Get Real: Leadership as a Performing Art by Warren Bennis
Joan Goldsmith, a dear friend, co-author, and colleague of my father’s, recently found a typed copy of this essay while cleaning out her files. Dad’s words here compel us to make the connection between Leadership and Art.
The essay was not published when he wrote it in 2002, but was included in the book, The Essential Bennis, followed by comments from Glenn Close.
Dad loved the theater and I was lucky enough to benefit from his enthusiasm—we saw A Chorus Line on Broadway and Cats on the West End. His favorite author was Shakespeare of whom he said, “Every time I read Shakespeare, he’s learned something new!” He once said that Falstaff (“a fat, vain, and boastful knight, he spends most of his time drinking at the Boar's Head Inn with petty criminals, living on stolen or borrowed money”) was the first executive coach, sent by King Henry IV to prepare his son for the throne. Love that.
Dad always connected Leadership and theater…and so do I. He wrote an article in Bloomberg called, Acting the Part of Leader and wrote the introduction to the book, Leadership Presence by Kathy Lubar and Belle Halpern, both performers who started the Ariel Group.
I have to thank my father for so eloquently making the case for the work I do—using the skills and techniques of the theater to help people communicate as their full selves in the world.
Here, he lays it all out for us. Enjoy.
Whatever else it is, leadership is a role, a part that a person plays. And so we are not surprised that the writer who seems to have known the most about leadership, as indeed he knew the most about everything, was also a man of the theater. William Shakespeare was acutely aware of the leader as actor, both in the sense of a person who acts or is expected to act and in the sense of a performer on stage. Shakespeare understood that there was nothing like a play about power--its achievement, its use and misuse, its loss, and the way it changes the person who has it--to hypnotize his audience, be they groundlings or nobility. One way or another, all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, all his history plays and even a number of his comedies are about the rise and fall of leaders. Indeed the link between leadership and drama was recognized long before the highly theatrical Age of Elizabeth. Aeschylus, Sophocles and other ancient playwrights knew intuitively that audiences would be riveted by plays about legitimacy, succession and other leadership matters--perhaps because the playwrights understood that the power that leaders have over the rest of us means that their lives are inextricably bound up with our own. Some men may, in fact, be islands, but no leader ever is. Palpable in ancient Greece and Elizabethan England, the link between leadership and performance is even more obvious today in a nation where at least one president--Ronald Reagan--was earlier both a member and a leader of the Screen Actors Guild.
A word about method here. This essay will be more post-modern in spirit than Aristotelian: instead of having a beginning, middle and end, it will be a work of bricolage. It will consist of a string of observations based on notes I’ve written to myself over the years on the convergence of leadership and performance. Occasioned by everything from movies I’ve been struck by to conversations with insightful friends, including my actor daughter, Kate, and other entertainment industry professionals, these notes have been fattening one of my accordion files for years.
Let me reach into that file and start with an anecdote about an encounter between Orson Welles and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first time FDR met Welles, the President graciously said to the fabled young actor: “You know, Mr. Welles, you are the greatest actor in America.” “Oh, no, Mr. President,” Welles replied. “You are.”
That story is true even if it is apocryphal. Just as theater and religion have been linked since ancient times, so have theater and leadership. Look at all the actorly attributes the two great men shared. They were both masters of the relatively new medium of radio--Roosevelt paternalistically reassured the nation during his weekly Fireside Chats; Welles scared the same nation out of its wits with his apocryphal description of a Martian invasion in the infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Both men skillfully used theatrical dress and props--Welles, his rakish hats, FDR, his signature cape and cigarette holder--to create dashing images for themselves despite significant physical imperfections.
In his fascinating short study “On Politics and the Art of Acting,“ playwright Arthur Miller talks about the star quality that great actors, including Welles and FDR, have in abundance. Miller writes about seeing Marlon Brando on stage for the first time in an otherwise forgettable play by Maxwell Anderson. Brando made his entrance and said absolutely nothing for what seemed like a long time. The audience was mesmerized. “Without a word spoken, this actor had opened up in the audience a whole range of emotional possibilities, including, oddly enough, a little fear,” Miller recalled. When Brando finally spoke his first line--“Anybody here?”--the relief was palpable that no violence had been done, Miller writes.
