The Unseen Leader: the Power of Understated Leadership with Martin Gutmann Ph.D.
Martin Gutmann - Historian, author, professor and TED speaker
Martin’s research focuses on leaders who largely remained unseen and unwritten about through the pages of history. Not because their impact and influence wasn’t substantial, but because they don’t comply with the compelling heroes' tale, and offer us an opportunity to redefine what true leadership is.
Martin Gutmann Ph.D., is a Swiss-American historian, author, and professor at the Lucerne School of Business, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland. He has published three books, most recently (as co-editor with Dan Gorman) Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion (Oxford University Press). He lives in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, with his wife and their three children.
Picture this: It’s the early 20th century, 1912 in fact, and you’re a worthy seaman fated to cross the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic Ocean from Europe in an attempt to be the world's first. During this journey you’ll face the world's most extreme freezing temperatures, encounter endless days and nights of darkness, and the only people you’ll see during this multi-year journey are your fellow sailors - day in, day out. This will test your mental, emotional and physical endurance beyond measure.
In this situation, would you rather be a) be led by a gregarious, action oriented leader who’s quick to act, and who holds great conviction in his decisions made.
Or b) be led by a quiet and unassuming leader, who rather than imposes unfaltering ideas, is open to iterating and adapting along the journey as needed.
As history reveals to us - we have a tendency to bias leaders who create the most energetic and loudest response in the face of crisis. This is a concept coined the Action Fallacy and one that we’ll explore on We Are Human Leaders today with Swiss-American, Historian, Author and Professor at Loo-cern School of Business in Switzerland, Martin Gutmann.
Leadership is one of the most hyped topics in business today. But are the historical archetypes of Leadership really the inspiration we should be drawing on?
In this episode we’re unpacking the recent book of Martin Gutmannn, The Unseen Leader which is an exploration of leadership through the lens of historical scholarship, offering a less sensationalized and stereotypical protagonist's tale of leadership.
Martin’s research focuses on leaders who largely remained unseen and unwritten about through the pages of history. Not because their impact and influence wasn’t substantial, but because they don’t comply with the compelling heroes' tale, and offer us an opportunity to redefine what true leadership is.
Martin Gutmann Ph.D., is a Swiss-American historian, author, and professor at the Lucerne School of Business, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland. He has published three books, most recently (as co-editor with Dan Gorman) Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion (Oxford University Press). He lives in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, with his wife and their three children.
This episode will undoubtedly have you rethinking your ideas and preconceptions around what makes a great leader - it certainly challenged our thinking, too - now let’s dive in.
Learn more about Martin Gutmann, and get a copy of The Unseen Leader here:
Connect with Martin Gutmann on LinkedIn and via his website.
Get your copy of The Unseen Leader here.
Episode Transcript:
Alexis Zahner (00:09.71)
Picture this, it's the early 20th century, 1912 in fact, a neural worthy seaman fated to cross the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic Ocean from Europe in an attempt to be the world's first. During this journey, you'll face the world's most extreme freezing temperatures, encounter endless days and nights of darkness, and the only people you'll see.
during this multi -year journey are your fellow sailors, day in, day out. It will test your mental, emotional, and physical endurance beyond measure. In this situation, would you rather A, be led by a gregarious, action -orientated leader who's quick to act and who holds great conviction in his decisions made? Or B, be led by a quiet and unassuming leader
who rather than imposes unfaltering ideas is open to iterating and adapting along the journey as needed. As history reveals to us, we have a tendency to bias leaders who create the most energetic and loudest response in the face of crisis. This is a concept coined the action fallacy and one that we'll explore on We Are Human Leaders today with Swiss -American historian,
author and professor at Lucerne School of Business in Switzerland, Martin Gutman. Leadership is one of the most hyped topics in business today. But are the historical archetypes of leadership really the inspiration we should be drawing on? I'm Alexis Zahner and together with my co -host Sally Clark, in this episode we're unpacking the recent book of Martin Gutman, The Unseen Leader.
which is an exploration of leadership through the lens of historical scholarship, offering a less sensationalized and stereotypical protagonist tale of leadership. Martin's research focuses on leaders who largely remained unseen and unwritten about through the pages of history. Not because their impact and influence wasn't substantial, but because they don't comply with the compelling hero's tale and offer us an opportunity to
Alexis Zahner (02:31.79)
redefine what leadership truly is. This episode will undoubtedly have you rethinking your ideas and preconceptions around what makes a great leader. It's certainly challenged our thinking too. Now let's dive in.
