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

[Music] I would like to invite you on a little thought experiment let's pretend that we're going on a polar Expedition together all of you and me and we need to hire a captain and we have two resumés in front of us one comes from a man who has already success F achieved all four of the major polar goals the North Pole and the South Pole and the Northeast and the Northwest Passage in fact three of these he was the first person to accomplish let's call him candidate a candidate B is a man who set off

for the Antarctic four times three times as the man in charge and every time resulted in failure catastrophe or death who should we hire it's not meant to be a trick question I think it's obvious we want candidate a he's the man for the job but in reality we often trick ourselves into hiring candidate b or someone like him how do I know well both of these men were real Polar explorers who lived during the so-called heroic age of polar exploration and in the century since one of them has been consistently celebrated as a leadership

role model in best-selling books blogs documentaries podcasts and an endless stream of social media posts but surprisingly shockingly this is not candidate a but candidate be the very much disaster prone angirish Explorer Ernest Shackleton meanwhile candidate a the Norwegian rald Amenson by any metric the most successful polar Explorer to have ever lived has been largely forgotten I did a quick search in my University's Library catalog before this talk and I found no fewer than 26 books that celebrate shackleton's leadership qualities for ainson I found four two of which I wrote what is going on here

why are we obsessed with a mediocre at best leader and overlooking a truly gifted one well I'm a historian who studies leadership and I'm here to tell you we celebrate the wrong leaders and not just in the realm of polar exploration have you heard of to latu you probably discuss him around the coffee machines in the mornings maybe not but you should he was born an illiterate slave and Rose to become one of the most influential revolutionaries ever and outsmarted the biggest empires of the day including napoleons what about Francis Perkins she was the pillar

in US President Franklin delno Roosevelt's famous New Deal we celebrate the wrong leaders and this is not just an academic or a trivial Insight leadership development today is a $60 billion industry for good reason we need leaders right all the challenges that we face today require people to work together and this in turn requires somebody who can motivate them Inspire them coordinate the work deal with whatever hiccups might arise along the way but for this reason it's important that we celebrate the right leaders because the leaders we celebrate are the leaders we learn from and

so in this sense the leaders we celebrate has a direct impact on the success success or as it may be failure of our greatest Endeavors today so why do we celebrate the wrong leaders sometimes it comes down to Pure racism and sexism we have a well documented bias for associating leadership with white men but there's another culprit at work as well what I like to call the action fallacy our mistaken belief that the best leader are those who generate the most noise action and Sensational activity in the most traumatic circumstances in other words we confuse

a good story for good leadership but the two are not the same as a matter of fact very often good leadership will result in a bad story let me explain imagine leadership for one moment not as a polar Explorer starting a new course or a CEO motivating her staff but as the simple Act of swimming across a river and not just any River imagine a violent River with waves crashing together and rocks lurking somewhere below the surface if if a swimmer ventures in haphazardly without being aware of his own capabilities or the currents and nearly

drowns but splashes around wildly fights with all his strength and somehow miraculously manages to drag himself back to safety those of us looking on will notice him and we will probably say wow what a guy he really fought hard to get himself out of that crisis and if instead we have a swimmer who has studied the river for years and knows just where and when to enter the water and how to turn her body in subtle ways and so lets the current carry her across we probably won't notice her and if we do we would

probably say eh that looks pretty easy Shackleton and almanson are a case in point Shackleton or candidate B is best known for his ill-fated endurance Expedition which set off in the summer of 1914 and saw his ship become trapped and eventually crushed by the ice of Antarctica and he and his men were then forced to undertake a dangerous Trek across the ice and brave some of the stormiest Seas on Earth before finally reaching the safety of South Georgia in the summer of 1916 now Shackleton was a tenacious man no doubt and his is a captivating

story fit for Hollywood in fact it was made into TV series starring a young Kenneth branaugh but it is not a story fit to draw Leadership Lessons From because admirable those efforts were the crisis that beset him was largely self-inflicted he overlooked the advice from local Whalers who told him the ice was particularly dangerous That season and he overlooked massive deficits in his equipment preparation crew selection and training and it gets worse rarely highlighted in the many books that celebrate his leadership qualities is the fact that the expedition's other ship the Aurora suffered an even

