The Strength in Weak Leaders

[Music]

a little over 30 years ago

i went off to college wanting to study

leadership but because i also grew up

the son

of an air force officer i grew up

wanting to become a pilot

so i chose the naval academy it was a

good choice

this place takes leadership so seriously

that they even have an

entire building called loose hall

dedicated just to the study of

leadership

but at some at some point i became

concerned

that i wasn’t going to find enough

leadership

in the cockpit of a single-seat aircraft

so at that point i gave up my childhood

dream

and i decided instead to become a

practitioner of leadership

in the navy seal teams and i became a

task unit commander deployed in the wars

after 9 11.

and it was then deployed to those wars

that i started to confront some very

deep questions about everything i

thought i knew about leadership

and it happened in particular one night

in western iraq when my leadership

almost killed

two of my own people

we have been conducting reconnaissance

missions along the euphrates river

looking for insurgents and back then

our greatest threat was improvised

explosive devices

or ieds bombs in the road and so we

would go to great lengths to plan our

missions to avoid these ieds

and minimize this threat and one night

we had a unit returning to our base

and thinking that i had the best

judgment thinking that i had all the

knowledge as the leader

i changed the plan i made a change to

the plan

and what happened next was as

predictable

as sunrise one of our vehicles took a

direct hit

from an ied and the two soldiers in the

front seat of this vehicle

very nearly lost their lives and it was

a hundred percent

the result of my bad decision making

now the good news is those two men lived

and they only live because they got

rapidly evacuated to a trauma center

that happened to be just down the road

and they happened to get there in the

nick of time

and the evacuation was chaos and i

wasn’t even on the scene

i had grown up thinking that good

leaders

make good decisions and yet my decision

making almost killed those two men

in an evacuation that had nothing to do

with my leadership or decision making

is what allowed them to live

when i retired from the navy i looked

for a new way to get outside my comfort

zone

and end up taking up beekeeping sadly

this is the first summer where i find

myself not having any bees at all

i wasn’t paying close enough attention

this summer and they got overcrowded and

they swarmed

which means they left to find a new home

and swarming behavior is one of the

miraculous things that bee colonies do

as a group they make these exceptional

decisions

without the benefit of a leader

we may call her the queen bee but she’s

not the leader she just

lays eggs bee colonies are a flat

non-hierarchical system and the research

suggests that bee colonies

have evolved this way because it

protects the colony

from the bad effects of any single bee

with bad judgment

so you see my lessons in war and in

beekeeping

were the same that strong

domineering leaders confuse the fact

that they have extra authority

with the idea that they have extra

judgment

that strong domineering leaders expose

us to risk

that strong domineering leaders

are an impediment to good decision

making

so if we say someone’s a strong leader

what does that mean

and is it the same thing as saying that

they’re effective

similarly when we call a leader weak is

that to say that they’re ineffective

and why do we so often confuse

charisma with leadership

in my experience we skip over these

important questions

and what we do instead is we preach

we preach the virtue of things like

humility

as the number one secret to good

leadership

but this just circles us back around to

the same problem

because if humble leaders are so good if

humility is the answer to leadership

how do we explain successful leaders

like steve jobs

or walt disney who went on to great

success

not being known for their leadership

being humble how do we explain

the election of donald j trump

trump may be an extreme case but he is

not an isolated case

if humility’s so good how do we explain

the fact

that narcissistic personality types are

still

over represented by far

in senior leader positions

you see i went to the naval academy to

study leadership because we believe

that leadership can be taught we believe

that great leaders are made not

born and yet study after study

after study suggests that the question

of who becomes a leader in life

mostly comes down to things like gender

or stature

or the width of our face

if leadership is so much about things we

learn why

is that who emerges as a leader in life

comes down to things we’re born with

until last year among fortune 500 ceos

there were more men named john than

there were women

that would be sensible if men were

particularly high performing with their

leadership

but that’s not the case in fact the

number one thing most organizations can

do

to immediately get a boost in

performance

is to hire a female ceo

so the science of leadership would tell

us

that our leaders should reflect humility

and diversity

and yet we keep ending up with

narcissistic men

so in my 30 years of studying leadership

i’ve concluded that it’s still less a

science

and it’s more a mythology that’s why

three years ago i founded the crystal

group leadership institute

and co-wrote this book leaders myth and

reality

and the book opens with a vignette of

predictably

a man general george washington

america’s first president

crossing the delaware river and this is

one of america’s most recognizable and

famous paintings

now i tell you i know relatively little

about american history

but i happen to know a great deal about

this one painting

and i only know a lot about this one

painting because i spent six years

working in the white house for both

presidents bush and obama

and when i worked in the white house i

spent an unusual amount of time

sitting on a particularly comfortable

couch

this couch was in the west wing lobby of

the white house

and just above this couch hung a

reproduction painting

of washington crossing the delaware

and so as i was sitting on that couch

all those hours

tour groups would come through the west

wing

and the tour guide would stop the tour

group right in front of me

and tell the group about the painting

hanging just over my head

so i learned a lot about this one

painting

and i’ve showed this painting to

thousands of people over the years

and i always ask them the same question

look at washington and tell me the first

word

that comes to mind

exactly i keep hearing the same words

over and over again

confidence stoic

strong

and what i learned about this painting

