The Art of Manliness - #325： Leading Quietly

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. I got a cold

00:00:19.000 last week and I lost my voice for an entire day and it's just coming back. So I sound a little

00:00:22.640 raspy in the intro. That's why the show must go on. So we're going to do this. When we think of

00:00:26.860 being a good leader, we often think we need to be bold, visionary, risk-taking type leader like

00:00:32.320 Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, or even a Steve Jobs. But my guest today argues that most of

00:00:37.140 the day-to-day work that makes the world function is done by individuals who stand outside the 0.99

00:00:41.140 limelight and lead with calm confidence. His name is Joseph Bataraco and he's the author of the book

00:00:46.280 Leading Quietly, an unorthodox guide to doing the right thing. And today on the show, Joe and I

00:00:51.040 discuss the heroic archetype of leadership, why most leadership development books and courses

00:00:54.900 focus on it and why heroic leadership can actually get in the way of an organization's success.

00:00:59.680 He then shares the qualities of a quiet leader and why they're often more effective than heroic

00:01:03.420 leaders at getting things done in an organization. And we end our conversation by exploring the

00:01:07.500 Aristotelian approach to leadership that most quiet leaders utilize and how you can start using those

00:01:12.160 principles today in your work, community, and family. After the show's over, check out the show notes

00:01:16.260 at aom.is slash quiet leadership. Joseph Bataraco, welcome to the show.

00:01:24.540 Glad to be here.

00:01:25.820 Well, you wrote a book that I really enjoyed and the title of it, the reason I read it was the title

00:01:30.680 intrigued me a lot. It's Leading Quietly. And the reason why that intrigued me, because oftentimes when

00:01:35.180 we think of leadership, we often think of, you know, the great man, heroic leader like Theodore

00:01:40.920 Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, very assertive, very in front of the public eye. Before we get

00:01:46.900 into leading quietly, why do I have that conception of leadership as being up front and center?

00:01:54.000 Sure. I think you probably got it in school because you learned about heroes and you should have studied

00:02:03.240 and learned about heroic heroes because they've changed our world. They can inspire us. You may have

00:02:10.080 also gotten the same message about heroic leaders from your parents. And I've even speculated there's

00:02:17.260 some evolutionary instinct that we all share to follow the strong person. So some confluence of

00:02:25.400 those forces makes us all think about heroes when we hear the word leader.

00:02:30.920 And how do you think heroic leadership can often get in the way of progress, right? Like how can heroic

00:02:38.320 leaders get in the way of the success of the individuals that they're leading?

00:02:42.980 They can lead people in the wrong direction. They take a lot of responsibility on their shoulders.

00:02:48.260 And if they're flawed, if they make a mistake, that has serious consequences for the movement or the

00:02:55.280 organization or whatever they're leading. There's some heroic leaders that are good at getting started,

00:03:02.000 good at the inspiring talk, but can't really follow through with execution and detail, which

00:03:06.820 often are absolutely critical. And so what they've started never really goes anywhere.

00:03:14.380 So heroism isn't easy. And that's yet another reason why we should learn about and admire the heroic

00:03:20.380 leaders who really have made a big difference for all of us.

00:03:24.480 So how did you stumble upon, or maybe you didn't stumble upon this idea, but this idea of the quiet leader,

00:03:29.600 what got you interested in exploring how they approach leadership?

00:03:34.340 Yeah. Well, I think that the very beginning was juxtaposing in my own head, the historic model that

00:03:42.940 we've just been talking about. And the fact that in working earlier in my career for Pricewaterhouse,

00:03:49.700 now PricewaterhouseCoopers, observing how Harvard Business School and Harvard University worked,

00:03:55.240 writing case studies, teaching executives. I just rarely came across people who fit the heroic model.

00:04:03.160 And so my question when I started the study was, what other model or approaches are there?

00:04:10.380 And so I gathered, I think ultimately maybe 150 case studies of men and women at different levels

00:04:17.520 of organizations. So right down from managing a team up to CEO who faced hard challenges. And I

00:04:25.740 sorted them into sort of three categories, people who seem to have done well, people who seem pretty

00:04:31.220 clearly not to have done well, and kind of murky cases. And then I looked for patterns among the people

00:04:36.960 who did well. And it was in the process of doing that, that this other model emerged. And I don't know,

00:04:44.740 quiet leader seemed to be the right name for it. And my publisher liked it. So that's why it found its

00:04:50.540 way onto the title page of the book.

