On leadership, emotion, decision-making and Sir Ernest Shacketon…

What would Sir Ernest Shackleton make of the breathless claim of researchers at a respected business that a review of the 35 years of research into emotion reveals that:

“…emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making.”?

In 2015, I am reflecting on the leadership and courage shown by Sir Ernest Shackleton and his fellow expeditioners, who, in 1914, embarked on the task of crossing Antarctica from sea to sea.  In Shackleton’s own words: 

After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen, who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeyings—the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea.

Shackleton was an acclaimed veteran of Antarctic expeditions, so when he announced his latest expedition, he received nearly 5,000 applications from which he selected 56 men.

While reading about Shackleton's adventures of 100 years ago, researchers at respected business schools tell me, ‘Don’t let emotions screw up your decisions’ and ‘Take Bias out of Strategy Decisions’. I do wonder what Shackleton would make of such advice. Or, what he would make of the breathless claim that a review of the 35 years of research into emotion reveals that:

…emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making.  

Apparently, this review, and a ‘revolution in the science of emotion’, heralds a potential ‘paradigm shift in decision theories’. 

For me, leadership and decision are intertwined and inseparable. Talking about one without the other seems strange. For me, management research heralding that ‘emotion’ can (and should) be taken out of managerial decision-making describes a workplace dystopia. 

People are led by other people. Wishing away the limitations and strengths of human cognition, behaviour, and interaction in the workplace strikes me as an odd path toward improving individual and organisational performance. 

The peaks of human endeavour are often achieved by people (and groups) not taking the purely rational course. Rather, an emotional commitment is made to achieving a greater good that inevitably involves a leader committing to others and seeking that commitment in return. A relationship of confidence and trust is largely founded on emotional attachment. These types of commitments don’t need to be heroic to be effective. Indeed, they are made every day by leaders and workforces in every conceivable form of organisational activity.

People want to be led. However, they exercise choice in the level of commitment they give, to whom and for how long. Committing to the leadership of another cannot be an entirely rational decision. It is a commitment beyond the purely economic balance of pros and cons and costs and benefits. It is a human relationship.
All organisations rely on leaders with the knowledge and flexibility to meet the challenges of unfamiliar problems in unfamiliar contexts. Leaders work with partial knowledge, uncertainty, changing circumstances, and perhaps most importantly, the emotional states of others. 

Leaders work with people’s fears, aspirations, experiences, and capabilities. They encounter other people’s happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust daily. They also grapple with their own emotional states. Leaders must incorporate emotion in decision-making to do what is asked of them in achieving the organisation’s goals. It is unavoidable.

For me, while there is much conversation today (as there always has been) about ‘leadership’, the prescriptions, advice, and recommendations seem to be centralist, controlling, managerial and process-bound. Simplistic advice that speaks to taking emotion out of decision-making takes us further in that direction.

In 1919, recounting his experiences, Shackleton observes that:

We failed in this objective [crossing the Antarctic continent from sea to sea], but the story of our attempt is the subject for the following pages, and I think that though failure in the actual accomplishment must be recorded, there are chapters in this book of high adventure, strenuous days, lonely nights, unique experiences, and, above all, records of unflinching determination, supreme loyalty, and generous self-sacrifice on the part of my men which, even in these days that have witnessed the sacrifices of nations and regardlessness of the self on the part of individuals, still will be of interest to readers…

Shackleton is not recounting the emotionless management of an expedition where every decision was subject to a rationality test or where every decision was carefully weighed to determine the optimum outcome. He describes the art of leadership, the pressure of making decisions in uncertain conditions, engaging with risk, adapting to circumstances, and honouring the implicit confidence and trust that comes with leadership.

I think I’ll stick with Shackleton on this one.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

Sources:
Sir Ernest Shackleton, CVO, (1919), South: The Endurance Expedition, (xii, Penguin, 2008).

Ernest H. Shackleton, 1874-1922, http://www.south-pole.com/p0000097.htm

Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim S. Kassam, Emotion and Decision Making, 2014, http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jenniferlerner/files/lerner.li_.valdesolo.kassam_in_press_annual_review_emotion_and_decision_making_edited_proof.9.29.2014.pdf 

Don’t let emotions screw up your decisions, https://hbr.org/2015/05/dont-let-emotions-screw-up-your-decisions, May 6, 2015

Take bias out of strategy decisions, https://hbr.org/2014/01/take-the-bias-out-of-strategy-decisions/, January 15, 2014

Picture Credit:
Photo by martin_vmorris - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License  https://www.flickr.com/photos/24108242@N05