1 week Ago By Martin Gutmann
It seems Ernest Shackleton’s legend has set sail again, this time courtesy of National Geographic and Disney+, which just released a new documentary on the discovery of the famed Anglo Irish explorer’s lost ship. Shackleton is best known for the trials of his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica, which set off in summer 1914 and saw his ship trapped and swallowed by the ice pack. He and his crew were forced to undertake a dangerous trek across the ice and brave the stormiest seas on Earth until reaching the safety of South Georgia Island in May 1916.
His tale is irresistibly cinematic: the icebound ship, the desperate march to safety, the unflagging motivational speeches. It is that rare real-life event that follows a dramatic storytelling arc as well as the best Hollywood script. Even today, his tale provides enduring fodder for bestselling books, business school case studies and social media posts that mine it for leadership lessons and insights.
The HMS Endurance is seen caught in the ice in the Weddell Sea of the Antarctic during Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, circa 1915. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) But our obsession with Shackleton is emblematic of a problematic tendency: that of celebrating bold, brash and action-prone leaders who, it turns out on closer inspection, stumbled from one self-inflicted crisis to another. As one of Shackleton’s contemporaries, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, rightly quipped, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.
” Yet to those of us looking for social media- or bestseller-ripe leadership takeaways, this hardly matters. A good story, it seems, has more cachet than actual leadership competency. And this truth extends far beyond polar exploration.
A series of contemporary studies have shown that we tend to assess leadership potential by a narrow set of easily observable but largely irrelevant traits. According to a 2020 study , those who speak the most are perceived as having the most leadership mettle, regardless of what they actually say. Other studies have found that we see leadership potential in those who act “assertively and forcefully,” regardless of their competence or, as it may be, incompetence.
Meanwhile, Harvard Business School professor Thomas DeLong coined the term “the busyness trap” to describe our admiration for those who are perpetually busy. In other words, in our offices today, appearing leaderlike, rather than actually demonstrating sound judgment and an ability to inspire others, is often the path to recognition, promotion and fame. Shackleton is a case in point.
Despite his heroic efforts to lead his crew to safety, the crisis he faced was largely of his own making. He disregarded seasoned whalers’ warnings about hazardous ice conditions and failed to select, train and equip his crew properly. Even more damning, the expedition’s second ship, the Aurora, faced an even graver crisis than the Endurance, resulting in three lost lives — a detail often brushed aside in glowing accounts of Shackleton’s “leadership prowess.
” His most demonstrable skill, it turns out, was not so much leading, but rather managing to overcome his own ineptitude despite long odds. His record as an explorer is an unimpressive 0 for 4: He was part of four expeditions to the South Pole but never reached it. In fact, in this heyday of polar exploration, he failed to claim any of the era’s grand objectives: the North and South poles and the Northeast and the Northwest passages.
Meanwhile, Roald Amundsen, that comparatively dull but competent Norwegian, ticked them off with precision. His expeditions may lack the high drama of Shackleton’s, but they offer lessons in careful preparation and steady competence. His expeditions are, compared to Shackleton’s, unexciting stories.
And, perhaps precisely for this reason, few have heard of him. The lesson here? True leadership isn’t about swaggering through crises of one’s own making or dazzling us with dramatic heroics. It’s about foresight, preparation and avoidance of a crisis in the first place.
Celebrating leaders such as the Shackletons of our offices, while overlooking the quieter, more competent Amundsens out there, perpetuates a toxic admiration for flashy bluster and missteps over steady success. The danger extends beyond overlooking brilliant but understated leaders. As leadership scholar Keith Grint notes , our fascination with action-oriented figures can become self-perpetuating.
Once people realize they are rewarded for hyperactive responses to crises, they learn to “seek out — or reframe situations as crises.” One need only look around the office or the news cycle to glimpse this phenomenon in action: The key to garnering influence, favor and, for that matter, votes, appears increasingly to be bold proclamations and ceaseless agitation in the face of a real or imagined threat. Let’s leave Shackleton where he belongs — celebrated as a gallant adventurer, sure, but on an ice floe of cautionary tales.
The next time we seek out great leaders, let’s look past the dramatic and toward those who quietly get the job done. We might be surprised at what (and whom) we find. Martin Gutmann is an American professor at the Lucerne School of Business in Switzerland and the author of “The Unseen Leader.
How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership.” Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected] .
.