00:04:53.860 So what sets a quiet leader apart from the more heroic leadership archetype?

00:05:01.220 Well, fundamentally, quiet leader, leading quietly was a really good title because it captures the

00:05:07.880 essence of what sets these people off. They do lead in the sense that an organization

00:05:14.100 or a little part of the world is different and better because they've been there. And it's not

00:05:21.360 just because someone was there, it's because a particular individual was there doing or not doing

00:05:26.940 certain things. And they haven't accomplished what they've accomplished by themselves. They've worked

00:05:32.960 with and through other people to make a difference. So I think that's fundamentally leadership. You can call

00:05:39.980 leadership management. You can debate that forever, but they've made a difference working with and

00:05:45.380 through other people on something important. However, if you were a fly on the wall, or maybe even

00:05:52.080 somebody working in the organization, you might not be aware of everything they were doing. The

00:05:58.760 individual might not even get full credit for what's done because they've been working behind the scenes,

00:06:04.760 patiently, sometimes indirectly, sometimes kind of astutely in a political sense, often working with

00:06:13.560 others rather than putting themselves up in front to get the job done. So there's lots of these

00:06:18.620 different quiet tactics. And that's kind of what defines the quiet leader. And that's how they get

00:06:25.340 done what they get done.

00:06:26.720 Are there situations where quiet leadership is more effective than, say, the heroic leadership model? Or

00:06:34.700 and vice versa? Are there instances where the heroic leadership model is more effective than the quiet

00:06:39.200 leadership model?

00:06:40.580 Well, let me start with the second part about the heroic part. It's a mistake, I think, to believe that heroic

00:06:48.040 leadership is best left for political movements and churches and big organizations in moments of crisis.

00:06:54.620 There are times in organizations where, you know, you're at a meeting, and things are moving in a

00:07:00.420 direction that you're pretty sure is wrong. And the boss may be moving things in those directions.

00:07:06.100 And it can be hard to put up your hand and say something, take on others, stand out from the

00:07:11.180 group, you know, the squeaky, the nail that sticks out, the one that gets hammered down. It's hard to take

00:07:17.020 on the boss, okay? That takes courage. And I don't want to put people who do that on the same level as

00:07:23.820 you mentioned, Teddy Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, and others. That would be preposterous. But it takes some

00:07:30.100 courage to step forward and do what's right. And you're running some risks, and it may cost you

00:07:35.800 something. So there's everyday heroism. And, you know, you see it with firefighters, you read about it with

00:07:41.520 police officers, or even ordinary citizens who rush into dangerous situations and do something. So we may all have

00:07:50.140 opportunities on occasion to do something that's at least a little bit heroic. That said, I think to

00:07:56.660 answer your core question, it's the vast majority of situations that call for quiet leadership. You

00:08:03.740 know, there's some cases that are clear what needs to be done, either strategically or legally or

00:08:08.640 ethically. And it doesn't take any kind of leadership to do what's kind of up on a billboard, and everybody

00:08:14.620 recognizes we ought to do it. But in tough situations where there's a lot of uncertainty, where the politics

00:08:20.380 is tricky, where there's often technical complexities that not everybody really understands, then it's important

00:08:26.860 to move quietly. And what I would add is I think that every five years or 10 years, the world moves further in

00:08:34.420 that direction of greater uncertainty and greater technical complexity of all kinds. So I think you've got to move

00:08:43.500 slowly and patiently and cautiously in those situations. And that, roughly speaking, is quiet

00:08:49.320 leadership.

00:08:50.320 Right. I like how you talked about in the book that quiet leaders often are working on the little things

00:08:55.240 in the background, but those little things really aren't little. They're the things that make

00:09:00.420 everything work.

00:09:02.560 Well, you know, it's a cliche, but it's true that we live in this interdependent world. And that's true of

00:09:08.780 relationships and organizations. It's true of computer systems. It's true of biochemical systems.

