Leadership Lessons from Bolsonaro: about sticky-notes, followers, and clowns.

What can we all learn about leadership from the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro [name your own country’s President]? Or, how come such a clearly incompetent person gets elected to the highest political position in the country?

In October 2014, I wrote a post entitled “Leadership is dead! Long live the Team.” The point I made back then was this: the dog wags the tail. Not otherwise. It is almost a tautology, but any organization is a group of people, i.e., the sum of employees, clients, and other related communities. A leader is a product of that assemblage. In both senses, a great leader is the result of (i) a particular history and (ii) a particular set of people, a.k.a "followers." A great leader is a great team. The same way, an awful leader is an awful team. To help unpack the two last sentences, let’s talk a little bit about sticky-notes, followers, and clowns.

Sticky-notes

Leaders are like sticky-notes. They are only reminders of what we would like to do, of interests we would like to entertain. And, like sticky-notes, they are only consequential or even useful if we pay attention to them.

At any moment in time, we have a list of things – big and small – we would like to accomplish by the end of the day, the month, the year, or life. Like having a profusion of speakers in a public square, each sticky-note is trying to call your attention to the goal or idea it represents. Some of these sticky-notes on and around our desks have been hanging there for a while: finish that post about leadership, get that shed cleaned, start working out, etc.

Like in a public square, those human interests captured by sticky-note-speakers will linger there until we start paying attention to them. Procrastination, as a matter of fact, is related to our feeling that we will not be able to accomplish a specific task or challenge. So, sticky-note-speakers calling for fighting climate change, racial disparities, equal pay, social and economic justice, get way more than their fair share of our procrastination. Unfortunately.

As the quote attributed to Henry Ford (1863-1947) suggests: “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” Then, out of the blue or for many reasons - like a medical imposition; or running out of time; or just out of shame, a particular sticky-note grabs our attention. And we get to work to make it happen.

Like sticky-notes, leaders will not make us follow through with our actions. Actually, it is the other way around. Our actions will promote a stick-note-leader to the center of our lives.

Followers

Probably, due to 12,000 years of history of trying to apprehend the world around us, we tend to focus mostly on the constraints that are external to us. We seldom pay enough attention to the fact that how we respond to these externalities is much more decisive to what will unfold to us. Or, expanding the concept through Anne-Marie Willis's quote on Ontological Design: “we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.”

So, keeping in mind the sticky-note-leader metaphor, at any moment in time there is a profusion of wannabe-leaders stuck in the public space, each one of them trying to call our attention to the goal or idea they represent. Then, for many reasons, a particular sticky-note-leader grabs our attention and we become “followers”, or choose to vote on them.

Although we still have a culture of glorifying leaders, as Derek Sivers suggested in his 2010 TED Talk, are really the followers that transform a “lone nut into a leader.” As a great 3-minute illustration of how that occurs, watch the video below. Keep in mind Anne-Marie Willis’ quote as you watch it.

Let’s unpack it as we go through its transcript:

• 00:20 - So let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under three minutes, and dissect some lessons from it.
• 00:26 - First, of course you know, a leader [sticky-note] needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed [get our attention].
• 00:32 - What he's doing is so easy to follow [you can do it].
• 00:34 - Here's his first follower with a crucial role; he's going to show everyone else how to follow.
• 00:39 - Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal.
• 00:41 - Now it's not about the leader anymore; it's about them, plural.
• 00:45 - Now, there he is calling to his friends.
• 00:47 - Now, if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself.
• 00:53 - It takes guts to stand out like that.
• 00:55 - The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader [design the world].
• 01:05 - And here comes a second follower.
• 01:07 - Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts -- three is a crowd, and a crowd is news.
• 01:12 - So a movement must be public.
• 01:14 - It's important to show not just the leader, but the followers, because you find that new followers emulate the followers [world designs back], not the leader.
• 01:22 - Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people.
• 01:26 - Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point.
• 01:28 - Now we've got a movement.
• 01:31 - So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky.
• 01:35 - So those that were sitting on the fence before now have no reason not to.
• 01:39 - They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, but they will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry.
• 01:48 - So, over the next minute, you'll see all of those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in [response to externalities].
• 01:56 - And that's how you make a movement.
• 01:58 - But let's recap some lessons from this.
• 02:00 - So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you.
• 02:13 - Okay, but we might have missed the real lesson here.
• 02:16 - The biggest lesson, if you noticed -- did you catch it? -- is that leadership is over-glorified.
• 02:22 - Yes, it was the shirtless guy who was first [sticky-note], and he'll get all the credit, but it was really the first follower that transformed [response to externalities] the lone nut into a leader.

Just to reinforce Derek’s concluding lessons, leadership is over-glorified. The followers are the ones to credit the design of a “lone nut” into a leader.

