Leading Quietly Badaracco Analysis

Lecture Text
Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.: Leading Quietly*
Now what I’m going to do today is talk for a while about research I’ve done over the last five years and completed with the publication of a book by that title: Leading Quietly. What I set out to do initially was to see what I could learn about leadership and effective leadership, if I looked beyond, if I looked away from, what I’ll call the heroic model. And the heroic model is one that, with the briefest sketch, is familiar to all of us. Who are heroic leaders? They are people who change the world or part of the world, they’ve got very strong values, they are charismatic, they are inspiring, they are willing to make sacrifices, sometimes, in some walks of life, the ultimate sacrifice,
He worked in Africa. He won the Nobel Prize in 1952. Took the money, spent it expanding his hospital down there, and stayed in Africa working as a medical missionary until the point when he died. This is what he says. And I think this is a remarkable statement: “Of all the will toward the ideal, all of our highest aspirations, only a small part of it can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with”— notice that phrase—”small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is”— notice again how strongly he puts this—”a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition.” These folks who get the recognition compared to the former are “like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.” This is someone who is a heroic leader, by so many standards, basically saying, don’t pay a lot of attention to people like himself. Look elsewhere—look at the people engaged in these small and obscure deeds. So, what I’d like to do now is spend the remaining time, maybe fifty minutes or so, telling you a little bit about these quiet leaders: What I looked at, what I learned, how they think, and what they do. I summarize this in the form of seven lessons. Let me say a little bit about each one of these. The first thing about these people is they don’t kid themselves. What they don’t kid themselves about is how much they know, how much of what goes on around them they can control, how
That the future, whatever it might hold, was made up of multiple alternative scenarios. The future, no matter how hard and smart their efforts were, could easily come up from behind and sort of bite them in the posterior. They were also political realists about their organizations. They didn’t kid themselves about other people’s motives. They knew that in any organization, there are some people who are basically in it for themselves. They also didn’t kid themselves about the fact that most organizations are organized like pyramids—a lot of the goodies go to the people at the top, and lots of smart, ambitious people are trying to get hold of those goodies. They realize that organizations tend to be organized on the basis of insiders and outsiders. Insiders tend to take care of themselves; lots of outsiders are trying to get in. In other words, I’m not talking about saints, social workers, would-be martyrs, folks who are holier than thou. In fact, I’m talking about people—and I’ll spend a little more time on this in a moment—who are quite eager to get higher pay, promotions, and make their way up to the top of the greasy pole. They did not kid themselves about how the world worked. But, there’s one other element that I want to add to this basic idea of, “don’t kid yourself.” These folks were not cynics. When I mention things like the politics, the competition that takes place in any