00:09:15.600 You've got to get a lot of little things right. Otherwise, big things can easily go wrong. And,

00:09:24.060 well, the quote I like a lot in the book is from a guy named Bruce Barton, who's largely unknown. But

00:09:31.380 early in the last century, he ran for Congress successfully. He wrote a number of very successful

00:09:38.020 religious pamphlets. He spent most of his career building up a big advertising agency. And he said that

00:09:43.560 given the uncertainty in life, you just don't know, he said, whether a tap on the shoulder or

00:09:49.520 a dime on a newsstand, as he put it, might not have really big consequences. So the idea that you're kind

00:09:57.360 of on holiday till the world gives you some big issue where you can be a hero, I think is not really

00:10:05.440 stepping up. There's lots of small and medium-sized things. They take quiet leadership,

00:10:10.680 they take effort, they take patience, work on them and try to get them right. That's one of the

00:10:15.160 messages in the book.

00:10:16.700 Yeah. So one of the things you argue in the book is that a quiet leader is like a pragmatic realist.

00:10:23.700 I think oftentimes the heroic leader is often, they're great for having, articulating a vision

00:10:28.300 and letting people know about that vision and inspiring people. While the quiet leaders are there

00:10:32.640 looking at, okay, what can we actually do? So what can leaders do to hone their perceptions

00:10:40.820 so that they have an accurate picture of what's actually going on in the situation they're facing?

00:10:46.880 Well, I think the fundamental thing is to sort of imagine that they are walking across a kind of

00:10:53.180 minefield. And I don't mean to encourage excessive caution or paranoia, but before they take action,

00:11:00.040 realize, ask themselves, you know, who's likely to support this? Who's likely to oppose it?

00:11:07.180 Who could we get to support it if we made the right case and persuaded them? And if you look at

00:11:13.200 the people likely to oppose something that's going on, how much clout do they have? How persistent will

00:11:19.920 they be in their opposition? These are skills that we often associate with politicians. And it's kind

00:11:26.800 of a negative view of politicians as opposed to the ones that we make into heroes or who are genuine

00:11:32.520 heroes. But there's lots of complications and lots of politics and lots of power stuff that can stand in

00:11:39.620 the way of getting things done. And I'd say have a really clear look at that. The second thing I'd say

00:11:45.340 is even putting all the politics aside, you've got to ask yourself, you've got to use your imagination in a

00:11:51.960 very practical way and say, do you have a plan that's got a good chance of working? And if it

00:11:58.300 doesn't, what's the backup? One of the famous professors in the history of HBS was a man named

00:12:05.680 General Georges Doriot. He was French by birth. He came to this country. During World War II, he was very

00:12:14.700 important working for the U.S., managing the immense supply chain that supplied the troops in Asia,

00:12:21.740 America, and in Europe. And then he went on to found the first really important publicly financed

00:12:27.640 venture capital firm. So this guy was really important. And his advice to managers has been

00:12:33.420 quoted by a lot of his former students. He said, if you've got a plan of action and it gets an A for

00:12:38.460 strategy and a B for execution, and you've got another plan that gets a B for strategy and an A for

00:12:44.360 execution, he said, always pick the second plan, the one that you can execute. So that's the second part

00:12:51.180 of this pragmatic realism. Even if you get over the political hurdles, can you really see this

00:12:57.420 through? And as I said, have you got a backup? I love that. Well, how do you, how does a quiet

00:13:03.380 leader of, you know, remain realistic, right, without becoming cynical and jaded? Because that, I know

00:13:10.740 that from my own experience, I can, I can fall into that. I'm like, I'm just being real here, but then I

00:13:15.000 can see I'm actually being cynical. Yeah. I think you've really got to look in the mirror and you've

00:13:21.900 got to look at your motives. And I think ideally you find a full set of motives. In other words,

00:13:29.300 you find some self-interested motives, like I'd rather succeed than fail. I'd like to get promoted.