The Clown

The video above presented a “lone nut” being promoted as a movement leader. It is very difficult trying to explain why that sticky-nut got into a leadership position by studying his personality, his leadership strategy, or his skills. Or, as a matter of fact, any other nonsensical approach usually employed by business magazines to explain what leadership entails.

One of the most fascinating metaphors to understand the dynamics of how a leader is made is suggested by some extensions made of the “Clown” concept used by Hannah Arendt to describe Adolf Eichmann: “everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”

But, before developing the Clown approach further, let’s tap into two other useful perspectives that can be of help making sense of the leaders’ phenomena. The first one, the survivors’ bias, might be helpful to understand why crediting successes and failures to leaders themselves is not a very effective way to explain why or what happened. Also called Survivorship Bias, it is the tendency to exclude from performance studies - either knowingly or not, all people that acted exactly like the best or the worst performers and didn’t obtain the same results. And, it might not be a surprise to know that these cases are not exceptions, but very numerous. Most often, they are brushed under the rug because they don’t fit the hero or loser’s traditional narratives. By removing these cases, it creates research results that are skewed, without any meaningful contributions, other than reinforcing fairytales about the hero’s journey.

The second one is the research about the effects of managerial turnover. It uses sports data to study the effects of manager replacement on firm performance and seems to confirm that “changing the coach does not affect team performance neither when considering as dependent variable the number of points per match nor when looking at the number of goals scored or conceded” (De Paola & Scoppa, 2011, p. 4)

As Dave Berri describes on a Freakonomics blog post: “Essentially, coaches appear to receive similar training, face similar information sets, and ultimately make similar decisions. The results – perhaps not surprising when you consider these similarities – are that outcomes with different coaches are quite similar.”

Based on these sports team researches, the team’s performance stays statistically the same, after a brief worsened performance period right after the change of coach. Which, in retrospect, ends being seen as an improvement due to the new “leader.”

So, what about the Clown? One of the most traditional Clown’s act happens at the beginning of the show. Traditionally, minding of their own life, the Clown enters into the stage without being aware of the place, the audience, or their role in the whole scheme of things. The Clown seems surprised that there is a stage, an audience, and that they is the sole focus of everybody’s attention.

Here, for the sake of understanding leaders, the Clown metaphor brings the framing of someone who doesn’t know how they ended up at the arena but keeps the show going with their tricks and juggles.

What can we learn?

What can we all learn about leadership from the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro [name your own country’s President]? Or, how come such a clearly incompetent person gets elected to the highest political position in the country?

Like so many questionable leaders throughout history, Jair Bolsonaro had a long and painful record of doing nothing or of accomplishing not much. But, like the "lone nut", he also had the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. For almost 30 years, he kept shouting stupidities, which consistently required very low brainpower to understand. Like the sticky-nut, Bolsonaro was a sticky-note on many people's desks, either as an aberration or as a deep-seated desire to be violent, misogynous, racists, etc. What he was doing was, indeed, "so easy to follow." With all the bluntly autocratic promises of being someone who can return his country to the glories of "an imaginary past."

Like the Clown and the sticky-nut, Jair Bolsonaro would probably not be able to explain why he got into a leadership position. What the video shows in 3 minutes is how a “lone nut” is promoted to a movement's leader, not by his skillful leadership performance, but by the people choosing to pay attention to that particular sticky-note, by choosing to "follow" him.

Leadership failures, like sports coaches, also cannot be attributed to the lone-nut either. As many failed leaders' stories can attest, there is much more that goes into failures then one single sticky-note can handle. One interesting example of clarity from a corporate leader was how Nokia CEO Stephen Elop ended his speech in 2013 - while NOKIA's mobile phone branch was being sold to Microsoft, by saying “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”.

As Hannah Arendt suggests, “Action is a WE and not an I.” In other words, there is no way a “leader” can steer people towards where they don’t want to go or do what they don't want to do. Let me repeat it since we might have missed the real lesson here: It is instrumentally impossible for a “leader” to make people do what they don’t want to do. Action is a WE. No WE, no action.

This is an extremely troubling lesson. As a Brazilian citizen, I would rather prefer to believe that I didn't have anything to do with such a disgusting election outcome. But, as clear cut as red-metal, Ol' Hannah reminds me that I didn't do enough. I saw that sticky-nut on my desk for the longest time. Always telling myself that I should do something about it. I focused my attention on other sticky-notes. Hurtful procrastination... When people decided to join that ridiculed and easy to follow dance, as seen below, it was too late.

Yes, I think that is the main leadership lesson I took from Jair Bolsonaro [name your own country’s President]. Indeed. Social responsibility cannot be procrastinated.

“To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1970), 45.

?Non-conclusion

As usual, the texts I post here are not meant to be final statements in any sense. They are all starting points for further discussions. Feel welcomed to share your thoughts.