Alexis Zahner (02:50.99)
Welcome to We Are Human Leaders, Martin. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here with us in conversation today.
Martin Gutmann
Well, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm very happy to be a guest on this podcast that I've listened to for a long time. It's always fun to be on the other end of things. And what brought me to the work that I'm doing today? I have a relatively international background. I grew up in Sweden, Japan, the US.
Now I live in southern Germany, work in Switzerland, have also worked in southern Africa sometimes. So that definitely characterizes how I look at the world. And by training, I'm a historian, but I have taught in business schools for most of my academic career. So I think that's also perhaps something a bit unique about the perspective that I bring to questions around leadership and management. Thank you so much. It sounds like Martin that...
Sally Clarke
I can imagine growing up in these different cultures that that awakens in you a kind of innate curiosity about the differences in how humans behave and how indeed also how humans lead. Is there sort of a connection between that background and that sort of upbringing and your work as a historian? I've never thought of it that way. It's very possible actually that having experienced and lived in so many different cultures awakened a curiosity in me about human.
generalities and differences. That's definitely something I've always been curious about in all my work. You know, I'm a historian, but always with, let's say a social psychology lens. I'm curious about why people, especially in groups behave the way they do. So yeah, that's possible. I haven't thought of it that way, but I think, you know, how we grew up characterizes us in ways that we're often not even aware of.
And reflecting on your book, Martin, it seems as though you like to challenge some of the long held preconceptions in history. Do you feel like, has this always been part of who you are, someone who likes to challenge status quo and rethink what we feel to be right about the world or history in your case? No, not at all. Okay. At least not the way I perceive myself. I think I tend to in social situations avoid...
Martin Gutmann (04:59.662)
conflict that tend to be the conforming type. So yeah, I definitely don't have a track record of challenging the status quo. So not a revolutionary in that sense. Perhaps seeking new ways of looking at narratives that we take as being simply how it is. That's certainly one of the things I took from your incredible new book, The Unseen Leader, is that there is this kind of fresh lens that we can gain when we have different perspectives given to...
these stories that we know so well. And I think it's really exciting for us to read and to start to really challenge these ideas that we just take for granted. No, you're right. And I think in my case, that book and its perspective wasn't born from some innate urge for revolt that I have, but it just kind of presented itself through the various perspectives that I had given my career and my life. What I mean by that is, you know, I'm a trained historian, I have written a lot of historical works, done a lot of historical research, and then I find myself teaching in a management
setting. And as is always the case, people who are brought up within a certain academic culture, within discipline have certain assumptions and they're often very different from the people in a neighboring discipline. And so if you're in this environment where you have a different background and suddenly you're dealing with management scholars and management questions and management students, you realize, well, my assumptions are entirely different. And that's where this book was born from simply that how leaders are described in a lot of management and leadership studies today.
doesn't quite conform to how historians see individuals having been influenced in the grand events of the past. So we're going to delve deeper into your incredible book shortly, Martin, and explore these four leaders that you've highlighted as unseen leaders and unpacking some of the qualities that they have. But I'd love to start by exploring the concept of the action fallacy, which you raise quite early in the book. And if you can sort of explain for us what exactly that means and also how it impacts our perception of what makes a great leader.
Yeah, I mean, we talked about assumptions before and, you know, extracting lessons from past historical figures is actually a very popular form of studying leadership. Many people do it, but not all of them are necessarily trained historians. It's just, you know, these stories from past leaders, be it Churchill or JFK or Napoleon, they're inspiring, they're exciting. And so why not use that to draw lessons that we can use today? However, what I noticed is that
Alexis Zahner (07:23.95)
often the stories we pull from the past are of those leaders who were the most action oriented, who suffered the gravest crisis, who had to fight the hardest. In other words, the most entertaining stories. And so that's what I term the action fallacy, that we have this tendency to zero in on the historical figures who were the most exciting, when in fact, very often the reason why their stories are so action packed is because they made a lot of mistakes.
And in fact, the really effective leaders, you know, sometimes their stories make for boring reading because they were able to avoid or mitigate the dramatic circumstances. So that's the action fallacy, our assumption that the more drama there was, the more of a leadership challenge it was and the better the leader responded.
