In Our Quest for Inspiration Over Insight, We Wind Up With Neither
Or, what you need are facts, evidence, and ideas
You know what’s funny? Many people are stuck in draining jobs, working for bosses who are either clueless or jerks. They believe business schools are meant to come in and save them. Like, “Yes, please, teach me how to be inspired while I’m drowning in a sea of meaningless tasks!” People expect professors to give them hope and motivation. They think it’s part of the course.
And you know what? Business schools play right into it. Seriously, just go to any top business school’s website. What’s the first thing you’ll see? Some headline screaming, “Looking for an Inspiring Management Course?” Like it’s a spa retreat or something.
Inspiring? Really? Since when did inspiration become the selling point for a course? You don’t see med schools or engineering programs pulling that nonsense. Imagine an architecture school advertising “inspiring” lessons on load-bearing walls. No way. They’re talking about rigorous, useful stuff. The kind of knowledge that actually helps you do your job without the building falling down.
But when it comes to fixing work problems or planning out your career, do you really need to be “inspired”? Nah. What you actually need are facts, evidence, and solid ideas. It’s not like you’re at a cricket match and need someone to cheer you on. Fixing a broken workplace or figuring out how to climb the corporate ladder? That’s tough, nitty-gritty work. Inspiration isn’t going to get you through it.
But, hey, I know I’m in the minority here. Most people think they need inspiration. They want a boost, like the guy in the executive course looking for a quick lift instead of real answers. And that’s exactly what the leadership industry sells — feel-good vibes over actual substance. They’d rather give you a nice, warm feeling inside than make you face the harsh realities of the working world.
And can you blame them? Life’s already tough enough. Who wants to sit through a course or read an article that makes them feel worse? The leadership industry gives people what they want: hope, happiness, and some entertainment. Is that what people actually need? That’s another story altogether.
If we want to build a real science of leadership, we need solid, reliable data. We need to know exactly what successful leaders did. Not just the fairy tales they tell. But, let’s face it, the leadership industry is full of fables.
Think about it. When leaders write newsletters or autobiographies, they aren’t sharing facts. They’re crafting a narrative. Stories designed to build an image and reputation. Not to teach or inform. Stories that are as much data as a TV commercial.
Take Jack Welch, the celebrity Chairman and CEO of General Electric. He wrote a tonne of books on leading GE. However, he conveniently leaves out terms like “GE jerks.” GE executives used this term to describe the harsh culture Welch created. Welch never touches on the not-so-nice stuff that happened under his watch. Like pollution scandals or price-fixing. That’s not the image he wanted out there. To be frank, nobody does.
It’s all about motivated cognition. People want to see themselves in the best possible light. So, they’ll remember their wins and conveniently forget their screw-ups.
Like us, leaders want to remember their achievements and forget their less-than-great moments. And even if they do remember them, you can bet they’re not rushing to share those stories.
The more leaders tell their stories, the more they start believing their own bullshit. They repeat these tales so often that they can’t even tell what’s real anymore. It’s an evolutionary advantage. The best way to fool others is to fool yourself first.
Despite these obvious biases, people still eat up these leadership fables. Why? Because they tell us what we want to hear. They fit the narrative that the world is fair, that everything will be okay in the end. It’s like those feel-good Hindi movies. “Things will be all right in the end, and if they aren’t all right, it’s not yet the end.”
The problem isn’t storytelling. Stories are powerful. They stick with us more than raw data ever could. But leadership stories? They’re often exaggerated or plain made up. And nobody bothers to check the facts.
Case in point: A woman from a top Silicon Valley company leads a marketing analytics project. She brings in $4 million. This leads to a promotion. She becomes the youngest and only female leader reporting to her boss. But now a peer is trying to get her unit moved under him. When she uses her leadership training on “authenticity and trust” to mend things, it falls flat. Her peer only cares about taking over her team. Not interested in mending things. When she turns to her boss and HR, they tell her to toughen up and handle it herself.
People lose out on attractive job opportunities by believing in these fake prescriptions. They start having problems in their current positions.
Not only that, when we turn leaders into larger-than-life heroes, it backfires in other ways. First off, people end up feeling like they can’t measure up. They look at these so-called “mythical” leaders and think, “Why bother? I’ll never be that good,” so they either give up or don’t even try.
Second, we get so caught up idolising these leaders that we don’t want to hear about their screw-ups. We miss out on the lessons we could learn from their mistakes.
Thirdly, the leadership industry holds up rare, almost superhuman leaders as role models. They’re teaching us to learn from one-off, random events that can’t be replicated. The advice ends up being useless.
In our quest for inspiration over insight, we wind up with neither. We get no inspiration, as we learn that the leadership stories are more fiction than fact. And we get no insight, because we do not gather the data on which to build an understanding of effective leadership.