Miller then makes a brilliant observation, equally true of great actors and great leaders: “Here was Napoleon, here was Caesar, here was Roosevelt. Brando had not asked the members of the audience to merely love him; that is only charm. He had made them wish that he would deign to love them. That is a star. Onstage or off, that is power, no different in its essence than the power that can lead nations.”
The star power that FDR had is an example of what is sometimes called charismatic leadership, a fuzzy but irresistible term. Miller incisively homes in on the intensity and intimacy of the emotion that such leaders arouse in us. For reasons that no one has satisfactorily explained, such magnetic individuals--such stars of leadership--cause us to care deeply about them. Without needing to share the same physical space, they induce in us a response that normally requires the presence of powerful pheromones.
Gifted director Peter Brook once observed that “one actor can stand motionless on the stage and rivet our attention while another one does not interest us at all. What is the difference? Where chemically, physically, psychically does it lie?” Brook argues that this question is “the starting point of our whole [dramatic] art?” It is also, I would argue, the starting point of the whole art of leadership, at least of all of true leadership, which is to say all leadership that is not purely situational. The poet W. H. Auden observed something comparable when he said a great actor can break your heart at 50 feet.
We tend to describe a star’s power in personal terms--to say, for instance, that he or she has “presence.” But such terms miss an important point about both being a star and being a leader. I’ll come back to this subject a bit later, but for now, let me just say that what both great actors and great leaders do is make us--the audience--part of the performance. They engage us. However self-obsessed the star may be, he or she is only successful when the audience is engaged. As actors will tell you, the audience is essential to, perhaps even determinative of, a great performance. Similarly, no matter how soaring his or her agenda, a leader is truly successful only to the extent that his or her followers share that vision. Leadership is always a transaction between leader and follower and always involves reciprocity.
Shakespeare, of course, has something to say on this point. In “Henry IV, Part I,” we encounter Glendower, trying to impress Hotspur. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” Glendower boasts. And Hotspur, in a hilarious outbreak of candor replies: “Why so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?” Genuine leadership requires more than putting on the trappings of power. It requires the ability, as Miller observes, “to find the magnetic core that will draw together a fragmented public”--not just to call the spirits but to make them come when they are called. In essence, the leader is able to create community. Former President Clinton did this brilliantly in his speech accepting his party’s first nomination when he spoke so movingly of there being “no them, only us.” A content analysis of great political speeches would reveal a wealth of skillfully brandished plural personal pronouns--the one that pops immediately to mind is Churchill’s prediction that “this will be our finest hour.”
One of the great lingering questions of the leadership literature is whether leaders are born or made. Once again, I defer to the leadership guru from Stratford-on-Avon on this. In “Twelfth Night,” Malvolio, tangled up in his cross garters, pronounces: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Like so many comic moments, this one is packed with truth. The only misleading aspect of Malvolio’s statement is the relative equality his syntax gives to these three paths to greatness. Few are born leaders--although we tend to rewrite the biographies of the great after the fact in ways that suggest they were found in a basket on the doorstep of history, already fully formed and armed with the skills of diplomacy and war. Knowing his remarkable performance as president, it is easy to forget that Harry Truman was once regarded as little more than a smalltime politician who got lucky. FDR had so little respect for his vice president that he never fully confided in him--Truman wasn’t told the true nature of the Manhattan Project until after Roosevelt’s death. Indeed Truman was so ill-regarded early in his presidency that Washington wags joked: “To err is Truman.”
Most leaders acquire greatness, and they do so as a result of having a role requiring greatness thrust upon them. Abigail Adams, a superb presidential advisor and shrewd analyst of leadership, was acutely aware of the role that crisis plays in forming leaders. Look at the stature and number of leaders who were forged in the relatively peaceful revolution that produced the United States--Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison and Hamilton come immediately to mind. “These are the hard times in which a genius would wish to live,“ Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1790. “Great necessities call forth great leaders.”
