The New Portrait Of Leadership: Martin Gutmann Of The Unseen Leader On Which Legacy Ideas About Leadership Need To Be Discarded, And Which New Approaches To Leadership Should Be Embraced
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Being realistic about this fact, in other words being humble, is a prerequisite in my mind for good leadership. Directly tied to this dimension are emotional intelligence and situational awareness, which we can think of as two sides of the same coin (in my book I call it Environmental Intelligence). Good leaders are able to understand the complexity — including the social and the non-social dimensions — of each new leadership challenge.
We are living in the Renaissance of Work. Just like great artists know that an empty canvas can become anything, great leaders know that an entire organization — and the people inside it — can become anything, too. Master Artists and Mastering the Art of Leadership draw from the same source: creation. In this series, we’ll meet masters who are creating the future of work and painting a portrait of lasting leadership. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Martin Gutmann.
Martin Gutmann Ph.D., is a Swiss-American historian, author, keynote speaker and professor at the Lucerne School of Business, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland. His most recent book is the Unseen Leader. How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership. Martin is also a partner in Align Coaching and Consulting, a boutique coaching firm.
The Unseen Leader explores how history can help us rethink leadership. By drawing on four ‘unseen’ leaders from the past (Roald Amundsen, Winston Churchill, Toussaint Louverture, Gertrude Bell) Martin explores what it takes to be a leader who makes a real difference in the world. He aims to debunk years of guru-inspired leadership wisdom, revealing that being a successful leader has very little to do with heroic struggles or Hollywood stereotypes. In fact, as history has shown us, the most effective leaders are often ‘unseen’, and are overlooked.
Thank you for joining us. Our readers would enjoy discovering something interesting about you. What are you in the middle of right now that you’re excited about personally or professionally?
I just got back from three days of camping at a remote Alpine lake with my family. We don’t manage to do that as regularly as we would like, but it’s certainly something I enjoy. And it is rejuvenating for all of us.
I’ve been reading The Big Bam. The Life and Times of Babe Ruth. Ruth was far from a model leader — he was in many ways remarkably unaware and insensitive. So, it is all the more noteworthy that he managed to usher in an era of utter New York Yankees dominance that is more or less unparalleled in sports history, not to mention build a legacy that has lasted to this day. He was a gifted player, of course, but there’s more to it than that. I’m not far enough along in the book, though, to have any definitive conclusions on how he did this.
I’m generally pretty diverse in my interests, both professionally and privately, but as a trained historian, I tend to bring that perspective to bear on everything I do. And I’m fascinated by the quirky or misunderstood examples from history.
We all get by with a little help from our friends. Who is the leader that has influenced you the most, and how?
There are a lot of LinkedIn posts out there that suggest you should “pick your ideal leader rather than your ideal company”, or something like that. I think that advice is spot on. I’ve been the happiest working in situations where I felt valued and listened-to by my boss. I am in such a position right now — the director of my institute, Matthes, makes it his mission to clear hurdles out of the faculty’s way so that we can get on with what we do best. And I’m grateful to him for that every day.
But I’ve also been influenced by some of the bad leaders I’ve had the displeasure of working with, but maybe it’s best not to go into too many details on that front. I suspect this is true for many of us, though.
In general, I think identifying both behaviors to emulate and those to avoid is a productive perspective to take. I do that a lot in my writing — be like Toussaint Louverture, not Napoleon; like Gertrude Bell, not T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia,” and so on.
How has your definition of leadership changed or evolved over time?
Influence seems to be the key term in most definitions of leadership — most of us agree that leadership has something to do with influencing others. I don’t think that’s wrong, but as I’ve studied it over the years, I’ve added two terms to my working definition: “deliberate” and “outcome.”
