Leaders: Myth and Reality

by General Stanley McChrystal

We can see clearly—but still look past—the awkward reality that effective leaders often have traits that most leadership guides would either spurn or not even see fit to discuss.

The myth of the “great man” theory is, of course, patently patriarchal. Historical records are dominated by such “great men,” and it’s only recently that this trend has begun to become more balanced. Still, not even all Great Man leaders in history were men, and Cleopatra and Joan of Arc are classic counterexamples, as was Margaret Thatcher within our list. Nonetheless, the gender imbalance in leadership is both disturbing and unhealthy, and has deep roots in the history of leadership. Recent indicators show how far we still have to go. For example, it is not surprising that there were more men than women among the CEOs of the S&P 1500 in 2015. But it is disconcerting to learn that there were more men named John than there were women. And there is ample data to suggest that gender inequality is counterproductive to firms and to society as a whole. Studies have shown a relationship between gender diversity and organizational preference. As with much of the research on leadership, this is generally a matter of correlation, and not causation, but it seems clear that organizations with more female senior leaders might be at an advantage. A range of plausible explanations has been offered as to why.

Gender bias is but one of a handful of factors in which we think of leadership as being embedded in personal attributes, behaviors, and traits. Evidence suggests how flippant and superficial people can be in rationalizing what leaders should ideally look like. Study after study shows that one’s leadership opportunities are a function of gender, height, and even face width. Six hundred years after Zheng He was selected as admiral, in part because his facial features prophesied loyalty to his emperor, it’s a reminder that not too much has changed.

It seems clear that the problem of gender disparity in leadership positions is at least partly due to our leader-centric ways of thinking. But it is only one of many toxic effects of this deeply entrenched approach to leadership. Great man theory, as the name would suggest, encourages people to become great individuals, rather than encouraging a whole organization to become great together. Great man theory suggests that it’s more about the attributes of the single leader than the attributes of the system; more about the “I” than the “we.”

The Attribution Myth misrepresents leadership as little more than a process directed by the leader and, in this view, outcomes are attributable mostly to that leader. We see this myth in action when we adjudicate what success and failure should be laid at leaders’ feet, and when leaders’ followers demand too much of them. As a result, our typical framing of leadership neglects the many other factors embedded in the leadership ecosystem. We overstate the influence of individual leaders, and neglect that the real agency in leadership is bound up in a system of followers.

Accounts of Thatcher’s leadership during her premiership often implied that she led as though her hand was at the tiller of a ship, steering as she pleased. But Thatcher was less a hand on the tiller and more a star on the horizon, suggesting a general course to steer for a ship being buffeted by a stormy sea.

Leadership is never about the capacity and impact of a single person. And to be judged fairly, leadership styles must be viewed not just at a specific time but also in a particular framework. The context of an enabling institution is often necessary to substantiate leadership.

Today, when leadership is discussed, we usually purport to be discussing what leaders do, rather than what they say, as if this were a more clear-eyed approach. This brings us to the third myth, the “Results Myth,” capturing the falsehood that the objective results of the leader’s activity are more important than her words or style or appearance. The truth is that when we look closely, we see leadership as much in what our leaders symbolize as in what they accomplish.

The prevalence of these three myths is hardly revelatory, and academic theorists have been suggesting elements of them for decades. But somehow their existence is ignored, and discussion of them is confined to the kinds of literature that do not make for light reading. Volume after volume, and study after study, have tried to steer us away from individual leader traits and toward relationships among networks of followers. And yet there remains a wide gap between how we think of leadership and how it actually works. Why is this? It was in hindsight, after we finished writing most of this book, that we found an unexpected answer to this essential question. And the clue was found, of all places, in our approach to the book itself.

It is difficult to step back from Plutarch’s masterpiece and see his “top ten” list of qualities one should emulate, for he left no such capstone for how to be an effective leader. His goal was not to offer a programmatic lens for leaders to take away, and Plutarch generally had the good sense to refrain from distilling his observations into generalizations. Instead, Plutarch hoped that his readers would explore how they might emulate his leaders and the dimensions of their virtue. Accordingly, Plutarch’s essential question was “What was his character?” This is where we deviated sharply from Plutarch’s method. Our interest was not in the character of leaders, but in leadership itself. Our original research question was different: simply, “How did he or she lead?” We reminded ourselves of this essential question often, asking this of each other as we turned page after page of each biography and scanned each archive. To ask “How did they lead?” feels uncontroversial, with the ring of a familiar shorthand. However, over time, we came to see that very question as nonsensical, itself a reflection of the very myths we sought to explore.

Our question was guilty of suggesting that an answer could be found in the leader, divorced from its relevant context. The more sensible questions, which we came to only through repeated exploration of the wrong question, were “Why did they emerge as a leader?” or, more specifically, “What was it about the situation that made this style of leadership effective?”