The American Revolution was a crucible in which great leaders were formed, an experience that revealed and forged greatness. To use a term favored by the writer/producers of episodic television, the story of each of the founding fathers is an arc--Washington, Jefferson and the others are transformed by the war with Great Britain and the responsibilities of defining a nation into individuals quite different from the men they were before. Such transformations, which often take place in demanding times, or eras, are a consequence of the roles these leaders assume or create for themselves.
In the course of doing research for a new book on the alchemy of leadership called Geeks & Geezers, coauthor Bob Thomas and I interviewed the late John Gardner. The only Republican in Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet (Gardner headed what was then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), Gardner was a reticent, even shy man who nonetheless helped create such innovative and durable organizations for the public good as Common Cause. Much to his surprise, Gardner told us, he discovered during World War II that he was a gifted manager. He had never thought of himself in those terms--he didn’t even respect managers--but once cast in that role by his government superiors, he thrived in it. Gardner explained with unusual precision how role and talent sometimes converge to produce greatness. His management gifts were evident almost at once because, he theorized, “some qualities were there waiting for life to pull those things out of me.” There are unknown numbers of people with the qualities necessary for leadership who never become leaders because life does not present them with the roles that will pull greatness out of them.
The plays in which Shakespeare dealt most directly with the alchemy of leadership are those that show the transformation of hell-raising Prince Hal into a heroic Tudor king. Monarchies reveal leadership at its most theatrical. A school child can list the ways in which kings and queens are like great stars of theater. They have the most lavish costumes, they wield props (throne and scepter among them) that allow even the people in the cheap seats to know who’s in charge, they are at the center of the action and almost always in the spotlight--the list goes on and on. But political leaders are not simply like actors. They are actors. It’s no accident that the time-honored education of the prince that Hal undergoes has, as its denouement, his acceptance of his royal role and all that goes with it. What turns him into a true king is not his performance in battle but his recognition that he both is and must act like a king. Although he has resisted royal responsibility mightily, he now accepts that he will always be on stage and always under scrutiny. And he knows that the script he must follow in the future is not about whim and self-indulgence but about what is best for the kingdom. When Hal says to Falstaff, “I know thee not, old man,” the prince is denouncing the lay-about life of the ale house and the brothel as well as rejecting his no-longer seemly mentor. The moment would be heartbreaking if it were not, in effect, the moment that Henry accepts the mace and crown.
Great necessities call forth great leaders. In our own time, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, seemed to trigger just such a transformation in President George W. Bush. Whatever the President knew and whenever he knew it, the attacks revealed a newly serious leader in the White House. Before the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush had an uncertain mandate and something of an aging frat-boy image. But he clearly recognized that the unexpected assault on the United States presented an opportunity to reveal himself as a world-class leader. He did so in an overtly theatrical way, with a speech to Congress and the nation broadcast on Sept. 20. Whether history will declare Bush to have been a great president, for 30 minutes, in the course of that speech, he acted like one. Observers, including many Democrats, were stunned. Among them was Gerald Posner, who wrote of the speech in The Wall Street Journal: “Like Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, he rallied a country’s spirit, had the courage to tell us the bad news that the upcoming battle would be neither swift nor easy, and declared that those who would destroy our culture and values would not prevail.” In short, Posner observed: “He rose to this most important occasion.”
In a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the speech evolved, D. T. Max wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Bush was very conscious of such historical models of exemplary leadership as Winston Churchill’s. (Churchill was another whose leadership flowered in mid-life, much to the surprise of his contemporaries. One of his biographers said of Churchill that he jaywalked through life until he was 66.) As Bush advisor Karen Hughes helped tweak Bush’s speech, she had a plaque on her White House desk bearing Churchill’s ringing declaration: “I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar.” But Bush had no intention of sharing the stage with great presences from the past. He insisted that the speech contain no lines, however memorable, attributable to anyone else. This was his chance to dominate the world stage, and he knew it. It’s fair to say that when the press began comparing his metamorphosis to that of Prince Hal, Bush was not the least surprised, despite his non-intellectual, good ole-boy persona. The headline in The New York Times Magazine described the speech as “2,988 words that changed a presidency.” Put in appropriately theatrical terms, Bush’s performance was a smash.
