7 Leadership Lessons from the Nobel Prize

The annual Nobel Awards are being announced this week. The awards have been around since 1901 to reward advancements in several categories. Their 120-year history provides several lessons for leaders today. Here are 7 lessons in leadership from the Nobel Prize.

1 - Understand Your Legacy - The Nobel Prize was created by a rich Swedish industrialist, Alfred Nobel, who left most of his estate to a fund to establish and administer the award. Much of Nobel’s fortune had come from his creation of explosives (e.g., dynamite) and armaments. When his older brother Ludvig died, a newspaper erroneously ran the obituary they had prepared for Alfred. That obituary criticized Alfred for the impact his work had on making warfare more destructive. Legend has it that that obituary caused Alfred to set up the Nobel Prizes to make his name associated with a positive legacy after his death.

2 - Don’t Wait too Long - The prize is specified for awarding advancements achieved in the previous year by people who are still living. That can make timing of the award very important. Amazingly, Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize despite being nominated five times. He was assassinated shortly after his last nomination in 1948. The Nobel Committee decided to award no Peace Prize that year, a rare move in a year outside of World War I or Wold War II.

3 - Don’t Act too Early - In retrospect, other awardees may have been seen as getting the award prematurely, before their achievements or legacies passed the test of time. In 1926, the Physiology/Medicine prize went to Johannesburg Fibiger for his discovery of a parasite that caused cancer - a conclusion that was later disproven. Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Peace prize in 1991 but has been criticized later for supporting a repressive military government in her home country of Myanmar. Barack Obama was awarded the Peace prize within the first months of his presidency, a move that some criticized as representing more forward looking hope than achievements at the time.

4 - Use “Near-Misses” to Calibrate Criteria - All awards have a subjective element. Having too many specific criteria can limit flexibility to acknowledge worthy winners with complex cases. Having too few criteria can make awards too subjective. Monitoring the awardees versus non-awardees can help calibrate your criteria. Doing an analysis of notable “near-miss” cases can be a good way to pressure test the criteria an organization is using versus others’ expectations. The Literature awards are a good example, as there are not clear explanations of why many long popular artists never won an award - e.g., China Achebe, Jorge Luis Borges, Karel Capek, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Arthur Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, August Strindberg, JRR Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, John Updike, Simon Vestdijk, and Emile Zola. Examining several notable “near-misses” in the Peace prize can also be insightful - e.g., Corazon Acquino and Eleanor Roosevelt stand out as notable women in the category not to have won.

5 - Build in Diversity - The Nobel Awards have been criticized for having a bias toward awarding Europeans/Scandinavians over the rest of the world and for men over women. One way to help ensure diversity in consideration is to have a diversity among selectors. Alfred Nobel’s will limits diversity of Nobel selectors in one geographic way in that they are directed to come from notable Swedish/Norwegian institutions. Some committees have become more diverse in gender representation. For example, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee to select the Peace prize winner has gone from being male-only for the first 68 years of the prize to rotating between men and women since then.

6 - Create Team Awards - The Nobel awards are limited to being shared by no more than three people. That helps maintain the exclusivity of being a Nobel awardee. But it is a challenge when much work is often done by teams larger than that. Having team-based awards to complement individual awards can be a useful way to acknowledge other team members while maintaining the exclusivity and prestige of individual-based awards.

7 - Respectfully Respect Tradition - For all its imperfections, the Nobel Awards themselves have stood the test of time. Over 100 years after their establishment, they continue to be a generally well-know, respected, and understandable process. The committee has maintained traditions while still staying relevant in a world that has changed enormously over its 120 years. Think about how much sciences, arts, and politics have changed through the Industrial Age to the Internet Age over that time. Somehow the Nobel Prize has stayed relevant. Perhaps the Nobel Prize process deserves a prize of its own.

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About the Author: Victor Prince, a Wharton MBA, is a?corporate trainer,?executive coach, and an Amazon Top 20 best-selling leadership?author?who helps organizations build leadership, strategy, communications, and critical thinking?skills. Follow Victor on?LinkedIN?to access his 100+ articles on?leadership,?strategy,?learning & development, and more.

Sources: A facts sourced from Wikipedia.org articles.