And Martin, I think something else that I derived from that as well was that there's this assumption that to be a leader, there has to be a crisis for us to be responding to. And through reading your book, especially in the first chapter alone, reviewing like the polar exploration and Shackleton in particular, seemed to be a victim of many of his own.
crises that he himself had actually found himself in by virtue of perhaps poor judgment or misunderstanding the circumstances he was going to find himself in his crew in. Does that feel like it rings true for you as well? Absolutely. And I wouldn't say that if there is a crisis, then then it's necessarily poor leadership. Sometimes, you know, there's a crisis that cannot be avoided that has nothing to do with your planning or how you responded. However, the opposite is also not true. So, you know, if there is these characters who
always find themselves in a crisis. Shackleton is a case in point. I mean, every one of his expeditions ended in near death or death. We have to ask ourselves, why does this always happen to this guy? Now he worked very admirably to get himself out of, you know, especially the endurance expedition, his famous expedition that so many books have been written about. So that's admirable in its own right. But if we want to extract some kind of general leadership lessons, if we want to glean some wisdom, why go with the guy who
Alexis Zahner (09:29.902)
always finds himself in a crisis. And that's where this idea of, I think, entertaining stories comes in. His life is really entertaining. I love reading the books about his challenges, but something that's entertaining is not necessarily the same thing as a valuable leadership parable. Hmm. I guess, interestingly, particularly since the industrial revolution as well, there's been, you know, in management and in leadership,
A lot of language like employee motivation, employee engagement, you know, getting people fired up to do often jobs that aren't super great. So I think that does lend itself to this idea of creating this like one idyllic hero who can bring the team together against all odds, inspire people to do this, do work.
And obviously you also speak in the book about the hero's journey. And I'd love to also unpack this a little bit more, cause I think it helps us understand the action fallacy piece. And that is what are some of the dangers when we do focus on a leader through this lens of the hero's journey. And how does that kind of trip us up when it comes to really identifying what it means to be a great leader? I mean, the first thing we have to say about the hero's journey and stories in general is that we humans are storytelling animals. We.
love stories, we use stories to make sense of the world. We use stories to transmit information from one generation to another. I mean, this is one of the things that has characterized humanity since our days in the caves and on the plains. You know, that's part of our DNA and the stories we tell about ourselves, I think even today are really profound. So there was some research out in Northwestern recently that suggested that.
having a purely positive, stress -free narrative of your past is not as beneficial to your development as having a narrative about your own life as having struggled and had successes. So we like this tension inherent in stories and the hero's journey, as you suggested, is the classic human story. It's the one plot that we are absolutely addicted to. Go back to the earliest books that were written all the way up to the big blockbusters today, Harry Potter and...
Alexis Zahner (11:37.646)
Matrix and Luke Skywalker. It's always the hero's journey. A man or more recently, sometimes also a woman, of course, but in our earlier stories, we were very centered on white men in particular. They are pulled out of some ordinary world into a crisis. They have to go through this inner transformation while they're transforming their followers. There's a near death experience and towards the end, of course, they manage to defeat this whatever evil is after them. And it's a great story. We're addicted to it. But again, is it really the best story to learn?
leadership from because we talked about Shackleton and actually his endurance expedition is the hero's journey. They're trapped. He has to fight his way out of this near death experience. So it's entertaining, but we have these other polar explorers who managed in the same environment, never to get stuck in the ice, never to have to face these circumstances. So if you ask me, those are the leaders we should be looking at. It's so interesting because I'm just thinking about how many leaders there must be through history who simply through.
good planning and good management and good anticipation and really informing themselves a lot about the situation that they're in and probably erring on the side of humility rather than arrogance that we're simply not aware of that don't actually rise to the surface in our sort of historical narrative because they don't have that kind of captivating hero's journey that we're all so addicted to. Sort of to that end, Martin, I'm really curious, you've highlighted in your book four,
particular leaders and some of them might be familiar to some readers, I have to admit that a couple weren't to me, but I'm really curious about what was your selection process? What were the criteria that you used to define these are the four leaders that I want to highlight in this context of this particular leadership lesson that they have for us, this unseen leadership. So.
