12:34Keith Grint, the preeminent scholar of leadership today,
196. 12:39brilliantly summarizes this problematic dynamic.
197. 12:44“Since we reward people who are good in crises,
198. 12:46and ignore people who are such good managers that there are few crises,
199. 12:51people soon learn to seek out or reframe situations as crises.”
200. 12:57We need to disincentivize this style of leadership
201. 13:00by refusing to give these people the attention they crave.
202. 13:03And that's easy when we're confronted with the sober facts.
203. 13:07Ahmanson’s four successes, Shackleton’s four failures.
204. 13:11But as soon as it's embedded in a story,
205. 13:14the dramatic details pull us in like a magnet
206. 13:17and give us a false sense of inspiration.
207. 13:19False, because there’s no real substance there.
208. 13:24Instead, we need to learn to celebrate
209. 13:27those who mitigate rather than promote drama.
210. 13:30And this can be challenging because often they do so in very subtle ways,
211. 13:36below the surface of the water, in the case of our swimmer.
212. 13:39They’re obsessive planners.
213. 13:41They build processes that align the organization’s strength
214. 13:45with the unique challenges they face.
215. 13:47And they're authentic and create cultures that bring out the best in people.
216. 13:53Harvard Business School professor, Raffaella Sadun,
217. 13:56has studied the profound impact this behind-the-scenes work can have,
218. 14:01and she has given it a name.
219. 14:03I don’t want to give you too many technical academic terms here,
220. 14:07but this is an important one.
221. 14:09She calls it, “Boring management.”
222. 14:12(Laughter)
223. 14:14But as she tells us from her research,
224. 14:16“The evidence is clear that boring management matters.”
225. 14:21It may not be as exciting as leading a cavalry charge from the front
226. 14:27or giving a brash pep talk,
227. 14:30but it’s the real toolkit of good leaders.
228. 14:33And to me,
229. 14:37making a difference from behind the scenes,
230. 14:40unconcerned with what other people are thinking,
231. 14:44unconcerned with spilling self-aggrandizing words, or exaggerating,
232. 14:48such people are truly inspirational.
233. 14:54Let me summarize.
234. 14:56The action fallacy tricks us into celebrating the wrong leaders,
235. 14:59and this comes with huge costs.
236. 15:03We can overcome it.
237. 15:05I would say we must overcome it.
238. 15:07And this starts with re-imagining what good leadership looks like.
239. 15:12So the next time you're in a position to judge or reward a leader,
240. 15:18or maybe just the next time you’re trying to figure out
241. 15:22whose efforts actually guided your team or organization to success,
242. 15:28resist the temptation to be dazzled by tales of adventure and derring-do,
243. 15:34and take a moment to look below the surface
244. 15:36or in the quieter corners of your team.
245. 15:40And this is important, because the next time your organisation
246. 15:45is faced with the equivalent of the ice pack looming on the horizon,
247. 15:51who do you want in charge?
248. 15:53The leader who responds to the ship freezing in place
249. 15:57by frantically cranking the engine, unpacking the crates of dynamite,
250. 16:01and pushing his men to their breaking point,
251. 16:05or the leader who avoids getting stuck in the ice in the first place?
252. 16:08Thank you.
253. 16:10(Applause)