I think influencing others — making them feel motivated or inspired or whatever — worthwhile though it is, is in and of itself not enough. A leader also needs to deliberately steer a team toward some desired and positive outcome. There’s something irresistible and shiny about leaders who run around almost hyperactively giving grand speeches, nagging people to work harder, and so on, but at the end of the day, they may not be any closer to achieving their organization’s goal. So, the outcome — or lack thereof — matters too. And the actions a leader takes need to be attuned toward that outcome. If we have a positive outcome by sheer luck, that’s nice, but it’s hardly a recipe for long-term success.
Success is as often as much about what we stop as what we start. Do you agree and, if so, do you have an example that illustrates this?
You make a really important point, one which I pick up on in my new book The Unseen Leader. We tend to think of good leaders as acting boldly and quickly. In many cases, however, restraint is the better but ultimately harder choice. A case in point is Churchill’s handling of the so-called Second Front in World War Two. The US leadership, including President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower, were hell-bent on launching a cross-Channel invasion as early as possible — which would have been disastrous for the Allied war effort. The Western Allies quite simply weren’t ready to face the German army on the beaches of France in 1942 or even 1943. Through a combination of feigned compliance and masterful trickery, Churchill managed to delay D-Day until 1944. This “inaction” was one of the most important leadership interventions in the war.
What about a legacy leadership behavior that we might want to stop because it is no longer valuable or relevant?
I’m a bit weary of blanket leadership advice — whether in terms of what we should or should not be doing — because so much of it depends on the specific circumstances. With that said, we’ve certainly outgrown some leadership approaches. There used to be a debate about how best to motivate people: through oversight, control, and the threat of sanctions or through empowering and tapping into people’s internal motivation. Douglas McGregor called these competing approaches “Theory X” vs “Theory Y.”
Today there’s not really a big debate about what’s best, at least not in most circumstances: if you want people to work hard, you have to rally them around a common vision, mobilize their internal drive, put the right structures in place for them to be able to do their best work, and then get out of the way (perhaps gently peering over from the sidelines every now and then to give some subtle impulses). Old-school military command and control, “Theory X” in other words, is an approach that has outlived its usefulness.
There’s a great case study on this by Harvard Business Publishing that I had to read back in my graduate school days called “Coach Knight and Coach K.” It contrasts these opposing leadership styles through two of the great college basketball coaches: Bobby Knight and Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski. The case just looks at their successes as coaches — they both won a lot of games. But a long-term perspective bears out the point that the Theory X-inspired approach, as embodied by Coach Knight, is a dead end. His chair-throwing tantrums and physical assault of his student players eventually (I would say much too belatedly) got him fired, Coach K., on the other hand, went on to become a respected professor of leadership at Duke’s Fuqua Business School.
What advice would you offer to other leaders who are stuck in past playbooks and patterns and may be having a hard time letting go of what made them successful in the past?
I think self-reflection is a key habit for leaders to cultivate, through whatever mechanism: coaching, mentoring, journaling, in-team debriefings, or whatever. One of the reasons why the military produces such good leaders is because of the culture of After Action Reports, or the systematic debriefing after every training exercise or mission, whether a success or failure.
The fact of the matter is that no two leadership challenges are the same and so what worked the last time around may not work this time. But leaders who are unable to self-reflect tend to blame someone or something else when things don’t work out. After all, their leadership “moves” have always worked before, so the fault must lie elsewhere.
The only way to grow and learn as a leader is to take a hard look in the mirror.
Many of our readers can relate to the challenge of leading people for the first time. What advice would you offer to new and emerging leaders?
I do a lot of long-distance running and one of my favorite gurus frames running as “an experiment of one.” In other words, there is an abundance of advice on diet, training volume and cadence, gear, and so on. It is important to take in as much of this expert advice as possible because much of it would take too long to discover on your own. But, on the other hand, you have to see what works for you in your unique circumstances and with your specific body. The same is true in leadership.
Treating leadership like an ongoing experiment is a good approach. Try things out and then collect as much data as you can — in every form, from hard feedback to the subtle reactions in those around you — and then draw some preliminary conclusions and reflect back again on the expert advice. Next time around, tweak things slightly and see what happens.