The first real competitor to trait-based leadership was introduced in the mid-twentieth century by behavioral theorists, for whom leadership involved an education; they insisted that leaders were made, not born. On that assumption, leadership was less intrinsic to a person’s character and was more about learned behavior, and therefore more accessible. Not surprisingly, it was about then, when the Great Man seemed to be losing some of his luster, that would-be leaders stopped reading Plutarch. This transition also coincided with the post–World War II boom in industrialization, which created strong demand for management of factory workers. In this new reality, leaders could now be fashioned from whole cloth. Also not surprising, this period saw the rise of a for-profit “leadership industry” to train and develop leaders. In turn, the view that leadership could be taught only helped spur the idea that it was a learnable set of skills. And while thinking about leadership as a set of learned behaviors was democratizing in its implications, it ultimately did little to divert attention away from the individual leaders themselves.

The shift toward “followership” didn’t occur until the 1970s, when leadership theory took another major step with the arrival of “servant leadership.” Fittingly, those who preach and practice servant leadership see power in the system, not in themselves, and they condemn the commanding pull of the strong man as exploitative. Instead, for servant leaders, it’s the bottom of the pyramid that matters most. Events and outcomes are made possible by a particular group of people, and it is the leader’s job to supply them with whatever they need and to cultivate the environment most conducive to collective success.

Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize a decade after he led the Allies to victory over Nazi Germany, but he did not attend his 1953 award ceremony. Instead, Lady Churchill stood and curtsied to the Swedish king, who ceremoniously handed her the small stack of items that constitutes a Nobel Prize, topped by the medal itself, cast as a solid-silver mold of Churchill’s 1937 book, Great Contemporaries, reflecting the fact that Churchill’s Nobel Prize was for literature, of all things. Inscribed across that silver book was the award’s citation of his “mastery of historical and biographic description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” It was both ironic and telling that one of the twentieth century’s most lionized leaders received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his “brilliant” oration. It was ironic because of Churchill’s speech impediment as a child. And it was telling because it underlines how often leadership is rooted in communication and narrative.

In the 1990s, neoclassical economics faced many such puzzles, with gaps between how the theory suggested “economic actors” behaved and how real humans actually behaved in practice. For a long while, economics had been rooted in the concept of the “rational actor,” who was supposed to behave in predictable ways. For instance, as the theory goes, people respond to a rise in the cost of a good by buying less of it. Yet there is ample evidence that the economic choices of humans often defy this simple and logical principle.

We encounter such contradictions in what we want from leaders because human nature is itself similarly conflicted. Sometimes we are concerned about the collective, but we can be equally and irreconcilably self-regarding. Sometimes we ask for what is fair and reasonable; other times we are driven by more emotional forces. These human dualities are what makes leadership so complex and often so confounding.

This was perhaps the only common denominator among our profiles. Many of our leaders were made powerful not so much by what they did, or even by what they said, but by what their followers perceived they had to gain either individually or collectively by buying into what their leader was asking. They stood for the hopes and fears of a future state of being, and their role as leaders was in crafting a visceral sense of the possible.

Finally, this view of leadership also speaks to what makes leadership both so universally necessary and also so confounding. Leaders are necessary because we tend to understand the world through individuals who organize into various structures as a way of fulfilling collective needs. This is particularly important in our current digital age, for there will still be a unique niche for human learning and organic intelligence, and it is in this enduring sphere that leadership will remain prized.

As an enabler of a system, leaders should shift their mindset to think of themselves as a node in a network, rather than the top apex of a triangle. As a node, they shift from mere decision maker to a more powerful cultivator, and serve as both a bottom-up servant to enable action and a top-down symbol to motivate and provide for meaning. In this way, leaders need to be retrained and should come to think of themselves as fulfilling both functions.

If we were to bring more behavioral science to leadership, the legacies and legends of our heroes serve as a useful reminder of why narratives that offer both understanding and mystery can be a powerful and compelling form of influence.

There are also considerable implications for those in the business of studying leadership and training leaders. Very few of the thirteen people we profiled were trained in any formal way as a leader. Well before the arrival of the modern leadership industry, leaders still found paths to lead in a great variety of contexts. Many simply fell into the role, or were pulled into it. For most, no one could have told them how to prepare for those roles. But just as this view doesn’t imply that leaders are unimportant, it also can’t be taken to mean that leaders shouldn’t be trained. Rather, it suggests that the training of leaders is still necessary and important, but how leaders are trained and developed should be revisited. In particular, leaders shouldn’t be given a checklist of attributes. Rather, they should be equipped with an understanding of leadership as a system, see themselves as the enablers of that system, and learn how to adjust their approach based on the needs of that system.

The real lesson is that what we think we see—in artwork or in a leader—is often more consequential than the reality. For instance, Lee’s legacy as a leader is increasingly wrapped up in how he is depicted as a symbol and less in his performance as a former military general. This is again proof that what we mean by leadership can be intensely contextual and shift over time. But it is even greater evidence that leadership is inseparable from how human systems derive meaning.