In his book, Miller notes that the kind of acting that modern media require is the less-is-more kind, not the grand, florid style that flourished before the microphone and the close-up. It would be fascinating to know what the expectations were of the crowd that gathered for the Lincoln-Douglas debates and what kind of actors the two men were. Today we know that the camera, and the voting public, tend to favor the candidate who acts as if the camera isn’t there. Nixon’s palpable dread of the camera during his televised match with John F. Kennedy would have doomed him even if it had been broadcast without sound. As Miller points out, Al Gore’s inability to act relaxed on camera cost him far more than George W. Bush’s verbal confusion, which never seemed to unnerve him or dim his easy smile. Joe Klein calls his latest book about Bill Clinton The Natural, and that’s what we expect our leaders to be--even if they have to fake it. Whether real or feigned, their apparent ease makes us comfortable with them. Miller argues that such ease, however studied, makes an audience receptive, rather than defensive.
Acting ability is an aspect of leadership in every arena, from the playground to the board room. But it is absolutely key in national politics, where the only contact the average person has with the candidate or office holder is mediated by an entertainment medium. Even when we know our politicians by their written words, we inevitably read those words with media-generated images in mind. No wonder our prospective leaders call in experts to vet the color and cut of their suits and spend hours practicing their speeches and critiquing videotapes of those practice sessions. For modern leaders not to do so would be as foolish as it would have been for Greek and Roman leaders not to master the arts of rhetoric. And, in fact, those same arts of rhetoric and other time-honored dramatic techniques still matter--perhaps more now than ever. In May, 2002, The New Yorker ran a Washington letter on “Democratic rising star” North Carolina Senator John Edwards, which amusingly but seriously described the entertainment values of a recent Democratic party conference in Florida. Writer Nicholas Lemann might have been a drama critic, not a political commentator, as he described “the dramatic buildup” culminating in keynote speaker Al Gore’s appearance and parsed the speech Gore gave as “an art form with a lot of rules,“ from thanking “your introducer for that generous introduction” to finally basking “in the glow of the audience’s applause, raising your arms above your head, palms forward, in a gesture that expresses something triumph and self-effacement.” We tend to think of ourselves, even our political selves, as spontaneous souls, but our conventions, state-of-the-union addresses and other political performances reveal that we practice a form of political theater as highly conventionalized as Kabuki.
Some years ago, in the course of writing an earlier book on leadership, I interviewed the distinguished director Sydney Pollack, whose work includes the Oscar-winning films “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa.” Pollack began his career as an actor--and he continues to take roles in films from time to time. In the course of that interview, Pollack talked about his first directorial experience. He told me that he had no idea how to direct a film, so he fell back on the skills he had developed as an actor and acted like a director. “That’s the only thing I knew how to do, because I didn’t know anything about directing,” he told me. His “acting as if” (a favorite strategy of the Human Potential Movement, you’ll recall) included costuming himself as a director and surrounding himself with the props he associated with the profession. “I had images of directors from working with them,“ Pollack said, “and I even tried to dress like a director--clothes that were kind of outdoorsy. I didn’t put on puttees, or anything like that. But if there had been a megaphone around, I would have grabbed it.“
I have included that anecdote because it raises a crucial question about leadership and acting. Can a leader be authentic or do the masks of command (as John Keegan so aptly called them) force the leader to be something other than his or her true self? Can a leader both act and be real? These are terribly important questions with no easy answers. Let’s look at Pollack again. When he was acting as if he was a director, was he faking it or not? My belief is that he was not faking it--he was a real director, albeit an inexperienced one--even if, in his own mind, he was only acting as if he were one. The feeling of not being up to the job--the belief that the role is too big and important for one to play--is an emotion that every leader with the potential for greatness feels at one time or another. It is evidence that the role is greater than the individual and, thus, worth taking on. By putting on his outdoorsy clothes and grabbing his metaphorical megaphone, the nascent director in Pollack had already made the leader’s requisite leap into the unknown, boldly accepted the risk of failure that is the essential first step in becoming a leader.
