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