00:13:35.520 I'd like to get a bonus. I'd like to have good things being said about me in the network inside the

00:13:41.540 organization. I think people who are acting out of their self-interest or acting out of a pretty

00:13:47.400 important and strong motive. And it keeps them motivated when things get tough. But if those

00:13:52.840 are your only motives, then I think you're at risk for the kind of thing you were worried about,

00:13:58.140 Brett. And you've got to say, wait a minute, am I also doing this for some larger cause or larger

00:14:04.260 purpose that's important to the organization, important to my team, maybe important to some people

00:14:11.300 in the organization? A quote I really like is from the ancient Hebrew philosopher and theologian,

00:14:19.200 Hillel the Elder, who said, and a lot of people listening, I'm sure have heard this, if I'm only

00:14:24.420 for myself, what am I? And if I'm not for myself, who will be for me? So you got to be for something

00:14:32.060 bigger than yourself, but you got to take care of yourself as well. It's that mix that I think is

00:14:37.760 important. Yeah. Speaking of motivations, I thought this was really interesting when you explored the

00:14:43.860 motives of quiet leaders, because oftentimes we, I think heroic leaders are put out there as like,

00:14:48.520 they're just these altruistic individuals who are just striving for the greater good. But you give

00:14:54.840 these case studies of these quiet leaders who they were thinking about their careers too. Like they would

00:15:00.340 make tough decisions that could affect their career. And they try to navigate a decision that got them to

00:15:06.660 a good result while protecting themselves. And some people would say, well, that's kind of conniving,

00:15:12.900 Machiavellian. Yeah. What's your response to that?

00:15:17.160 My response to that is that that's how the world works and that's human nature. You know,

00:15:22.380 if we just waited around until people with angelic motives that were 99.9% pure acted and did what

00:15:31.540 needed doing, we'd be waiting an awful lot of time, a long time and not much would ever happen. You know,

00:15:37.480 there's a kind of biography you read of great leaders, which is kind of a gotcha story. And it

00:15:44.340 says they look great, but actually their motives were complicated and they had issues with their

00:15:49.080 parents and so forth and their settling scores and so forth and so on. And my view of that is that's

00:15:55.100 probably true that human motivation is typically really complicated. So I don't mean this in a

00:16:03.140 harsh or sort of arrogant way, but I just say, you know, open your eyes, look at what makes people

00:16:08.560 tick. It's typically a combination of motives, often very deep, often not even fully understood.

00:16:16.100 But that's what I like about the, I think, the profound observation by Hillel the Elder.

00:16:23.220 Yeah. And I mean, what I loved about these really complex, often like the ethical dilemmas some of

00:16:28.080 these quiet leaders face is that they weren't just thinking about the immediate ramifications of their

00:16:33.360 decision. They were thinking like third, fourth level, like how would this affect things, you know,

00:16:38.680 years down the road. And when you have that long-term approach, it often makes you do things that in

00:16:44.080 the short term might seem to people looking in from the outside. Well, that's not, maybe that's not

00:16:49.800 ethical, but if you look at it for the long-term, it's actually, you realize that was the best thing

00:16:53.700 that they could do. Yes. I think that one way of characterizing quiet leaders is that they're very

00:17:00.060 managerial. And there is, of course, the old cliche, which I really dislike that says leaders do the

00:17:07.040 right thing and managers do things in the right way. And it sort of says managers are sort of second

00:17:13.000 class citizens who do the budget and send out the memos and all the rest. But in a complicated world,

00:17:18.340 it really matters to do things the right way in making a decision and then in executing the

00:17:24.760 decision. And in fact, I think maybe somebody has written a book I'm just about to describe.

00:17:30.480 I'd love to read one. I'm not planning to write it myself because I don't have the background.

00:17:35.580 But I think it would be fascinating to see a study of the great leaders and look at what they were

00:17:41.400 doing when they weren't giving the great speeches and up on the podium and leading the troops and

00:17:46.580 everybody else. Martin Luther King is famous for his, I have a dream speech, which he gave at the

00:17:52.480 end of the March on Washington. But he spent two weeks or so before that trying to get six or seven

00:17:59.120 different civil rights groups to agree to have the March on Washington and then to agree how it'd be

00:18:04.860 structured and who would give a talk and where and all the rest. So he had a managerial hat on

00:18:10.180 for a long period of time, just trying to get stuff done. What we know about is the

00:18:16.900 rousing, heroic, inspirational talk, but that was sort of the icing on the cake.

00:18:22.660 Yeah, that brings an interesting point. So it is possible to be both a heroic leader and a quiet

00:18:27.160 leader then. My sense is that almost all of the great leaders have also been quiet leaders,

00:18:34.260 managerial leaders. You know, in many cases, these men and women were kind of mobilizing a group.

