Leaders: Myth and Reality

by General Stanley McChrystal

I found that leaders who exhibited all the right traits often fell short, while others who possessed none of the characteristics of traditional leadership succeeded. The things we sought and celebrated in leaders had confusingly little linkage to outcomes. The study of leadership increasingly seemed to be a study of myth, with a significant gap between how we speak of it and how it is experienced.

Between the two effects, we devise narratives that obscure the role of followers and wrongly attribute complex outcomes to mere individuals:

Here lies the root cause of the mythology of leadership—its relentless focus on the leader. For years, human beings have searched for the secret of leadership by studying why certain leaders achieve enviable results where others do not. To the detriment of the study of leadership, rarely do we look to the individuals around the senior leader. We assume the leader controls the process, undervaluing the role of followers and situational context. Moreover, we pretend that leadership is goals-driven, and that good outcomes can be gained through the correct formula of effective leadership. We wrongly believe that what happened in one leadership instance can be replicated in another.

This common understanding of leadership, when held up against the reality of how leadership actually works, reveals three myths, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the book’s final two chapters: The Formulaic Myth: In our attempt to understand process, we strive to tame leadership into a static checklist, ignoring the reality that leadership is intensely contextual, and always dependent upon particular circumstances. The Attribution Myth: We attribute too much to leaders, having a biased form of tunnel vision focused on leaders themselves, and neglecting the agency of the group that surrounds them. We’re led to believe that leadership is what the leader does, but in reality, outcomes are attributable to far more than the individual leader. The Results Myth: We say that leadership is the process of driving groups of people toward outcomes. That’s true, to a point, but it’s much broader than that. In reality, leadership describes what leaders symbolize more than what they achieve. Productive leadership requires that followers find a sense of purpose and meaning in what their leaders represent, such as social identity or some future opportunity.

In reality, and across the profiles in this book, we see that leadership is about much more than outcomes; it is equally concerned with how complex human groups optimize their cooperation and how individuals find symbols of meaning and purpose in life. This optimization and sense of meaning emerge from the interaction of a wide range of constantly shifting variables that include far more than the individual leader. Leadership is coproduced by leaders and followers, emerging between the influential and charismatic who crave it and the hopeful and fearful who demand it.

It is often difficult to separate the leader from the mythology that has grown around him or her, and Lee is no exception.

Leadership is better judged as either effective or not. Was Lee effective? In large ways yes, and in many ways no.

For leaders, it can be exquisitely complex. Whether out of strong belief, a sense of duty, or another purpose, a leader may work, politic, or fight for a cause some judge reprehensible. But the moral validity of the cause doesn’t determine the success or effectiveness of the leadership. Great leaders can serve bad causes as often as lousy leaders represent the most noble of efforts.

This is an important position. Ever since James MacGregor Burns wrote Leadership in 1978, there has been a school of thought that equated "leadership" with morality. If you weren't working for good, then Burns and others said it wasn't leadership.

Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.

Lee’s competence as a professional soldier is well grounded. But the reality is that while many of the Confederacy’s shortcomings were the result of material limitations and the Confederacy’s awkward relationship with the individual state governments, accounts that the Army of Northern Virginia was also a less disciplined and efficient force than circumstances demanded are convincing.

In an age of mass armies, how well an army executed the mundane functions of logistics, field sanitation, and medical operations, or managed personnel, furlough, and legal requirements, was (and remains) as critical as battlefield brilliance.

One of Lee’s most noted critics, the retired British Major General J. F. C. Fuller, lays responsibility directly at the feet of the Commanding General: “this lack of appreciation that administration is the foundation of strategy; this lack of interest in routine, and abhorrence to exert his authority, maintained his army in a state of semi-starvation and were the causes of much of its straggling and ill-discipline.” Historians differ on the validity of Fuller’s critique, but throughout the war, Lee’s forces, hamstrung by sources of supply dep...

Although many of the commanders touted Mexican War experience, most had served as staff officers—none, save President Jefferson Davis, had senior command of troops in the field.

Where commanders like Stonewall Jackson thrived on operational freedom of action, Lee’s command approach of broad “mission style” instructions—where subordinates are told what they need to accomplish rather than how to accomplish it—was hugely successful. But with less confident commanders, these general, sometimes vague, orders intended to provide flexibility led to problems. Where both the commander and situation aligned, as with Jackson at Chancellorsville, the result was sublime. On other occasions, as with the failure of Lieutenant General Richard Ewell to capture the decisive terrain of Cemetery Hill on the first day at Gettysburg, Lee’s reluctance to be clear and direct carried painful consequences.

