Why the best leaders dont always have a plan

Why the best leaders dont always have a planWhy the best leaders dont always have a planStanley McChrystalis a retired U.S. Army general who commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the mid-2000s.He is also senior fellow at Yale Universitys Jackson Institute for GlobalAffairs, and the bestselling author of the recently released book,Leaders Myth and Reality.World-renowned organizational psychologist andNext Big Idea Club curatorAdam Grantrecently hosted him at Wharton to discuss how we can cultivate mora female leaders in the world, and why so many of our beliefs about real leadership are off the mark.This conversation has been edited and condensed. To watch the full version, click here.AdamInTeam of Teams, you wrote that when you stepped in to command the JSOC, you stopped thinking like a chess master and became a gardener. Youre a general whos known for being a fierce leader, and youre saying weve got to go garden? Seems like a soft metaphor. Whats behind it?Stanley I had thought that leaders were responsible for directing, having an answer to every question, giving orders, driving performance. I welches pretty good at that for most of my career, but suddenly in this environment, that welchesnt enough. When we got up to 18 raids a month, I was still personally approving every operation, but that was the absolute limit. The wheels were falling off the machine, so we had to change.The first thing is that I had to share information that I didnt share before. The information which had been curated for me, the leader, had to be turned on its head and shared with everyone. Then I had to give the decisions down to others- thats a little scary, because youre still responsible.In the summer of 2004, the opportunity to change was no longer optional- it was change or lose, and we had no idea how to change. I wasnt Steve Jobs- I didnt have this vision. All I knew was that the current course of action was failing. So I said, Were going to keep doing more of whatever works, were going to stop doing what doesnt work, and you, the organization, will figure it out. And thats essentially what happened.I had grown up on the idea that the leader is a chess master. You move the chess pieces, and if youre a good strategist, youre going to win. But the reality is that Id become more like a gardener. A gardener doesnt really grow anything- plants do all the growing. But a gardener creates an environment in which plants can grow. So you can change your goal pretty significantly if you become a caretaker of an environment, and allow everybody to operate there.Dont think that I suddenly started walking around and rubbing everybodys bellies. I leaned on the organization harder. But the point is, Im not a limiting factor- Im a cheerleader, Im an orchestrator, Im an enabler.And people own it when you push it down like that. Before, if I said, Okay somebody go out and do something, they might do it to the best of their ability. But if you say, We need to achieve this- figure out what we need to do, and make the decision to do it. Let me know how it goes, they own it with a very different mindset. Its extraordinary how most of the organization was very comfortable with that. There were some who would struggle with accepting that, but the good ones take it and run like crazy.AdamIts such a fascinating contrast to the standard models of change that say youre supposed to define a problem, build a core change team, and then immediately roll out a vision. Youre saying no, actually go in with no vision- just tell people youre changing as an organization and let them figure that out. Do you think that works outside of the military, too?We elect, select, follow, promote, support people who are serial failures, and we do it because they fill some emotional need in us.StanleyI think it does. Both vision and strategy are something you have to be a little careful about. The vision should be general- Were going to win- but the strategy needs t o be flexible, because things are changing fast in todays world, and the strategy wont survive too long. You shouldnt let the strategy be handcuffs that hold you.AdamIn your new book,you wrote, Leaders who exhibited all the right traits often fell short, while others who possess none of the characteristics of traditional leadership succeeded. This is something thats bothered me for my whole career- we think about qualities that we know are critical for leadership, and some of those dont seem to be enough. Then we see people who lack those qualities rise, and sometimes even succeed. How would you explain that paradox?StanleyWe think that if we have the right traits, learn the right behaviors, and have the self-discipline, were going to be successful. Thats just not true. You can follow all the rules and completely fail. Someone who breaks every rule and is offensive to you may beat you, because leadership isnt what we think it is, and it never has been. Its so much more contextual th an we want to believe.We tend to think of leadership as influencing people to do things they wouldnt otherwise do, but in my new book, we backed away from that definition. We now think that leadership is an emergent property from the interaction between followers, leaders, and other contextual factors. Leadership isnt something that the leader carries in a bag and sprinkles on people. We want to think, If Ive got the traits, Im a great leader. But a leader whos got all those traits has almost the same probability of failing as someone who has almost none of them.If a leader is very effective in one company or organization, and the headhunters go find him, pick him up and take him to another, they fail more often than if you just hire some character from inside the company and bring them up. And you say, Well, what happened? Did old Stan just lose his stuff, or is Susan just not as motivated as she used to be? No- the context is different. What worked in another context doesnt work h ere.A second myth is that the leader is responsible for everything the organization succeeds or fails at. In writing my memoirs, I found that I had been given credit for a lot of things that the organization had done, and I was happy to accept that. Id made decisions and something had happened, and therefore, I must have been the reason, right? I had this simple view of what happened, and in reality, all unterstellung other players had done things that I never knew about. I assumed that I pulled the right lever, and X happened. In reality, I pulled a lever, all these other things happened, and X happened- but it was only slightly related to me pulling the lever. I mattered, but not nearly as much as I thought I did. As we applied that idea to these other leaders, it gets proven over and over again.Martin Luther is credited with starting the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation is starting, Martin Luther nails 95 theses to the door- in fact, its questionable whether he actually did that- and he becomes part of it. He matters, but hes not the Protestant Reformation. And you can apply that to almost anybody.This