00:18:42.820 You know, if you think of civil rights leaders, for example, to fight against an establishment,

00:18:47.160 and that's not easy. You know, that takes a lot of management because you don't have the same

00:18:53.540 resources as the establishment. You don't have a hierarchy. You don't have relationships. You got to

00:18:59.000 get people to work together, people with lots of different backgrounds. You got some people who

00:19:03.700 are really committed to the cause, which is great, but sometimes they're so committed that

00:19:08.340 they're a little out of control and can actually undermine the cause. You got to get all these folks

00:19:13.920 working together. And that takes real management, negotiation, political leadership, and management

00:19:21.840 talent. So another aspect of developing quiet leadership is seeking for good enough. Because

00:19:30.500 I think another aspect of heroic leadership is, right, like, you know, leaders do the right thing,

00:19:34.880 right? And sometimes you do the right thing no matter what, even if it means you don't get anything

00:19:39.540 done because you're not willing to compromise. Right. How do you as a quiet leader navigate that

00:19:47.440 world when you're trying to, like, make compromises when people aren't willing to compromise or

00:19:51.580 they're not willing to settle for good enough? How do you as a quiet leader nudge people in that

00:19:55.880 direction? Well, sometimes the instinct that says, let's not settle, it is a sound instinct.

00:20:05.040 It's what's behind it sometimes is an intuition that if we're creative, if we spend a little more

00:20:11.180 time, if we use our imaginations, it's not just a case of A or B or C. There's another option out

00:20:18.640 there. It's going to take some work, take some imagination to flesh it out, but we ought to

00:20:23.480 really invest. And so I think before you settle for half a loaf, split the difference, whatever

00:20:29.740 cliche you want to use. These are good cliches because sometimes that's what you end up doing.

00:20:34.940 You ought to make sure you haven't left any creative options on the table. A very famous example that I

00:20:40.780 often use in classes involves Abraham Lincoln in the late 1850s. So he was running for president.

00:20:46.900 The big question in the country was slavery and specifically slavery in the new sort of

00:20:52.440 Northwest territories that became Indiana and Ohio. And if Lincoln came out in favor of slavery in

00:21:00.200 those areas, he'd lose a lot of support in the North. If he opposed it, he'd lose a lot of support

00:21:05.100 in the border states that he needed to get elected. So what do you do? A lot of politicians today would

00:21:11.120 just issue some sort of mushy statement. Lincoln said the following. He said he opposed the extension

00:21:17.240 of slavery because that would be bad for what he called free white men who would emigrate to these

00:21:25.000 territories and get 40 acres and build a life for themselves and their families. He said it was

00:21:30.960 unfair to make them compete with plantation farming. Okay. So it was quite interesting. He avoided taking a

00:21:39.660 stand on the fundamental moral issue, but instead found a creative way to oppose slavery and to build

00:21:46.440 a coalition to support him and to oppose slavery in those areas. And you can say, well, that wasn't

00:21:53.100 heroic and that was a little wishy-washy. But I mean, arguably, if he didn't come up with this

00:21:57.960 creative approach, his name might not be known today. The country might have split into two or more

00:22:04.600 pieces after the civil war, no emancipation proclamation and history would be radically

00:22:10.420 different. But there was a creative kind of compromise that this extraordinarily judicious

00:22:17.040 man put together and managed to execute. And I mean, I love that story. But I think

00:22:24.640 people, I think a lot of people listening, I was like, that sounds great. But like, how do you,

00:22:29.800 how do you convey that? Like that you're doing something, you're making a compromise in the

00:22:34.160 short term so you can fulfill some long-term goal. Or as I just, I feel like we have this culture now

00:22:39.500 where it's like, if you compromise, like you are weak, you're giving in. And there's no, there's no

00:22:45.400 taking an account into of the will happen five years from now and 10 years from now, et cetera.

00:22:51.980 Well, here's where I think a managerial approach can be helpful. So if you're going to say to a group,

00:22:59.100 this is the best we can do, we've got to sort of compromise. And I know you're disappointed.

