"The Unseen Leader"

I read an interesting article ("The 'action fallacy' tells us that the most effective leaders are unseen") that was based on excerpts from a book by Martin Gutmann, The Unseen Leader.  Gutmann also summarized some of his major points from the book in a TEDx talk entitled "Are we celebrating the wrong leaders?"  The article starts out with two commonly held beliefs about leadership.  Gutman actually suggests that they are so commonly held that they have become clichés: "Leadership is about overcoming crises" and "Leadership is about acting when others hesitate."  His statement, "Management blogs, consulting pitches, and social media posts are rife with similarly catchy leadership clichés" definitely hit home.

Gutman blames what he calls the "action fallacy" (see the related concept from psychology, called the "action bias"), which he defines as "the mistaken belief that leadership is characterized by energy and movement in the face of harrowing odds."  He suggests that we often place too much emphasis on "heroism in the face of harrowing odds" which "can obscure the nature of truly effective leadership."  For example, Gutman compares and contrasts the leadership of two famous polar explorers - Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen, two leaders that I have studied extensively and posted about in the past (see "To the Edges of the Earth", "10Xers" and "Better a live donkey than a dead lion...", among others).  Gutman suggests that Amundsen is perhaps a better example of a great leader than Shackleton.    I happen to think that both of these men were great leaders, so I was intrigued by Gutman's analysis.

In his TEDx talk, Gutman asks the audience to participate in a thought experiment: Imagine that you are recruiting a leader for a new polar expedition and have two resumes to review.  The first individual has previously achieved all four major polar milestones (North Pole, South Pole, Northwest Passage, Northeast Passage) - in fact, he was the first person to accomplish three of these milestones.  The second individual started off on expeditions to Antarctica on four different occasions (three times as the leader) and failed all four times (catastrophically so in perhaps one incidence).  Who would you hire?

I actually thought that the logical answer would be to hire the first individual, which makes the most intuitive sense.  However, Gutman states that, at least retrospectively, we oftentimes "choose" the second one.  We hold the second individual up as an example of great leadership during a crisis, often ignoring the first, more successful leader, particularly when the first leader made things look so easy!  Of course, he's referring to Amundsen in the first instance, and Shackleton in the second.  Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer during the so-called Heroic Age of Polar Expedition who led the first successful expedition to traverse Canada's Northwest Passage (Atlantic to Pacific Ocean) in 1903, the first successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911, the first successful expedition through the Northeast Passage (Pacific to Atlantic Ocean) in 1924, and led a team that flew over the North Pole in the airship Norge in 1926.  And yet, he is a far less celebrated leader than Ernest Shackleton, who is famous for leading the failed Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition from 1914-1917, which several leadership experts have discussed extensively in previous posts, articles, and books.  Gutman asks whether why we are obsessed with "a mediocre, at best, leader" (Shackleton) and ignoring a "truly gifted leader" (Amundsen).

Gutman says that according to the "action fallacy" we often "confuse a good story for good leadership" and argues that "very often, good leadership will result in a bad story."  He uses the analogy of two swimmers who are trying to cross a fast-moving river.  Swimmer A enters the river haphazardly, unaware of his capabilities and the currents.  Swimmer A nearly drowns, but splashes around wildly, fighting with all of her strength to swim back to safety, never mind whether she ends up on the other side of the river.  Most of us will see that Swimmer A did a remarkable job of getting back to safety, and may say, "Wow that swimmer really fought hard to get out of that crisis!"  In contrast, Swimmer B has studied the river for years and knows just where to enter the water so that the current will carry her easily across.  She crosses the river without drawing attention to herself, and we may therefore say, "Meh - that looks pretty easy." 

While I can appreciate Gutman's point, I still think Shackleton was an amazing leader.  However, I also recognize that we tend to underappreciate the "unseen leaders" such as Roald Amundsen and that there is perhaps more to learn from these leaders than the credit and attention we usually devote to them.  Gutman offers three key takeaways:

1. Judge leadership, including your own, only by the actual positive impact it has.

2. What effective leaders do to drive teams and events toward a successful outcome might not be easily visible at first glance.  Look below the surface.

3. What to uncritical viewer looks like "luck" is, in fact, an alignment of planning, intentions, and action with external circumstances.

I enjoyed reading the article and watching the TEDx talk, and I think you will as well.  I am looking forward to reading his book (although I will have to purchase it, because it's not available at my local public library!).  Gutman ends the article with the following vignette: 

When the President of the British Royal Geographic Society, Lord Curzon, insisted that the (often spectacular) failures of the "great" British explorers - John Franklin, Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton - were due to misfortune, while Amundsen's successes were due to luck, Amundsen wrote, "Victory awaits him who has everything in order - luck, people call it.  Defeat is certain for he who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called "bad luck."