Leaders - Myth vs Reality

Retired US Army General (and Senior Fellow at Yale University) Stanley McChrystal’s 2018 bestseller Leaders – Myth and Reality, has become essential reading in the study of Leaders and Leadership.  Over 400 pages McChrystal deep dives into the lives of 13 diverse leaders from Churchill to Disney, from Chanel to Einstein and from Robespierre to Martin Luther King. Some were best described as reformers, others as heroes and some as zealots.  Some were best seen as expert power brokers and some as geniuses.
 
Much of McChrystal’s final conclusion is that most of what we think we know about history’s great leaders and the skills or attributes required to lead are in fact driven from 3 archetypal myths; 1) the myth of the Formula: that if someone follows a checklist of behaviours they’ll be a great leader, 2) the Attribution Myth: that the success and failures of a team are all the results of its leader, and 3) the most compelling of all, the Results Myth: that delivering results is all that’s required to create a lasting position of power and respect.   
 
These 3 myths then aggregate to create something he describes as the ‘Great Man/Woman Theory’.  This is where McChrystal’s thinking coincides with many of the challenges that Root Cause Analysis enables us to overcome. Primarily our appetite for simplicity and person-focussed narrative drama as the explanation for the deeper sophistication and complexity of reality.
 
McChrystal writes ‘As authors, we know all too well that the pages of a good tale turn faster than those of analytical theory.  Most students of leadership prefer to get their lessons from the colourful pages of a CEO autobiography than the dry analysis of leadership literature’. 
 
Problem solvers can easily fall into the same trap, attracted to the myth of the ‘magic’ or ‘silver bullet’, that one unifying catch-all solution or action that saved the day in some great organisational, commercial, societal or sporting challenge.
 
McChrystal continues ‘Beyond a taste for narrative and belief in our own causality, we also have a preference for simplicity. Boiling things down to discrete action by a certain cast of prime actors is more relatable and makes attributing success and blame easier. Reductionist explanations are somehow more satisfying than complex, estranging, but usually more accurate accounts’.
 
And again, this is something that Root Cause Analysis practitioners have to overcome.  From the position of an RCA Trainer or Facilitator one of the biggest mindset changes to deliver in the classroom (or boardroom) is the ‘single cause/single solution’ approach to problem solving.
 
McChrystal concludes ‘Reality is complicated and even boring, and that mundane messiness can be unsatisfying. Life is more interesting and pleasing either when it is simplified or, in the other direction, sensational. And we’ll sooner accept the simple or the sensational explanation over the accurate one’.
 
A well-structured Root Cause Analysis process will steer organisations away from accepting simplified, detail-light explanations of problems. Explanations that often focus on the actions of individuals. By shedding light on the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ and not just the ‘who’ RCA helps dismantle the ‘Blame Myth’; the assumption that some kind of focus on the actions of individuals will somehow free our organisations of faults.  Equally RCA reveals that although effective leadership is vital, it cannot be simplified to a set of actions or attributes that can make up for deeper structural failings.
 
Shortcuts, hacks, assumptions and narrative-based explanations are certainly ‘sticky’ ways of thinking and this ‘stickiness’ goes a long way to explaining why many organisations suffer from a cycle of repeat errors.  A program and culture of Root Cause Analysis throughout an organisation addresses this ‘stickiness’ head on and helps break this punishing cycle of short-term fixes and fire-fighting.
 
Read more HERE
 
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