What I didn't want to do was to fall for the action fallacy in the sense of I didn't want to just look back and see who was shouting the loudest, whose story is the most exciting. Let me examine that guy or that woman because it's an easy trap to fall into. Instead I worked, I came at it from the other way around. I asked myself, what were some really challenging episodes in human history? Challenging in the sense that there was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of moving parts and you know, so a real leadership challenge, so to speak. And then in these scenarios,
Alexis Zahner (13:50.254)
who is the person who had the most influence, whether that influence is easy to spot or not. And the periods I picked were the revolutionary period at the end of the 1700s, beginning of 1800s, we have the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and lots of revolutions in South America, the post -World War I Middle East, which is a very complex time in a very complex place, the Second World War and polar exploration, which has all of these.
dangerous lurking, lots of tough decisions to be made. And in each of those cases, I looked for the person who was able to actually do what they planned on doing through good decision -making, through motivating people well, and through good leadership. And then of course, there's a lot of other periods I could have looked at as well, but it's important for me as a historian to be able to read the sources. So there's a lot of...
great Chinese examples that I was interested in, but I can't read the appropriate sources. And so that's something for somebody else to look at, not me. And it was amazing when I was reading the book, Martin, firstly, I just want to say that.
You know, Sally and I read a lot of nonfiction texts around leadership and management. And I have to say your storytelling in of itself was one of the most riveting leadership books that I've read. So thank you for that gift because it was such a pleasure to read throughout. But I'd love to dive into kind of getting a little discerning then around some of the differences in the attributes that you highlighted from the four leaders that you chose to focus the book on. And.
Perhaps if there are some similarities in the attributes that these leaders showed and what makes them different from some of the leaders that we have previously put on a pedestal through history. Yeah. So I think the first thing that we need to say about that is that leadership is very context dependent. So what is required of a good leader in scenario A might be very different from scenario B. Of course, there are some general conclusions we can draw, but that's really the big insight that I have that.
Alexis Zahner (15:47.758)
what it takes to be a successful polar explorer is different from a political leader in war time, from a revolutionary, et cetera. One concrete example. So, you know, I do look at in the book at Churchill's leadership during the second world war. And I also looked at Roald Amundsen, this very, very successful polar explorer who has been overlooked in favor of Shackleton and Scott and all these very action oriented, but very crisis prone.
British explorers and Churchill is a master communicator. And that's important if you're leading a country at war, because he has to speak not only to the generals and ministers who respond to him, but to the public, to the world, you know, in all his speeches, he's actually talking to the U S of course, as well, trying to influence them. So master communicator, absolutely necessary in his case, role. Dominson, I wouldn't say he's a bad communicator, but he's certainly not a good communicator. You know, when he gives talks after his expeditions, he's quite awkward. His English isn't.
great and none of his crew after the fact ever say, you know, wow, Roald stood up and gave this talk that really motivated us. That wasn't part of his leadership, but it didn't have to be. He led through a very authentic and humane relationship to his crew. They trusted him instinctively. He made good decisions. And so to say that being an excellent communicator's prerequisite, I would say is false. It depends on the circumstances. Right now, what are some.
generalities that I draw out of these four very different contexts. One is that all four of them. So the other two that I haven't mentioned were Gertrude Bell, who is kind of the primary architect of the post -World War I Middle East and a champion of Arab statehood. And the other is Toussaint -Lao -Vatieux, this very successful Haitian revolutionary. All of them were absolutely fluent in their contexts in the sense that they had spent...
a lifetime obsessively learning everything they could about the environment that they were working in. And I see this as a real prerequisite because that is what can enable you to avoid these overly dramatic circumstances that a lot of.
Martin Gutmann (17:50.51)
other leaders find themselves in. So these leaders are all able to kind of minimize the friction that they encounter, which makes their stories perhaps less exciting, less visible to us in hindsight, but it makes what they're trying to do easier to accomplish. So that's the one thing. The other thing is they all have a healthy balance between being humble and confident. You know, so they don't see themselves as the only person in the room who has the answer. They can defer to expert opinions when necessary, but if they make a decision, they don't second guess it.
They can see it through even in the face of criticism. And the third thing that I saw in all of them, and this goes beyond these four that I looked at, I think this is true for many great leaders, they are very practical. They're pragmatic. They're not overly ideological. And I think, you know, another way to get that is that they're willing to question their assumptions. What worked one time might not work the next time.