narrative of the great man or great woman as the essential player just isnt played out in history.Dont get disappointed when you find flaws, but at the same time, dont look at someone and pretend there arent any.Lastly, we have this myth that says we demand results from our leaders, that we only follow people who get a good bottom line, win victories or elections or wars.But we dont- we elect, select, follow, promote, support people who are serial failures, and we do it because they fill some emotional need in us, and we make allowances for it.We make allowances for all kinds of things, because its the relationship between the leader and follower- the emotional connection, how they look and make us feel- thats so incredibly important.So when you put all this together, you realize that we look at leaders through this really foggy lens. All th ose things we knew about selecting leaders- and even leading ourselves- is deeply flawed.AdamI love that youve called out the romance of leadership- leaders are less responsible than we think they are. I think thats good news for all of us who are not in leadership roles- seems like bad news for leaders, though. How do you think about what real impact a leader has?StanleyI still think the leader matters a lot, but more for setting tone than anything else. When youre a senior leader, people tell you how important you are. Youre humorous, youre brilliant, that sort of thing. You start to believe that, and our media supports that, because our media wants to put people on pedestals. We do the same thing with social media- were constantly looking for someone who will lead us.What we need to do is look in a mirror, and say, Wait a minute, were not just followers. Were participants, partners. We have responsibility, we have much greater agency than we want to pretend. We cant just tell a l eader to show us what theyve got, and then decide whether they succeed or fail. We are much more of that than we like to pretend we are. And when leaders fail, we own that, too.AdamI couldnt believe that the book opened with Robert E. Lee, and then my second surprise was that you grew up admiring the man. Youve obviously changed your tune on that, but Im curious How do you think about studying a flawed leader, and whether we should actually take any insights away from them?StanleyThats the only kind of leader you can study, because there arent any leaders that arent flawed. Youve got to look holistically- dont get disappointed when you find flaws, but at the same time, dont look at someone and pretend there arent any.The good things about Robert E. Lee were very good. He was a studious young guy, he was a great young officer, he was offered command at Union forces in the beginning of the Civil War, but ultimately sided with Confederacy. He performed bravely on the battlefield- some of the most amazing battlefield feats in American history. But at the same time, he betrayed his oath to the United States, and spent the next four years trying to destroy the country that his role model, George Washington, had helped create. And he did it to defend the institution of slavery.I have to come to see Robert E. Lee as, in some ways, very admirable, and in some ways an absolute failure. When we look at leaders, we dont have to be forgiving, but we have to understand that leaders are flawed. Thats what you can expect. Take a leader that you abhor, like Abu Musab, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq- I abhor so much about him, and I was happy the day we killed him. But the reality is, I admired a lot about the way he lived. He died for his cause. I disagree with what he believed in, but it was genuine. As you approach learning from leaders, we try to take good or bad away from the moral judgments and say, Are they effective or not?The person youre going to have to live with lon ger than anybody else is you.AdamYou write that the history of leadership is mostly a patriarchal history.StanleyWe wanted to have as many women as we could in the book- we ended up with three. If you go back in history, its harder to findwomen leaderssimply because the opportunities werent there. And then you say, Its a lot better now. Well, in the United States, there are more male CEOs named John than there are women CEOs entirely. We have a problem.So you have to do several things. You have to go back and create leadership opportunities for women from a young age- otherwise theyre not going to be postured for success. The second thing is you have to have female role models at the senior levels, which gets back to chicken or the egg How do you get senior role models unless you fix the problem So how do you fix the problem? Lets get senior role modelsSome of that has got to be the equivalent of affirmative action. If you wait until it happens naturally, our childrens children wont get there. So theres a legislative change, and then theres a cultural change. The cultural change takes longer, but itll stick more when it finally occurs.AdamHow do you show leadership even if you dont have formal authority?StanleyThe best thing you can do is be an exemplar, exactly what you want your leaders to be- mature, thoughtful, etc. Youll find that there is an effect of subordinates shaming senior leaders into functioning better. When I was in the Army Rangers, it was the first distribution policy Id ever been where I was a captain when I entered. We had really strict discipline, and if I stood somewhere and put my hands in my pockets, a private would walk up to me and say, Sir, we dont put our hands in our pockets. Thats really powerful. If you walk the walk yourself, its amazing the effect youll have on leaders.AdamIf you were to give one piece of advice for a career or a leadership journey, what would that be?StanleyTheres a great piece that C.S. Lewis wrote back in the 40s calledThe Inner Ring. The argument that hes making is that theres an intern ring in all kinds of things in life, and the inner ring is what we, almost by human nature, want to be in. It can be getting accepted to Wharton, it can be joining the cool group in school, it can be becoming the managing director in an organization- its some ring we want to get membership to.And the pull of wanting to get into those inner rings can make you do a lot of things that you shouldnt. If youve ever been in a group of people, and they tell a joke thats clearly unfair or cruel to somebody else and you laughed- not because you thought it was funny, but because you wanted to be accepted by that group- thats the danger of the inner ring. And its incredibly powerful.Not all inner rings are evil, but be really cautious about it. Because the person youre going to have to live with longer than anybody else is you. My litmus test now is my two granddaughters. They live next door, and I dont want anythi ng I write or do to be something that they are ultimately ashamed of. No amount of money, no amount of success, no amount of anything is worth giving that up. And if you hold on to that, everything you dont get in life will seem unimportant, because youll be able to live with yourself.This article first appeared on Heleo.