Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer

by Margot Morrell

When crisis strikes, immediately address your staff. Take charge of the situation, offer a plan of action, ask for support, and show absolute confidence in a positive outcome.

Get rid of unnecessary middle layers of authority. Direct leadership is more efficien...

Keep your malcontents close to you. Resist your instinct to avoid them and instead try to win them over and gain their support.

Be patient. Sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing but watch and wait.

Give your staff plenty of time to get used to the idea of an unpopular decision by leaking early details.

Mr. Larken points out that high-level managers tend to be very competent at their day-to-day business— they have to be to rise as far as they have. They are not, however, always good at handling a unique and rapidly unfolding crisis, when they have to respond immediately and with only limited information. "A lot of managers assume that crisis is ordinary business accelerated, but you need to organize quite differently and set up different communication," he says.

In a crisis, Shackleton never held onto emotional baggage. "The thing I particularly admire him for is his ability to refocus unerringly on actuality," Mr. Larken says. "He was brilliant at turning people around and making them see the new situation."

Larken briefs his clients, he sometimes uses a quick comparative sketch of Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, to point to Shackleton's unique strengths. For Scott: ambitious, naïve technically, hierarchical, arrogant, wary of colleagues more able than himself, indifferent selector, poor trainer, bad safety record, a gifted author. Amundsen: single-minded, objective, meticulous technically and as a planner, good safety record, formidable but not charismatic, realistic, lonely, supreme achiever. For Shackleton: single-minded, excelled in crisis, technically sensible but not innovative, gregarious, excellent public speaker, broadly objective, good conceptual planner, effective selector and trainer, good safety record, erratic in business, bored by administration, politically astute.

He also suggests executives build trust by following Shackleton's example of being "genuinely and demonstratively considerate of your team's welfare— and consistently so." A trusted leader will find a staff willing to support almost any decision.

"The onset of crisis is too late to decide to become an effective leader; the process must be a perennial and cumulative part of each manager's personal development plan and practice," Mr. Larken tells his clients. "The sooner this is started as a systematic process, the better, but now is probably not too late."

Shackleton headed the best and biggest boat and picked the weakest crewmen to accompany him.

It might have exasperated the weary crew, struggling so hard against huge odds, but Shackleton was certain each time that it was a necessary change, and his men trusted his judgment. James explained years later: "Well-settled plans would suddenly be changed with little warning and a new set made. This was apt to be a little bewildering but it generally turned out to be for the good. This adaptability was one of his strong points. With him it was never a wavering between two ideas. It was a conviction that the second one was a better one and acted accordingly."

At 1:30 P.M. they watched a little steamer entering the bay twenty-five hundred feet below. They saw small figures on the boats, the first men they had seen outside the Endurance crew since they had left South Georgia more than eighteen months before. Then they saw the station factory.

Shackleton shook his companions' hands in a gesture of congratulations.

"Life to me means the greatest of all games. The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game, a game to be taken lightly, and a game in which the rules don't matter much. The rules matter a great deal. The game has to be played fairly, or it is no game at all. And even to win the game is not the chief end. The chief end is to win it honorably and splendidly. To this chief end several things are necessary. Loyalty is one. Discipline is another. Unselfishness is another. Courage is another. Optimism is another. And Chivalry is another."

SHACKLETON'S THOUGHTS ON LEADERSHIP • "There are lots of good things in the world, but I'm not sure that comradeship is not the best of them all— to know that you can do something big for another chap."

"The loyalty of your men is a sacred trust you carry. It is something which must never be betrayed, something you must live up to."