00:23:04.800 You've got to be able to make the case that this is the best you can do. And that means assembling

00:23:10.580 facts. It can mean assembling data. It can mean showing them that you really burned the midnight

00:23:16.860 oil, trying to find alternatives. It can mean you looked at some alternatives and decided they

00:23:23.360 wouldn't work or they were just too risky. What I mean by being managerial is you got to make

00:23:28.900 the case. Then there's a personal element to this as well. Now you've got to be able to make the case

00:23:34.620 convincingly and look people in the eye and say, I really did the best I could. And that's why we're

00:23:41.840 going to do this. You know, that often happens in the case of layoffs, which are very painful for the

00:23:47.560 people laid off. Also tough in some ways for the people who do the laying off. They'll typically say

00:23:52.960 it's the toughest thing they do as managers or executives. And before you look at a group of

00:23:58.480 people and say, I'm sorry, but we're taking your jobs away. You know, you've got to be convinced and

00:24:03.800 you've got to be convincing that you really did all you could. And that's, that's hard managerial work.

00:24:09.940 That's not something that comes out of the heroic leader playbook.

00:24:14.680 You also discuss in your book, and this is can also raise some eyebrows from people listening,

00:24:18.200 is that an element of quiet leadership is rule bending. How can rule bending, I don't know,

00:24:24.240 be done ethically in a way that can move forward a big picture goal of a quiet leader?

00:24:28.980 Well, first, to be clear, there are some rules called, you know, black letter law,

00:24:35.520 whose interpretation is unambiguously clear, you know, like around insider trading. I'm not saying

00:24:41.900 for a second that you ought to bend those rules. In fact, I think you even ought to avoid the gray

00:24:48.800 area around those rules. Because, you know, if you're leading an organization or part of an

00:24:54.640 organization, and you're doing some clever maneuvering in the gray area, trying to get

00:24:59.600 right up to the law, but not cross it, maybe you'll succeed. You may wander across into something that's

00:25:05.600 illegal. And some people in your organization watching you, watching your example, may not be as

00:25:11.540 skilled as you, and they may do something that violates the law, and you've got a big problem.

00:25:16.120 So there are some real bright lines you better not cross. But, you know, there's lots of other

00:25:21.260 sort of laws, regulations, guidelines that have to be interpreted in particular situations.

00:25:30.020 And often they were written for situations other than the one you happen to be dealing with.

00:25:35.180 And so there I'd say, look for a little flexibility, rather than just say, gee, the law or the regulation

00:25:42.760 says absolutely this, this is what we've got to do. I think that can actually be a cop-out.

00:25:48.860 Now, you know, well, sorry, we can't do anything because that's what the regulation says.

00:25:53.760 I would look for a little flexibility. I'd certainly talk to knowledgeable people in compliance,

00:25:58.840 in the legal department, experienced senior executives, a mentor, if you've got, and say,

00:26:04.500 look, I think this is just pushing us too hard in the wrong direction. You know, you want to be

00:26:09.720 able to be public and somewhat transparent about it. If you've got a responsible job, you're not paid

00:26:15.400 to look up things in a rule book. You're paid to use your judgment. There can also be conflicting

00:26:20.300 rules, conflicting judgments. So that's where I say, look for a little flexibility and just don't assume

00:26:26.580 is black and white. It often isn't. Yeah. As I was reading your book, it seems like this

00:26:30.840 managerial approach that you're advocating is very Aristotelian, right? Like you're looking for

00:26:35.700 the right answer for the right reason at the right time. That's precisely right. And you're doing those

00:26:42.640 things for the particular situation you face. Now, Aristotle can be kind of frustrating because when

00:26:49.940 you say, well, what's the right thing? And you go to his writings, he'll say, well, the right thing is

00:26:55.040 whatever shows good judgment. You say, okay, great. What's good judgment? Well, good judgment is sort

00:27:01.480 of putting the virtues into practice and justice, truth, prudence. Okay. How do you find somebody

00:27:10.040 who's got good judgments living by the virtues? Well, they come from a good community. What's a

00:27:14.740 good community? Well, that's where you have a lot of people practicing the virtues. How do you know

00:27:18.540 you've got a good community? Well, you've got a lot of people with good judgment and you're right back

00:27:22.860 at the beginning. It's circular, but he did not want to define the world in terms of rules and

00:27:28.980 cookie cutters. He said, you've really got to look at specific cases. And of course, you use your