And, you know, a lot of leaders, I think they have a success early on, they extract some kind of wisdom from that and then try to live by that from then on. But circumstances might have changed, you're with a different team and you have to be willing to try other things out, to be iterative and not stick to what worked that one time a long time ago. I'm so glad that you raised that point, Martin, because that struck me from the very first chapter when we were looking at the polar exploration and the fact that the British explorers at the time couldn't...
navigate the Northwest Passage. So rather than sort of rethink their approach, they just got bigger and bulkier and heavier duty ships to kind of blast their way through these ice fields where, you know, Edmondson, who actually found his way through the passage first, had a tiny boat with a tiny crew. And what he did so well in my mind was really adapt to the conditions. And I think the language you use, I'm going to read from my notes here was definitely navigating his environmental challenges. And I loved that because I think it...
really demonstrated that he was very acutely aware of his surroundings and was willing to continually iterate, take on local diets, winter for two winters when others were trying to blast ahead after one. And he wasn't trying to take control of the situation, but rather he had a really good sense of his agency and where he could sort of use his control and where he had to.
Alexis Zahner (20:03.95)
iterate and go with the environment and really read that well. And I think that was all true for all of those stories. But remarkably in that first one, I think it was almost when you were speaking about Shackleton and Scott and this idea that they were just trying to blast through in the same way and sinking ships and spending, I was assuming millions of dollars at the given the time, but no one stopped to think maybe we need to reconsider our approach here. It was quite an interesting thing to reflect on. Seems so obvious in hindsight. Absolutely. I mean, the image that
comes to my mind of these British attempts at the Northwest Passage is to bulldoze your way through the problem. You know, as you nicely described, if the first ship you try to send through isn't big enough, if the engines aren't big enough, if you don't have enough food packed on board, then the next time just go larger, get a bigger one, double it, get a bigger one. Exactly. Or let's go with two or let's go with three. But of course that doesn't work because the bigger the engine is, the more coal you need to bring, the more people you bring, the more food you need to bring. You can't.
bulldoze your way through the pack guys. It doesn't work. You have to work with the environment you're in. You have to understand it. And yeah, it's also this pragmatism, right? You don't need a tailor in London to design special Arctic suits for you when the technology already exists among the Inuit people. Just go with what they've been using for generations that keeps you warm and dry. And
But, you know, there are these assumptions of cultural superiority that really characterizes everything the British do in that time. But I think that's very true in contemporary scenarios as well, that, you know, if a company has been very successful, they transfer that success onto realms where really they could be borrowing approaches or technologies or ways of doing things from other less well -known organizations out there.
And there's so many examples where we've seen companies sort of make drastically, drastic missteps in terms of trying to cover new territory based off primarily arrogance about their existing success rather than, you know, working with companies or leaders that are already doing things wonderfully sort of in that arena. I did want to just come back to that concept that you mentioned Martin of fluency in context, I think was the phrase you used. And I really love that because I think that combined with that sort of the humility and the willingness to iterate.
Alexis Zahner (22:11.598)
Sort of says to me, it's like, it's really that willingness to understand, to listen, to really gather a lot of data about the situation that you're in, not just from one source, but also from different cultures, different contexts, different people. And then with that kind of humble lens.
then also having the confidence to iterate, the confidence to draw ideas together and try something new. And I think just the way you described those different attributes, I just could sense this real interplay of them as being sort of interwoven and very interdependent. No, I think you're absolutely right. They kind of work as a system together. And interestingly, there's been recent research that doesn't have a historical lens at all that comes to similar conclusions. So Amanda Goodall, a leadership scholar in the UK, has this amazing study that shows that
sort of context fluency is really a prerequisite for effective leadership. So she looks at hospitals run by doctors versus, you know, kind of managers with no medical experience. Those hospitals function better by all the metrics you can measure. Sports teams that are led by players who are very successful themselves do better. Universities run by academics, not managers do better, regardless of how you measure it. So of course, leadership is to some extent transferable. They're...
are certain competencies and skills and mindsets that you can apply whether you're leading a group of firefighters or a basketball team. But I think it's a mistake to assume that if you're a good leader in one context, you're going to be great in another one. There's lots of historical examples that underpin this as well. I mean, Ulysses Grant in the US is widely regarded as one of the worst.
presidents the US ever had for good reason. I mean, he really did fail in that capacity before the civil war. He failed in business and in life, but he was the guy who could really orchestrate and implement the winning strategy for Lincoln's army of the North. So in that context, he was a master, but in other things, he was not. Very timely reflection, I think, for us there, Martin. You also refer in the book.
