Traits and critical roles of ‘quiet leaders’ who are often not at the top and don’t enjoy the spotlight. An interview with Martha Lagace of HBS Working Knowledge
Question: You write that one inspiration for your book titled, ‘Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing’ was the unusual course you’ve been teaching MBA students on moral leadership in organisations. What is a quiet leader? Is quiet leadership a topic you had been thinking about before?
Joseph L. Badaracco (JLB): I don’t think I really started thinking about it until just a few years ago. There were two things that prompted me to do so. One is that I had written a book called ‘Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right’ (HBS Press) which is about big deal, high-stake, traumatic decisions. And there was a natural question: “Is this all there is to writing about difficult ethical decisions?” Or put differently, what happens in between the big decisions – which don’t come along very often? For some people they come along very, very infrequently. Does this mean these people are on vacation the rest of the time? So that was one question that was in my mind. In the course, so many of the people in the works of fiction we read – who aspire to greatness or who achieve greatness – end up badly. There’s the age-old myth of Icarus trying to fly too close to the sun, and there is the suggestion that there is something dangerous about the pursuit of greatness. And at the same time while you read books and plays there are other characters, I noticed, who were what I came to call quiet leaders. You also end up defining quiet leaders almost through a series of negatives. They’re not making high-stakes decisions. They’re often not at the top of organisations. They don’t have the spotlight and publicity on them. They think of themselves modestly; they often don’t even think of themselves as leaders. But they are acting quietly, effectively, with political astuteness, to basically make things somewhat better, sometimes much better than they would otherwise be. Sometimes a few people were aware of what they did; sometimes nobody is aware of what they did. There aren’t medal ceremonies and often the people involved don’t think they would deserve one if the medals were being given out. But often they’re people, I found… in the cases I looked at carefully, who find that some situation or problem or difficulty affecting a person, affecting an organisation, is really bothering them; it gets under their skin. While other people would say, “Hey, why are you getting carried away about this?”, they care about it. They commit themselves and keep working tenaciously, so that over a period of time they find some ways to get stuff done.
Question: When most people think of leaders, they think of real brash types, even rebels. In business, for example, Jack Welch springs to mind as a well-known leader. The idea of a quiet leader seems almost the flip side of that.
JLB: It is the flip side of a standard or stereotypical view of a leader who speaks the truth or says what has to be done, who inspires others to do it in a critical moment. But I’m sceptical that in the countless meetings Jack Welch spent his career going to, in each one of these meetings it was the Jack Welch Show, and that he heard what everybody had to say and then announced the right thing and inspired everybody to do it. You have the famous example of Rosa Parks (an African-American civil rights activist), saying, “I’m not sitting in the back of the bus.” Well, while that was a remarkable act of courage on her part, and in some degree was kind of a spontaneous event, she’d just had enough of this kind of treatment from one particular bus driver. She’d even stopped riding on his bus and got on by accident. She’d been to a number of civil rights training programs. After she was arrested, the people in the civil rights movement asked themselves, “Is this the right person... is this the right case to challenge segregated busing?” So there’s a lot of preparatory work and a lot of work afterwards. Quiet leadership is not really the flip side. If you look behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet, patient work themselves.
Question: You write that one inspiration for your book titled, ‘Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing’ was the unusual course you’ve been teaching MBA students on moral leadership in organisations. What is a quiet leader? Is quiet leadership a topic you had been thinking about before?
Joseph L. Badaracco (JLB): I don’t think I really started thinking about it until just a few years ago. There were two things that prompted me to do so. One is that I had written a book called ‘Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right’ (HBS Press) which is about big deal, high-stake, traumatic decisions. And there was a natural question: “Is this all there is to writing about difficult ethical decisions?” Or put differently, what happens in between the big decisions – which don’t come along very often? For some people they come along very, very infrequently. Does this mean these people are on vacation the rest of the time? So that was one question that was in my mind. In the course, so many of the people in the works of fiction we read – who aspire to greatness or who achieve greatness – end up badly. There’s the age-old myth of Icarus trying to fly too close to the sun, and there is the suggestion that there is something dangerous about the pursuit of greatness. And at the same time while you read books and plays there are other characters, I noticed, who were what I came to call quiet leaders. You also end up defining quiet leaders almost through a series of negatives. They’re not making high-stakes decisions. They’re often not at the top of organisations. They don’t have the spotlight and publicity on them. They think of themselves modestly; they often don’t even think of themselves as leaders. But they are acting quietly, effectively, with political astuteness, to basically make things somewhat better, sometimes much better than they would otherwise be. Sometimes a few people were aware of what they did; sometimes nobody is aware of what they did. There aren’t medal ceremonies and often the people involved don’t think they would deserve one if the medals were being given out. But often they’re people, I found… in the cases I looked at carefully, who find that some situation or problem or difficulty affecting a person, affecting an organisation, is really bothering them; it gets under their skin. While other people would say, “Hey, why are you getting carried away about this?”, they care about it. They commit themselves and keep working tenaciously, so that over a period of time they find some ways to get stuff done.
Question: When most people think of leaders, they think of real brash types, even rebels. In business, for example, Jack Welch springs to mind as a well-known leader. The idea of a quiet leader seems almost the flip side of that.
JLB: It is the flip side of a standard or stereotypical view of a leader who speaks the truth or says what has to be done, who inspires others to do it in a critical moment. But I’m sceptical that in the countless meetings Jack Welch spent his career going to, in each one of these meetings it was the Jack Welch Show, and that he heard what everybody had to say and then announced the right thing and inspired everybody to do it. You have the famous example of Rosa Parks (an African-American civil rights activist), saying, “I’m not sitting in the back of the bus.” Well, while that was a remarkable act of courage on her part, and in some degree was kind of a spontaneous event, she’d just had enough of this kind of treatment from one particular bus driver. She’d even stopped riding on his bus and got on by accident. She’d been to a number of civil rights training programs. After she was arrested, the people in the civil rights movement asked themselves, “Is this the right person... is this the right case to challenge segregated busing?” So there’s a lot of preparatory work and a lot of work afterwards. Quiet leadership is not really the flip side. If you look behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet, patient work themselves.
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