all those hours sitting on the couch

is that it’s a fiction the delaware

river never froze that way

that’s the wrong flag the boat’s going

the wrong way and washington did not

cross the delaware in a little rowboat

and if you do a little digging you can

find the more accurate depiction of

washington cross in the delaware

and sure enough yes he’s standing at the

front of the boat and yes he

is looking forward but here in the more

accurate depiction

washington’s right hand has a firm grip

on the wheel

of a cannon

why because that’s what real people do

in a boat at night

going to war they don’t do this

why not because it’s ridiculous

but nobody ever offers the word

ridiculous

to describe washington that’s because

all of us

unknowingly subscribe to the mythology

of leadership we all

expect too much of our leaders we all

exaggerate what our leaders are capable

of

now while i spent a lot of time sitting

on that couch i did get out

of the white house from time to time and

one of the more interesting trips i ever

took was when i accompanied president

obama down to fort campbell kentucky

where he met with the team that did the

raid on bin laden

president flew down he gave the team

some awards he got a debrief and we flew

home that night

and on the way home i asked the

president for his reflections about the

trip

and what he told me was that he had been

struck by the way the team leader did

the debrief

and what he was referring to is the fact

that when they turned over the briefing

to the team leader

the team leaders debrief consisted of

mr president my team will now debrief

you

and that was it and that’s surprising

because few of us would actually do that

most of us would feel some temptation

to own that moment

and it’s striking because it’s an

example of what we call humble

leadership or technical term

servant leadership leadership where the

leader believes their job is to

celebrate the success of the team

leadership where the leader believes

that all the powers with the team not

with them

leadership where the leader believes

their job is to enable

their people not to command them

and servant leadership is known to be

powerful and it’s not new it’s been

around for a while

and it’s rare it’s hard to find but it’s

also somewhat misunderstood

i once had the opportunity to catch up

with that team leader

who had impressed the president and i

asked him

where do you get your leadership from

why do you lead this way

and his answer was simply to say

what choice did i have how else would

you lead a team like that

and his answer suggests one of the

greatest myths about leadership

we tend to believe that leadership rests

in the leader

we tend to believe that it’s the leader

that drives the leadership

we tend to see it this way

as a hierarchy with the leader at the

top but the reality is that we should

flip it around

the reality is that leadership rests

mostly

by the followers

but this raises another question

because if leadership really rests with

the followers

why do we even have this thing called

leadership why don’t we just operate

more like a bee colony

well it turns out that millions of years

ago our earliest ancestors were doing

just that

they were a hunter-gatherer species and

they were non-hierarchical

with outstanding leaders

and then relatively recently about 10

000 years ago

we discovered agriculture and we became

an agrarian society

with growing levels of hierarchy and

standing permanent leaders

and this has been a consistent feature

of the human species ever since

and so you see our evolutionary wiring

is conflicted on the one hand

we have a preference for flat

egalitarianism

but on the other hand we have

familiarity

with hierarchy on the one hand we want

our leaders to be

average on the other hand we want our

leaders to be

exceptional we humans

are a walking paradox

and because leadership is a human

endeavor it

too can be paradoxical

a great example is america’s 16th

president

abraham lincoln if you come to my

hometown

of washington d.c you can visit the

lincoln memorial

and if you walk into the memorial and

you look up

you will find inscribed on the wall the

words of the gettysburg address

and there at the top you will note the

famous line

hearkening back to millions of years ago

all men are created equal

and then if you look up to lincoln

himself

you might note that one of his hands is

in a fist

and the other hand is relaxed

symbolizing the fact that lincoln’s

leadership was effective

because it was a combination of both his

strength

and his compassion

this tension

reveals the ways in which sometimes we

want our leaders to stand up

open their mouths and deliver us a

rousing speech

and sometimes we want our leaders

to sit down shut their mouths and listen

this tension explains why it is that

sometimes we want the master

who inspires us with a particular vision

for the future

but sometimes we want the servant

who allows us to achieve that vision

in our own way the reality of leadership

is that it reflects the duality of human

nature

and that’s why we experience leadership

as a paradox and there is no greater

paradox

than finding strength in weakness

we like to celebrate washington’s

strength as him crossing the delaware

but the reality is that america’s first

president

was actually america’s humblest

president

george washington refused the trappings

of power he refused a third term he

voluntarily stepped down

at a time when all of his counterparts

were taking the title

your majesty he took the title

mr president we may insist on seeing him

as a master

but he insisted on us calling him mister

that’s why we need to stop referring to

our leaders as either weak or strong

because so-called strong leaders expose

us to weakness through their domineering

styles

and so-called weak law leaders are often

the strongest

because their humility unlocks the power

in all of us

my most memorable moment working for

america’s 43rd president

was when president bush simply invited

me to join him on a bike ride

and my most memorable moment working for

america’s 44th president

was when president obama stepped aboard

air force one

and told us about his experience the

previous night

as a father watching his oldest daughter

go to her prom the most effective

leaders are the ones

who impress us not only with their bold

sense of vision

but with their bold sense of humanity

and the true test of leadership is

whether our leaders

reflect both sides of this duality

we need leaders strong enough to confess

their weaknesses

we need leaders strong enough to profess

their ignorance

we need leaders who will give us not

only a bold

sense of who we want to be

but equally an honest sense

of who we really are thank you