Within the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee was held in particularly reverent repute, a fact that is worthy of further contemplation. Although his veteran campaigners savored some of the highest-profile victories of the war highlighted by physical privation—soldiers often marching staggering distances barefoot—serving under General Lee was also a frighteningly lethal prospect. Even while routing their Union foes, Lee’s ranks bled profusely. Over the course of his years in command, an infantryman in the Army of Northern Virginia had a 67.7 percent chance of becoming a combat casualty or being killed by disease. For those who joined Lee’s Army in 1861, 74.4 percent of infantrymen would die of disease or become casualties, and for those who joined in 1862, the chances were 83.1 percent.

With the distance of time, amid the emotion and among the shadows, how do we judge Robert E. Lee—a leader I’d been raised to admire? The contradiction between the soldier whose qualities were held up for veneration and his effort to maintain slavery and divide the nation is clear. But apart from that, as a leader, what difference did he really make? How do we judge any leader? And what does our selection of leaders and heroes say about us?

Whatever the state of her business—and much would change over the remaining half century of her life—Coco Chanel always prioritized creative control over everything else.

be. We also have a natural bias for attributing what works out well—in the end—as being the “right” formula for success. Yet such attribution is blind to the role of context and chance in devising such formulae, and can’t possibly consider the lessons of the thousands of would-be artists and animators who failed to capture the biographer’s spotlight.

While Chanel and Disney are quintessential case studies of entrepreneurial leadership, and as much as we can understand their success through the context of timing and their ability to create, we’re still left puzzling over the magnetic pull of their often-abrasive personalities. Indeed, the reality of their leadership styles is not something we’d try to teach or mimic. And while these two leaders might not be able to teach us much about how to lead, they do offer lessons in why we follow.

We seem willing to follow leaders who put the mission first because we all make trade-offs, and life is rarely simple or idealized. We want to be happy in our work, but athletes also want to win, soldiers want to survive the battle, and businesspeople hope to prosper. That’s not to rationalize successful leaders who have a mean streak. It’s simply to say that a nice personality is not necessarily required for holding a compelling vision for the future. And when forced to choose, we’ll sometimes take a leader’s vision over their style. More broadly, if a leader is giving us what we think we need, we don’t always care how they get us there.

Each of us has varying abilities that can be developed into competencies, but a quantum leap above lies the qualitatively different category of genius. Beyond a useful gift, or natural cleverness, are abilities of stunning skill that separate a genius from the rest of us. In their particular field, whether narrow or broad, geniuses can do what most of us cannot. But does that make them leaders?

The resulting implication was that what we had come to think of as “gravity” between two objects was really just the acceleration that results when the mass of the objects bends the space and time around them. A common metaphor to visualize general relativity involves heavy balls on an elastic surface, as explained by biographer Walter Isaacson, who asks his reader to “picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric.”

Planck, as secretary of the Academy’s physical-mathematical “class,” delivered the public reply to Einstein’s inaugural lecture and began by praising him but went on to say that he “runs the risk of occasionally losing himself in dark regions and unexpectedly encountering hard contradiction.” Planck then said that he “could not resist the temptation” to argue that the special theory of relativity did not, in fact, need to be generalized. Planck dissented from Einstein’s most important new ideas at the very moment he was sponsoring Einstein’s induction into the Prussian Academy. As Planck continued in his response to Einstein’s inaugural lecture, “Not without some pride [in physics] . . . more easily than in other sciences, the sharpest factual differences can be carried out with personal high esteem and cordial friendship.”

As early as 1926, Einstein wrote to his friend Max Born, one of the founders of quantum mechanics: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing dice.” The same Max Born had earlier written that “the starting point of his considerations was a ‘remark by Einstein on the relation between [a] wavefield and light quanta.’” Einstein therefore ended up in fundamental disagreement with an idea that he had helped spawn in the first place.

His genius and the consequences of his efforts are undeniably real. But too often we miss the relationships that shaped and supported him. In the end, the magic of Einstein’s leadership wasn’t only his ability to run alongside waves of light, but his openness to having friends occasionally guide him.

We tend to see both leadership and genius as within an individual, rather than coming from a system. The popular idea of Einstein as a “lone genius” is appealing but inaccurate. It’s telling that Einstein’s correspondence is so prolific—he had a network of collaborators that proved critical to his achievement, and his genius was only made whole through the coupling of his legendary, solitary reflection with his lesser-known interpersonal collaboration.