Developing a deep commitment to and a regular cadence of self-reflection is indispensable for leaders, whether they are new to it or seasoned pros.
Based on your experience or research, what are the top five traits effective leaders exemplify now?
As we discussed above, “the ability to critically self-reflect” and an openness to trying things out — let’s call that “an experimental mindset” — are key traits.
I would add to that list “humility,” “emotional intelligence,” and “situational awareness.” These three go hand-in-hand. While some leaders might think that, and behave as if, they are the center of the universe, a big part of being a good leader is recognizing that often there is a real limit to our scope of influence because of various restraining factors that are out of our immediate control — company culture, decisions taken by competitors, technological limitations, and so on. Also, the individual leader might not be best placed to take action — maybe someone else has the right expertise, the right temperament, or the right relationships for a given challenge.
Being realistic about this fact, in other words being humble, is a prerequisite in my mind for good leadership. Directly tied to this dimension are emotional intelligence and situational awareness, which we can think of as two sides of the same coin (in my book I call it Environmental Intelligence). Good leaders are able to understand the complexity — including the social and the non-social dimensions — of each new leadership challenge.
When I look back at successful leaders in the past this seems to be the one thing that they all had in common: they, more than anyone else, understood the complex contours of the events they found themselves in the midst of — like a seasoned captain who can read the subtle interplay of the many currents below the surface.
A good example, speaking of captains, is the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. He was hands-down the most successful polar explorer and, unlike many of his British rivals, he approached the challenges of the polar environments not as something that could be bulldozed through with steam engines, oversized crews held in check by strict naval discipline, and the various trappings of industrial society. Instead, he realized that to be successful, you had to work within the boundaries of what the ice and weather in these very hostile environments allowed, you had to empower your crew, and you had to seek help where you could get it, such as from the Inuit.
All of these traits go hand in hand. If you are humble, open to experimenting, and able to self-reflect, you will not only grow as a person but develop a keen sense for your leadership environment — the currents below the surface, so to speak — upon which success ultimately depends.
American Basketball Coach John Wooden said, “Make each day your masterpiece.” How do you embody that quote? We welcome a story or example.
Back to basketball again! I like that — I played basketball as a teenager. And, in fact, my coach gave every player on the team a framed picture of John Wooden’s coaching principles. I think I still have it somewhere in the basement of my parent’s house. So, I can definitely relate to that quote.
But these days I prefer a slightly different quote. My wife, Djahane, is an executive coach who works with some of the top C-suite execs out there. In her work, she often cites a quote by Anne Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I think it’s utterly brilliant because, while we all like to make grand plans — I want to eat healthier, I want to be a nicer person, etc. — nothing really changes if we keep thinking long-term. If you want to work on yourself, not just as a leader, today is the only time horizon that matters.
I think on one level, this is what Wooden was getting at as well. If you want to be a good basketball player, you have to make that commitment right now, today, at this very practice or in this very game, and every day from now on.
But his appeal to making “every day your masterpiece” is also a bit limiting. Leaders need to experiment; they need to be willing to make mistakes and learn from them. You can’t do that if you are singularly focused on making every day as good as possible. You might have some days where you utterly fail. But if you make a habit of being open, of experimenting, and of growing every day — which Anne Dillard’s quote invites us to, then your life’s work will be a masterpiece,
What is the legacy you aspire to leave as a leader?
As an academic, I’m more of a student of leadership rather than a practitioner. While I am occasionally responsible for people — in larger research projects for example — and I try my best in those situations to practice what I preach, I don’t have any grand leadership ambitions in the traditional sense.
But I do get tremendous joy from teaching, both students and participants in the various executive education programs I teach in. Being an educator is in some ways being like a leader because you get to accompany people as they learn and grow — it’s a privilege and a constant source of joy.
How can our readers connect with you to continue the conversation?
I can be found on LinkedIn under https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-gutmann-3a0136ab/. I’m always happy to hear from people, so feel free to connect.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to experience a leadership master at work. We wish you continued success and good health!
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
