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

I'd like to invite you to a little thought experiment. Let's imagine that we are going on a polar expedition together, all you and me, and we need to hire a captain and we have two resumes in front of us, one of them comes from a man who has already succeeded F achieved the four main polar goals: the Pole North and the South Pole and the Northeast and the Northwest Passage, in fact, three of them he was the first person to do it let's call him candidate candidate B is a man who established I went to Antarctica four times, three times as the man in charge and each time resulted in failure, catastrophe or death.

Who should we hire? It's not a trick question. I think it's obvious that we want a candidate. He is 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 that both men were real polar explorers who lived during the so-called heroic era of exploration polar and in the century since one of them has been constantly

celebrate

d? as a

leaders

hip model in best-selling books, blogs, documentaries, podcasts and an endless stream of social media posts, but surprisingly, this is not a candidate, but the candidate to be the very disaster-prone, angirish explorer Ernest Shackleton, Meanwhile, a candidate for Norway's Rad Amenson by any metric, the most successful polar explorer who ever lived, has been largely forgotten.

I did a quick search of my university library catalog before this talk and found no fewer than 26 books celebrating Shackleton's

leaders

hip qualities for Ainson. I found four, two of which I wrote down. What's going on here? Why are we obsessed with a mediocre, at best, leader and overlook a truly talented one? Well, I'm a historian who studies leadership and I'm here to tell you that we

celebrate

the wrong leaders and not just in the realm of polar exploration, have you heard of latu? You probably talk about him around the coffee machines in the mornings, maybe you don't, but you should.

He was born an illiterate slave and Rose became one of the most influential revolutionaries of all time and surpassed the largest empires of the time including Napoleons, what about Francis Perkins? She was the pillar of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous New Deal. We celebrate the wrong leaders and this is not just an academic or trivial view. Leadership development is a $60 billion industry today. For good reason, we need right leaders for everyone. The challenges we face today require people to work together and this in turn requires someone who can motivate them, inspire them, coordinate the work, deal with any setbacks that may arise along the way, but for this reason it is important that we celebrate the appropriate leaders because the leaders we celebrate are the leaders we learn from and, in this sense, the leaders we celebrate have a direct impact on the success or, as it may be, the failure of our greatest efforts today.

So why do we celebrate the wrong leaders? Sometimes it all comes down to Pure. racism and sexism, we have a well-documented bias of associating leadership with white men, but there is also another culprit at play, what I like to call the action fallacy, our mistaken belief that the best leader is the one who generates the most noise, action, and sensational activity in In the most traumatic circumstances, in other words, we confuse a good story with good leadership, but the two are not the same. In fact, very often good leadership will result in a bad story. Let me explain.

Imagine leadership for a moment, not as a polar explorer. starting a new course or a CEO motivating his staff, but like the simple act of swimming across a river and not just any river, imagine a violent river with crashing waves and rocks lurking somewhere beneath the surface if a swimmer random adventure without realizing it. of his own abilities or the currents and almost drowns, but he splashes wildly, fights with all his might and somehow miraculously manages to crawl back to safety, those of us watching will notice and probably say what a guy! , really fought hard! get out of that crisis and if instead we have a swimmer who has studied the river for years and knows exactly where and when to enter the water and how to turn his body in subtle ways and thus let the current carry him through, probably Shackleton and Almanson They are an example of this.

Shackleton or Candidate B is best known for his ill-fated resistance expedition which set out in the summer of 1914 and saw his ship become trapped and eventually crushed by the Antarctic ice and he and his men were forced to undertake a dangerous trek to across the ice and brave some of the stormiest seas on Earth before finally arriving at the safety of South Georgia in the summer of 1916. Now, Shackleton was certainly a tenacious man and his is a captivating story worthy of Hollywood; In fact, it was made into a television series starring a young Kenneth Branaugh, but it is not a story worthy of drawing lessons in leadership because those admirable efforts were the crisis that beset him was largely self-inflicted.