There's an ecosystem, too.

This duality of collaboration and solitude cuts against our simple narrative of genius. It is tempting to distill both Bernstein and Einstein down to their dominant reputations, with Lenny as the archetypal extrovert who thrived on collaboration and shunned isolation and Einstein as his polar opposite. But the true depth of genius requires both individual skill and the feedback and challenge of collaboration to be made whole. These men may have seemed to contain their genius within themselves, but as with leadership, when we look closely, we see that their individual achievements are also inseparable from collective interaction within a system.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. —ANATOLE FRANCE

For many, the Frenchman Maximilien Robespierre, now more than two centuries dead, is a two-dimensional character who ruled over the chaos of revolutionary France with the guillotine. By contrast, the Jordanian Ahmad Fadeel Nazal al-Khalayleh (aka Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), the founder and leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, against whom we waged a bitter, blood-soaked campaign, seems to fit the context of our times. We reviled Zarqawi’s tactics, but we came to grudgingly respect his effectiveness and commitment. And as we studied Robespierre in history and Zarqawi in hindsight, the very real complexity of these leaders came into focus.

The zealots we profile frustrate the archetype of a “textbook” leader. But they’re a vital focus of any leadership study, because they lay bare the idea that leadership is a feedback loop more than a top-down process. Propelled by underlying chaos, their followers craved the magnetism that came to define Robespierre and Zarqawi. The feedback loop that propelled these zealots sheds light on a crucial question: How does leadership help take people to dark places?

In the midst of the chaos, the Convention increasingly centralized the management of revolutionary France. The most important of several committees was the Committee of Public Safety, which supervised investigations, surveillance, military affairs, and other important matters of policy. The Committee also oversaw the Revolutionary Tribunal, a twelve-person body responsible for hearing cases referred by the Convention and doling out punishment. As conditions in France unraveled from 1793 to 1794, and in an attempt to secure the Revolution’s gains, the Tribunal oversaw an increasing number of cases for increasingly minor crimes, conviction for which required ever lower burdens of proof. This devolution of France’s already shaky system of justice is known as the Reign of Terror. During this period, as many as forty thousand Frenchmen were executed. Robespierre was not the Terror’s architect—though, like many other politicians, he did help create the conditions that wrought its devastating impact.

In the days before his al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) became dominant within the insurgency, Zarqawi led by fighting alongside, influencing, and supporting anyone who could create trouble for the government and the Coalition. In visits to small cells of insurgents throughout the city, Zarqawi would dress in black and wear running shoes, recite jihadist poetry, and sing songs with the fighters. This hands-on leadership—starkly different from the taped encouragements put out at a distance by al-Qaeda’s senior officers-in-hiding—helped him create a mystique among the fighters on the ground in the thick of jihad. He was real, he was committed, and he was there.

going. Like all leaders, they were part of a system, and their leadership was inseparable from the rest of that system.

It is not a coincidence that each of these men led for less than five years, and then died a violent death. Zealots serve a special and powerful purpose, but their sort of leadership can be cyclical and short-lived. The better they play their role, the less tolerable the environment becomes. Like flames that consume all available oxygen and fuel, Zarqawi and Robespierre became the agents of their own destruction. And because their leadership was tied to their ideological purity, compromise wasn’t an option. Zealots become corseted by their own followers’ expectations.

While the terms “hero” and “leader” are not synonymous, heroes often serve as useful models of courage, stoicism, and sacrifice. And although not all heroes seek or accept the mantle of leadership, the example they set, and the inspiration it provides, can be noteworthy. We search for heroism, and where it suits us, we celebrate it. Where genuine heroes are not apparent, we create mythical ones. We focus on selected acts, ignoring others, and often burnish the hero’s image to a high sheen.

More than any other genre of leaders, heroes are a function of the judgment and needs of others. So what need do they fill, and how and why do we follow them? Key Books Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006) Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Heroic leadership is not simply a quality or entity possessed by someone; it is a type of relationship between leader and led. —JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS

What Campbell saw across the various myths of history was a similar pattern, which has been termed the “Hero’s Journey,” built around what Campbell called the “Monomyth.” George Lucas credited Campbell’s description of this narrative form as critical to the development of his Star Wars epic. By now, much of Hollywood has studied what Lucas learned from Campbell. Films that retell an epic story, such as Ben-Hur, or that follow the Hero’s Journey, such as The Lion King, are often among the most profitable.