Graver crisis the result of which was three lost lives in contrast the Expeditions of AAL Amenson make for boring reading not because he was lucky but because based on his intimate knowledge of the Polar environment his careful and deliberate planning and his authentic and Innovative leadership in the field he managed to reduce the problems that his team encountered to a bare minimum in 1905 he achieved in a tiny fishing vessel what the mighty British Navy had failed to do the previous eight decades to find and navigate the Northwest Passage above the Canadian mainland in 1911

he reached the South Pole a journey of 3,000 km across hazardous and Uncharted terrain and arrived back at his Camp after 99 days just one day off his planed schedule if Shackleton is the swimmer who rushes recklessly into the water without understanding the currents or his own capabilities aminon is the swimmer who has spent a lifetime humbly studying the river before entering the water in just the right spot at just the right time and so makes it look easy now the uh action fallacy causes real problems and not just for our interpretation of the past

right I arrived at it through my work as a historian interested in why we celebrate some leaders of the past but not others but it's a dangerous feature in our offices today as well because after all the same biases and misconceptions that we bring to our reading of the past are one and the same with which we view leadership in our offices today it is the shackletons of our offices rather than the aminon who serve as role models who get promoted and who get rewarded in fact this is something um studies in organizational psychology have

confirmed we see leadership potential in people who speak more regardless of what they say in people who appear confident regardless of how competent they are and we have an unyielding admiration for people who are perpetually busy regardless of what they're actually doing I see some of you are imagining specific people in your office right now don't worry we we won't tell them in other words appearing to be a good leader rather than actually being one behind the scenes is the path to fame and bonus and promotion today and this causes all kinds of problems with

the wrong leaders in charge organizations are obviously now performing at their full potential and he creates a toxic cult culture in which those actually doing good work feel overlooked and demotivated and perhaps worse of all it's it's a self-perpetuating cycle because by celebrating these flawed action-oriented leaders we're actively creating more of them so this is a problem that we need to solve the good news is we can and it starts with reimagining what good leadership looks like and and there's two sides to this first we have to learn to ignore what we can call the

captains of Crisis the shackletons those who are lurching from one dramatic circumstance to another while some crises can't be avoided many are self-inflicted or Amplified by poor leadership or sometimes just a figment of their imagination Keith Grint the preeminent scholar of leadership today brilliant summarizes this problematic Dynamic since we reward people who are good in crises and ignore people who are such good managers that there are few crises people soon learn to seek out or reframe situations as crises we need to disincentivize the style of leadership by refusing to give these people the attention they

crave and that's easy when we're confronted with the sober facts alon's four successes shackleton's for failures but as soon as it's embedded in a story The Dramatic details pull us in like a magnet and give us a false sense of inspiration false because there's no real substance there instead we need to learn to celebrate those who mitigate rather than promote drama and this can be challenging because often they do so in very subtle ways below the surface of the water in the case of our swimmer right they're obsessive planners they build processes that align the

organization's strength with the unique challenges they face and they're authentic and create cultures that bring out the best in people Harvard Business School Professor Rafael ladun has studied the profound impact this behind the scenes work can have and she has given it a name I don't want to give you too many technical academic terms here but this is an important one she calls it boring management but as she tells us from her research the evidence is clear that boring management matters it may not be as exciting as leading a cavalry charge from the front or

giving a Brash pep talk but it's the real toolkit of good leaders and to me making a difference from behind the scenes unconcerned with what other people are thinking unconcerned with spilling self-aggrandizing words or exaggerating such people are truly inspirational let me summarize the action fallacy tricks us into celebrating the wrong leaders and this comes with huge costs we can overcome it I would say we must overcome it and this starts with reimagining what good leadership looks like so the next time you're in a position to judge or reward a leader or maybe just the

next time you're trying to figure out whose efforts actually guided your team or organization to success resist the temptation to be dazzled by Tales of Adventure and Daring Do and take a moment to look below the surface or in the quieter corners of your team and this is important because the next time your organization is faced with the equivalent of the ice pack looming on the horizon who do you want in charge the leader who responds to the ship freezing in place by frantically cranking the engine unpacking the crates of dynamite and pushing his men

to their breaking point or the leader who avoids getting stuck in the ice in the first place thank you [Music] [Applause]