He ignored advice from local whalers who told him that the ice was particularly dangerous. That season and he overlooked massive deficits in his team 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 other ship on the expedition , the Aurora, suffered an even more serious crisis resulting in the loss of three lives. In contrast, AAL Amenson's Expeditions make for boring reading not because he was lucky but because, drawing 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 minimize the problems his team encountered in 1905 achieved in a small fishing boat what the powerful British Navy had failed to do in the previous year. eight decades to find and navigate the Northwest Passage over the Canadian mainland in 1911 he reached the South Pole on a 3,000 km journey through dangerous and unexplored terrain and returned to his camp after 99 days, just one day shy of his planned agenda if Shackleton is the swimmer who recklessly jumps into the water without understanding the currents or his own abilities aminon is the swimmer who has spent his entire life humbly studying the river before entering the water in the right place at the right time and for that makes it look easy now The action fallacy causes real problems and not just because of our interpretation of the past.

I came to it through my work as a historian interested in why we celebrate some leaders of the past but not others, but it is also a dangerous feature in our offices today. because after all, the same prejudices and misconceptions that we bring to our reading of the past are the same ones with which we view leadership in our offices today: it is the shackles of our offices, and not the lessening them, that serve as role models and those who are promoted. and who is rewarded, in fact this is something that studies in organizational psychology have confirmed that we see leadership potential in people who talk more regardless of what they say, in people who seem confident regardless of how competent they are and we have unwavering admiration by people who are perpetually busy regardless of what they are actually doing.

I see some of you are picturing specific people in your office right now. Don't worry, we won't tell you to, in other words, look like a good leader instead of actually being one. Behind the scenes is the path to fame, bonuses and promotion nowadays, and this causes all sorts of problems with the wrong leaders in charge that organizations are obviously now running at their full potential and creates a cult culture. toxic situation in which those who actually do good work feel overlooked and unmotivated and perhaps worst of all, it is a self-perpetuating cycle because by celebrating these flawed action-oriented leaders We are actively creating more of them, so this is a problem we must solve, the good news is that we can and it starts with reimagining what good leadership looks like and there are two sides to this: first we have to learn to ignore what we can call the captains of the crisis, the shackles, those who stagger from one dramatic circumstance to another while some crises cannot be avoided. many are self-inflicted or amplified by poor leadership or sometimes simply a figment of your imagination.

Keith Grint, today's eminent leadership scholar, brilliantly summarizes this problematic dynamic, as we reward people who are good at crises and ignore people who are such good managers that there are few crises in which People soon learn to look for or reframe situations as crises. We need to discourage the leadership style by refusing to give these people the attention they crave, and that's easy when we face the sober facts. Shackleton's four successes for failures. but as soon as it is embedded in a story, the dramatic details draw us in like a magnet and give us a false sense of inspiration, false because there is no real substance there, instead we must learn to celebrate those who mitigate the drama rather than promoting it, and this can be a challenge because they often do it in very subtle ways below the surface of the water, in the case of our swimmer, they are obsessive planners, they build processes that align the strength of the organization with the unique challenges they face and are authentic and create cultures that bring out the best in people Professor Rafael Ladún of Harvard Business School has studied the profound impact this behind-the-scenes work can have and 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 cheeky pep talk, but it's the true toolkit of good leaders and, for me, making a difference behind the scenes, without worrying about what other people think, without worrying about spilling words of self aggrandizement or exaggeration, those people are truly inspiring, let me summarize the fallacy of action that misleads us to celebrate the wrong leaders and this comes with enormous costs we can overcome it I would say we must overcome it and this begins with reimagining what the good leadership so that the next time you are in a position to judge or reward a leader or maybe just the next time you try to find out whose efforts really 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 beneath the surface or into the quieter corners of your team, and this is important because next time. your organization faces the equivalent of the ice sheet looming on the horizon. Who do you want to be in charge? The leader who responds to the ship freezing by frantically cranking the engine, unpacking boxes of dynamite, and pushing his men to the breaking point. the leader who avoids getting stuck in the ice in the first place thanks