Leadership is not magic, and it is an alluring illusion that there are individual heroes. Rather, the apparent magic stems from the alignment of the right person at the right time, surrounded by a group of people who both enable their activities and find meaning in what someone like Tubman or Zheng offers.

Power is about influence over a group—it’s inextricably linked to leadership, and yet we shade the idea of “power brokering” with a negative connotation and shine a positive light on the idea of “leading.”

It is not, then, so surprising that the grassroots organizers who worked with Thatcher in her first campaign referred to her in explicitly gendered terms: “plump, smart, pretty, loved hats, lovely skin,” and a woman who “always looked right.” In the UK, it would not be until 1975 that a woman could open her own bank account, and not until 1982 that she could buy her own drink in a pub.

In fact, power is found mostly in people’s perception of the leader, and at the point when people believe that a leader has lost it, they likely have.

Perception matters greatly, because power rarely resides within just an individual. Power is not an absolute state but an arrangement among stakeholders. It is bestowed upon the leader as much as it is taken by the leader. While we speak about power as something that a leader seizes and dispenses, it is more accurate to say that power exists within the system that envelops a leader, and reflects that system’s expectations of its leaders.

Fortuitously, one of the university’s founding faculty members, who had departed in 1505, had left behind his printing press, and skillful use of this new technology was already building reputations. The humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus had used it to become one of Europe’s first intellectual celebrities. Between 1514 and 1517, Erasmus was the most published man in Europe, as copies of his Greek New Testament, as well as editions of Seneca and St. Jerome, flooded the market, creating Erasmian disciples all throughout Europe. Print soon became a powerful tool for Luther as well, and by 1518 he had overtaken Erasmus to become the biggest-selling author in Europe. In fact, as the historian Mark Edwards has calculated, between 1518 and 1525, publications by Luther in German exceeded those of the seventeen other most prolific authors put together. This was the outset of a publishing career that would see him translate the Bible into German, a contribution that influences the language to this day. Clearly, from 1517 to 1518, something had changed.

Rustin best summarized the necessity of building upon Montgomery’s success in a letter to King on December 23, 1956, just two days after King took his ride on Montgomery’s first desegregated bus. In Rustin’s thinking, “Montgomery possessed three features which are not found in other movements or efforts.” First, it had “given people something to belong to which had the inspiring power of the Minute Men, the Sons of Liberty, and other organized forms which were products of an earlier American era of fundamental change.” Second, through its sheer competence, the Montgomery movement had won the respect of whites. Third, it had “relied upon the active participation of people who had a daily task of action and dedication. The movement did not rely exclusively on a handful of leaders to carry through such fundamental change.”

Reform, it seems, is irreducible to a single, climactic event, speech, or court case. Instead, it is an extended process—a journey that twists, turns, starts, and stops, as though it were an animate object that defies control by a single individual. Our reformers were riders on an unruly horse, normally expending as much energy to hang on as to direct where, or how fast, the animal was going. While they achieved substantial results, success was never a sure thing. Not only was there no common formula for reform, they were more often the symbols of a cause than the doers of change.

Neither King nor Luther knew exactly what they were getting themselves into when they were handed the mantle of “leader.” But they accepted the role and carried on.

And yet Churchill’s record was hardly consistent and only occasionally deserving of such hyperbole. It was audacity that made him effective as a painter and became the hallmark of his leadership, but how well it served him depended greatly on the particulars of the situation. Churchill’s audacity gave him the courage to fight rather than negotiate terms with a seemingly invincible Nazi Germany, but periodically also resulted in some disastrous forays, such as at Gallipoli. And that famous wartime audacity also made for a far less effective peacetime leader. During his second tenure as prime minister, Churchill bungled vital efforts for bilateral talks with Russia concerning nuclear weapons, and far too much of his administration’s energy was taken up deciding who should be anointed as his successor. Attributes that had been essential to his wartime leadership could not be readily transformed to the new realities of postwar Britain. Nonetheless, over time the legacy of his bold successes would eclipse his audacious failures, and his record as a wartime leader relegated his pastime of painting to become a mere footnote in a storied career.

The Formulaic Myth reflects our desire to tame leadership into a static checklist, notwithstanding the reality that leadership is intensely contextual and always dependent upon particular circumstances that change from moment to moment and from place to place.

This question of timing is often overlooked. What we call “leadership” is often some combination of the leader’s actions, along with serendipity or other contextual factors that make for a positive result. Deciding to “do a Luther” is unlikely to lead to a similarly memorable outcome—most of us would simply be branded a crazed monk.