In the new book I mentioned earlier, Geeks & Geezers, my coauthor and I found that adaptive capacity is the single most important attribute in determining who will become a leader. Adaptive capacity is also the defining characteristic of successful actors. Being able to project yourself into someone else’s skin--called empathy both in and outside the theater--is a skill every great leader has mastered. Rushmorean figures such as FDR and Churchill seemed to have known our fears better than we did and were able to address them even before we had fully articulated them.
Actors have a sense, often lacking in non-actors, of alternative selves--they know, as Shakespeare wrote, “that each man in his time plays many parts.” They have an image of themselves as malleable, a consciousness of their potential for change. This sense that they can inhabit roles other than the one most of us think of as self is essential to leadership as well. Like stage performers, leaders can act as if, without losing track of who there are. Shakespeare--who else?--was perhaps the first person to show his audience a leader in the midst of doing one thing while thinking another. I refer, of course, to the scene in “Richard III” when Richard turns to the audience, in the first great aside in English theater, and reveals to the audience his plan to win Lady Anne, despite her contempt and his murder of her brother. Among other things, this may be the first theatrical acknowledgement of the unsettling truth that transparency is a luxury that not every leader can afford. I am not arguing here in favor of executive duplicity--we have seen far too many CEOs in recent years whose scheming and double-dealing would make Richard III blush. But, as Shakespeare is wont to do, here again he adds to the essential literature of leadership when he describes the kind of dilemma that explains why “heavy lies the head that wears the crown.”
As we who do not lead countries know mostly from the media, whether they are the plays of Shakespeare or weekly installments of “The West Wing,” leaders are routinely required to keep secrets and to balance conflicting values (the public’s right to know and the need for national security are the two we hear most about these days). Virtuous leaders are faced with this dilemma as surely as wicked ones are. Can a leader be less than forthcoming and still be real? Was FDR a fraud when he ran against Wendell Wilkie as an isolationist, even as he secretly prepared the United States to enter the war? Not necessarily. Was Roosevelt’s lack of candor justified by the millions of lives that were saved because the United States joined the fight against the Axis powers? I don’t know, and, in a sense, I don’t have to know. These are the big, hard questions leaders must grapple with. Indeed the most problematic aspect of leadership may be that it forces the leader to make moral decisions the rest of us don’t have to make. At such times, the leader must improvise without any models conveniently at hand. Leadership forces people into situations in which character is not a straight-forward matter of conformity to some widely accepted code. Instead, in such circumstances character may more fairly be defined as William James proposes when he suggests that the way to determine an individual’s character “would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensively active and alive. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the real me.’” In the absence of the psychopathology that creates a Hitler or other monster, the ability to hear that interior voice and act upon it may be the only kind of authenticity a leader needs.
Earlier, I alluded to the interdependence of leaders and followers, of the leader and his or her audience. Like great actors, great leaders create and sell us on an alternative vision of the world, a better world of which we are an essential part. Isaiah Berlin wrote about Churchill that he idealized his countrymen with such intensity that in the end they approached his ideal. Gandhi, it has been said, made India proud of herself. Washington and the other founding brothers also had that great leader’s gift of making people believe they could be part--that they were part--of a great nation. Martin Luther King (who was also a speaker of rare power) had that same genius. When you consider such towering and theatrical leaders, you realize that leadership is not just a performing art, it may be the greatest performing art of all--the only one that creates institutions of lasting value, institutions that can endure long after the stars that envisioned them have left the theater.