Alexis Zahner (24:11.47)
to a concept of environmental intelligence. And I think we've kind of been talking a little bit about some of the concepts that contribute to this now. It's really fascinating for me as well, because I think it does for a lot of us, we're very busy and we feel like we don't actually have the time to perhaps go deep enough into an area and really sort of garner that level of environmental intelligence that might really sort of drive great leadership. Can you help us sort of understand what first thing, I guess, what that concept.
entails and then what leaders can do to sort of go about building their environmental intelligence. I mean, we've already essentially been talking about it as you suggested, but maybe just to take a step back, there's a lot of research on emotional intelligence. And I think in a lot of leadership challenges, emotional intelligence is important, right?
being able to understand how the social environment around you, so the people you are working with, how what you say impacts them and what they are trying to communicate to you, the emotions that that evokes in you, being able to label those who understand them. It's important in a lot of contexts. I would say not in all leadership contexts. And so this term environmental intelligence is kind of broadening the circle a bit to say, well, there's all of these other factors, all these other drivers and trends that are influencing what you can and can't.
do beyond just the people in your immediate surrounding and being fluent in that understanding that is a prerequisite for good leadership as well. And in the book, what I use to kind of paint a picture of how this works is this image of a river that if we have a, you know, imagine this raging river and we have a swimmer who wants to cross it and just kind of.
jumps in haphazardly without understanding the river, nearly drowning, and then somehow manages to drag him or herself back to shore. We're going to notice that person because we'll say, wow, he really fought hard to rescue himself from that crisis. But of course, the crisis was very much self -imposed, right? He didn't take the time to understand the currents. Now, the leader who has this great environmental intelligence, who takes the time to understand the currents, will be able to chart a path across this river much more successfully. But unfortunately for them, it will look easy.
Alexis Zahner (26:16.718)
because they're allowing the currents to carry them across. They know just how to move their body in subtle ways so that they don't have to exert so much effort like the guy who nearly drowns has to. And that's the environmental intelligence, this ability to understand these bigger drivers in your circumstances and aligning your actions, your team, your process, your decisions with those. Take the Arctic environment that we talked about a few times. You can't bulldoze your way through this ice and the ice comes every year and the Northwest Passage, this was
frozen solid for 10 to 11 months out of the year. You have to find a way to work with it rather than try to bulldoze through it. And the British, I mean, they brought dynamite. They essentially thought we're going to blow our way through this stuff. If our steam engines can't do it, we'll use the dynamite. It doesn't work.
And interestingly, it makes me reflect, Martin, on a concept we discussed recently on the podcast with Professor Amy Edmondson around intelligent failure. And, you know, in all of these cases, the four leaders that you speak about were charting new territory. So there were a number of variables that were unknown, but as you've mentioned, they took the time to build their environmental intelligence and then were able to take risks that they could mitigate at least to an extent and perhaps change their approach as they learn to continue.
without complete failure. And again, I keep coming back to Shackleton, but he succeeded in achieving none of the major goals of polar exploration at that time. And there was just seemed to be no iterative process whatsoever after failure, after failure, after failure, not learning from a mistake. And so I think, would you agree that this sort of concept of intelligent failure, they obviously didn't have the language perhaps for it at the time, but would you agree that that's perhaps something that was going on as well? Absolutely.
100%. And in fact, I've really enjoyed Amy Edmonds' book. It came out at about the same time as mine did. If it had come out earlier, I definitely would have leaned on her terminology and the stories that she uses to bring this alive much more. So I think that's a very nice parallel that you're drawing between those two works. Yeah, brilliant. And there was one quote again that I just want to pull from the book. I think it was Toussaint when...
Alexis Zahner (28:20.334)
we were speaking about the Haitian revolution and he said slowly goes far and patience beats force. And I just love that I had to write that down because I thought that for me was just a beautiful way of, I think again, just mitigating the action fallacy that you spoke to that haste and quick decision -making and noise isn't always the best way to move forward. In fact, it's rarely. Yeah. And I like that you say rarely because of course, sometimes you have to react.
