[This post is part of a series examining several common, cherished myths about management and leadership.]
We all want great leaders to admire. Many of us want to become great leaders ourselves. And all of us want better leadership for our institutions and our society.
Let me continue to argue in this space that one of the biggest obstacles to cultivating better leadership is the way we cling to sentimental and sanitized notions of leadership, complete with wishful thinking and warm fuzzies.
Leadership is a messy business. It’s a job for people with thick skins and the stomachs of goats. A good person will oftentimes not make a good leader.
So if we want strong leadership, we need to be more sophisticated in recognizing the mix of noble and dangerous personality traits that you’ll see in most effective leaders.
I mentioned in my previous post that a good leader is more like the hypercompetitive jerk Kobe Bryant and less like the saintly Mother Teresa.
Here we need to deal with the semantics of the word “good.” Everyone knows that Kobe Bryant is a very good basketball player. But I’m not sure anyone has ever accused him of being a good human being.
I also love to bring up Steve Jobs constantly, because of the conundrum he represents to connoisseurs of “good” leadership. Jobs tormented and humiliated human beings. He neglected his own family. And he built an empire by outsourcing work to extra-cheap labor in China.
A good person? Nah. A good leader? Well, yeah, pretty much. The only reason many conscientious people didn’t boycott Apple is because they’d have felt silly calling for the boycott via their flashy new iPhones. Now that took some real leadership skill on Jobs’ part, didn’t it?
Some management experts try to get around the conundrum by drawing a distinction between leaders and managers. They’ll say that good managers can get things done in an amoral way, but good leaders add a moral quality to it.
This may be a distinction without a difference.
One of my chief mentors, the recently deceased, legendary leadership scholar Warren Bennis, did once spend time contrasting how “managers do things right, but leaders do the right thing” and how “managers focus on the bottom line, but leaders focus on the far horizon.”
But what’s less known is that, later in his life, you couldn’t pay Warren to draw a distinction between managers and leaders. He’d given up on trying to finesse the word leader into anything he liked and the word manager into anything he didn’t like.
I had the privilege of helping Warren and his colleague Steven B. Sample on Warren’s final book project, due out next spring. In it, they focus on several leaders, especially George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman. And they find that those giants, examined up close, severely test traditional notions of what good leadership looks like.
When we strip away the romantic sheen of history, can we say our best leaders were the best people? Lincoln was a controversial figure in his time, seen by many as a despot who didn’t value the lives or laws of fellow citizens. Churchill was an imperial bigot who failed at most things until he did one thing right, which was to defeat Hitler. Truman remains the only leader to ever use nuclear weapons on innocent civilians.
Washington, for his part, didn’t start out as a “good” man who then learned the mechanics of leadership. Rather, he began his career as an overly ambitious and brash person. Only the “crucibles of life,” to use one of Warren’s favorite phrases, taught Washington the restraint that made him memorable as a leader.
It reminds us that leadership is hell, and that sentimentalized views of leadership don’t do us much good in the clutch. We have to admit that we need to work with fallen, seriously imperfect raw material.
Any stable society needs warriors, police officers and politicians. But the people who naturally gravitate toward those roles may not be saints, and it’s futile to try to pretend that we could turn saints into strong warriors or effective elected officials.
This also gets us around one of the great puzzles of leadership: What to do with third-rail issues like the “Hitler and Stalin problem.” It’s certainly insufficient to claim these maniacs were “just managers, not leaders.” Let’s concede they had gifts in the area of leadership, rather than trying to contort the definition of leadership into something that conveniently excludes them.
Ultimately, to raise up better leaders, we need a more sober and sophisticated view of leadership.
Again, it’s not about finding saints and giving them a leadership manual. It’s more about recognizing the sorts of people who naturally gravitate toward leadership—talented yet vain, stubborn, and single-minded people. And then it’s about putting them in a position to do as much good as possible, and as little damage as possible.
And the chief way we do this is by refusing to confuse good leaders with good people.
