Success is more complicated than one exceptional individual

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The writer is the author of ‘Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future’

When I started my career, we talked about bosses. Today, all the talk is about leaders: special people whose magical qualities generate brilliant decisions to produce enduring success.

Leadership associations, institutes, centres, colleges, assessment tools, psychographic surveys and gurus now constitute the leadership industrial complex. Millions, if not billions, of leadership books are sold every year. But leadership practice doesn’t seem to have improved. Looking around at the worlds of business and politics today, it’s hard not to reach the opposite conclusion: that the more is written about leadership, the less we understand how to get it right.

What is going on? One cause of this problem could be a common attribution error, one made all the more likely by our obsession with leadership itself.

Standard accounts of great leadership typically identify moments of exceptional achievement, and look backwards to explain why they happened. Believing that leadership is a real thing, they analyse the characteristics and decisions of those in charge and deduce it was these that generated victory.

But how do they know?

A few Conservatives still venerate Boris Johnson’s leadership, claiming that it was he who won a landslide for their party. But did he win that election — or did Jeremy Corbyn lose it for him? He won the Brexit referendum by only a tiny margin, so his record of national electoral leadership is thin.

As we can’t do the controlled experiment and rerun 2019 without him, we will never know whether it was his specific brand of leadership that made the difference, or something else. Yet simplistic narratives are enduringly attractive, and it is these that seduce us into the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy — that is believing that when actions precede a major event it means they have caused it.

If this is a frequent problem in politics, it is ubiquitous in business. When a company flourishes, its CEO invariably gets the credit and the reward. Maybe even the opportunity for a hagiographic book or two. But business success is tremendously complex. Did a company thrive because of its boss, because its competitors were lame, lazy — or absent — or because it simply rode the wave of a sector that was booming? When start-ups take off, it could be that the founder was a genius or that the CFO had an outstanding network of investors to tap. It might be due to a brilliant marketing team, two or three superb engineers or fantastic chemistry between all of these, something that often just comes down to luck.

The absurdity of our leadership beliefs is nowhere better manifested that in Jim Collins’ legendary Good to Great, a huge evergreen bestseller. Collins aspires to position his work as science, writing about his “lab” in which the qualities of so-called great companies are measured and assessed, in a quest to discover the formula for great leadership. Yet the identification of these people is esoteric: Collins classes them as individuals whose companies averaged returns of 6.9 times the stock market over a period of 15 years. So bosses who produced returns of 6.8 times the market are flops? Or if it took them 17 years, they’re slackers?

Attribution errors proliferate because, whether in business or in politics, context is everything. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. A leader’s record can also look wildly different depending on when you assess it.

When he retired at the peak of GE’s share price, Jack Welch was feted as one of the greatest business leaders of all time. Ten years later, the academic Roger Martin noted that under Welch’s leadership, GE hit its price forecast to the penny 41 out of 46 times: something that is statistically implausible. Twenty years later, critics now see him leading just when the rot set in.

Because attributing success is so elusive, attempting to do so can be a bad teacher — a thought usually attributed to Bill Gates.

Thrilled by our own achievement, it’s all too easy to assume that what made the product or the business or the economy so brilliant was us. We did it! Of course we’ll pay lip-service to our colleagues. But in our confirmed self-belief, we are as likely to make the same mistakes as repeat the old brilliance.

Our lust for heroes and for a leadership formula fuels a huge industry. What it doesn’t seem to do is produce better leaders. It might even make everything worse. Placing too great a weight of expectation on the idea of leadership infantilises us all. It allows too many people to abdicate, waiting for a lead. It causes many to take their success as evidence that they are special, even infallible.

In oversimplifying what is complex, and trying to nail down what is fluid, we chase chimeras when we could be looking in the mirror and asking: what can I do better today?