00:27:34.860 judgment, you may make some mistakes. That's another reason to be managerial, to try and do things

00:27:39.920 carefully, but you may make some mistakes. That's also why I think you need good managers to have

00:27:45.460 contingency plans. But that really is out of the Aristotelian pragmatic view of how you do the right

00:27:51.920 thing. Well, and speaking of Aristotelian virtue ethics, you argue that there's three quiet virtues

00:27:57.200 of leadership. What are those virtues? One I focus on most heavily is the one I call modesty. And that

00:28:04.200 sort of says, let me put it this way. One consulting firm years ago had an ashtray or something they

00:28:09.640 gave to people. They put on the desks of people in their offices a long time ago, back when a lot more

00:28:14.460 smoking, and said, just remember, you're not a genius. And this idea that the world is a really

00:28:20.340 complicated place. And that you might be pretty good at what you do, and you might have gotten

00:28:24.600 some promotions, because you're pretty good. But there's an awful lot out there that you just

00:28:29.440 don't know. It's described sometimes as the prayer of a Breton sailor. The prayer is roughly,

00:28:37.060 oh Lord, my boat is so small, and the sea is so vast. It's this sense of modesty before all the

00:28:44.780 uncertainty out there that I think is almost an instinctive part of what makes quiet leaders tick.

00:28:54.380 And so they move more slowly, they talk with other people, they drill down, they pause and reflect on

00:29:00.320 things for a while. There's another saying that I like quite a lot that's apparently put in front of

00:29:06.420 people who are training to be Navy pilots, you know, who are going to land on aircraft cruisers,

00:29:11.300 which is a pretty dangerous and difficult thing to do. And the saying basically is that there are no

00:29:17.600 old, bold pilots. I think that's a great saying. These are super courageous people who do these

00:29:24.820 things. I'd say be patient, be modest before you go plunging ahead. Right. I think that's an important

00:29:30.820 virtue to hit on, especially in our day and age where you don't want to be modest. You want to

00:29:34.320 promote yourself and live big and go big or go home. Well, and you know, there are these great

00:29:39.280 stories out there. So I'm now reading a biography of Elon Musk. I'm about halfway through, but what an

00:29:45.300 amazing guy. And if you look at his three companies now, they seem to be doing pretty well as companies

00:29:51.020 and making profound changes or promising profound changes in life for all of us today. Okay. The guy

00:29:58.760 just didn't know he was supposed to sleep and often didn't think that what other people thought were

00:30:05.540 barriers in front of him were real barriers and went crashing ahead. Now, I think another biography

00:30:11.140 could be written about the close calls he had, the luck he had. But you look at somebody like that,

00:30:17.600 and that is kind of inspiring. And it sort of says, get off your rear end and give stuff a shot. 0.96

00:30:23.640 And I think that's a good instinct, but it's got to be counterbalanced, you know, in a complicated,

00:30:29.280 uncertain world with other ways of thinking, which I describe as quiet leadership. And most of us

00:30:34.860 aren't Elon Musk to begin with. So I'd recommend a little modesty, even if reading his book does get

00:30:40.880 you off your rear end and out trying some stuff. Well, Joseph, this has been a great conversation.

00:30:45.600 Where can people go to learn more about your work? Well, I've written a number of books that in some

00:30:49.920 ways are all variations on this theme. You can find those books basically on Amazon. Most of the books

00:30:55.820 I've written have led to Harvard Business Review articles as well. And I think they're available from

00:31:00.840 Harvard Business Publishing, I think for three or $4 or something like that. So those would be the

00:31:05.860 places I'd have a look. Fantastic. Well, Joseph Bataraco, thank you so much for your time. It's

00:31:09.900 been a pleasure. You're welcome, Brett. I enjoyed it. My guest today was Joseph Bataraco. He's the

00:31:13.540 author of the book, Leading Quietly, An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing. It's available on

00:31:17.880 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash quiet leadership,

00:31:23.920 where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:31:26.480 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,

00:31:41.500 make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy the show,

00:31:45.560 have got something out of it over the years, please take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or

00:31:49.380 Stitcher. It helps us out a lot. As always, thank you for your continued support. And until next time,

00:31:53.060 this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

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The Art of Manliness - July 27, 2017

#325： Leading Quietly

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