And so I don't mean to suggest that being action oriented is always the wrong recipe. You know, if your house is on fire or if the airplane, you know, is crashing, it's not the time to sit down and think about, you know, I have a long meeting about what the next course of action should be. Right. But it is not always the right response to plunge in and do things. And in fact, there is this, this does come from my work. There is a so -called plunging in bias that we have this tendency to start solving problems before we understand them.
And that's where I think going back to the earlier concept of the action fallacy, I think those of us observing leaders trying to either identify people in the past who are leaders or trying to promote people in our teams, we have this fallacy, we have this bias where we see the people doing stuff, doing stuff right away. We assume they're the better leaders because well, look, you know, she's getting on top of that problem, but maybe it's actually the other person who's more quiet, who's spending more time thinking about it, who in the end will come up.
with the better course of action and actually implement it in a more effective way. But we tend to overlook those people. And it's interesting, Martin, because I think that really highlights another really important component of grade.
leadership is that, you know, sometimes we do have to have that patience and that can be uncomfortable. You know, when team members want a response, we want sort of something to launch into. I think as leaders having that capacity to sort of sit with the discomfort of not knowing quite yet and taking some time to find out more explicitly what's going on and also sort of holding space in the team for that discomfort as well. Like kind of like a, probably because we've been talking about the polar expedition, but I'm thinking like a pack of huskies, like pulling them back.
Alexis Zahner (30:19.758)
and pulling the team back and just being in a state of, you know, right now let's take some time to reflect and really get clear on what the issue is. And perhaps the first courses of action are a bit lower key and perhaps are a little bit more gathering more data and getting more evidence in front of us. And I think that, you know, it's such a human tendency to want to see action and to feel satisfaction and to feel this, a stress response will subside when we think that there is a solution at play, but instead to say, no, we're going to hit pause and we're going to.
think a little bit more deeply about this. I think that's something that we do often miss and that is again, very beautifully highlighted in your book, these four leaders who do have that real courage to go a bit deeper when they really need to. Absolutely. And I like what you just described as well, because I think if you feel like there's uncertainty, if events are moving out of your hands, I think it's natural to do something because you feel like you're reasserting control.
But that's a fallacy, right? If events really are spiraling out of control, I think tapping into a humbleness is more important because we all do have to accept that in many scenarios in life, we are not in control. And simply doing something so we feel that we are in control might actually make matters worse or distract you from what you could be doing. So I think, yeah, being humble and accepting that very often things are out of our hands, things are moving in a direction that I cannot control. And once we accept that,
We can then perhaps find the best way to respond to that as opposed to jumping in, making a lot of noise, getting people doing whatever so that we somehow don't feel so unsettled by it. I'm so glad you said that Martin, because that was one of the keynotes I wrote down is that this.
illusion of control seems to be the reason where when people fall into that action fallacy, it's this idea that, oh my gosh, everything going on around me is spiraling out of control. And the one thing I can do to regain control is just do anything. So make a hasty decision without considering consequences or what have you. So I'm really glad that we could get to that point because I think that was a really important one. Now, Martin, at Human Leaders, we have sort of a belief.
Alexis Zahner (32:20.718)
an inherent belief in everything we do that leadership in of itself is so much more than a title. I'd love to know, how do you feel about that statement? I think it's a great statement. I think as we said earlier on, leadership is a feature of most aspects of human lives. It starts in school, among kids and everywhere else. And so we lead and we are led in all kinds of scenarios where people don't have the title or the people who have the title are not doing.
the leading or not exclusively doing the leading. So I think understanding that, appreciating that, approaching the world with that perspective is very healthy. Martin, we're frothing nerds here. We could go on for hours talking to you and unpacking the incredible book that you've written, The Unseen Leader. We thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure to discuss leadership and learn from you together. Thank you so much. Thank you both so much. I had a great time.
Alexis Zahner (33:21.006)
As Martin highlights during our conversation, the human addiction to a grandiose and compelling hero's journey has very much biased our views on what makes a great leader. Through a historical lens, we're able to more adeptly discern the skills, attributes and characteristics of effective leadership without the hype. Martin's book, The Unseen Leader is a riveting read from cover to cover.
Find out where to grab a copy for yourself at our show notes on www .wearehumanleaders .com. And if you're ready to shift how you lead to be more human -centered, building your emotional wisdom and ability to communicate mindfully with those around you, work with us. Learn more at www .wearehumanleaders .com.
We hope that you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you next time.