The first ever concert I attended was with the Anglican church I went to as a teen. It was called Revival at Belfast, and it featured an ensemble of musicians from around the Maritimes to play with Christian singer Robin Mark — a man born in Belfast.
It was a three day event with the first two days spent at a particular church where we listened to various sermons covering various topics, and did workshops.
Honestly I can’t quite remember the details of what those covered.
What I do remember though is aside from the unusual cabin and bed assignments, everything went without a hitch. We were fed, had ample of water and supplies, a great venue, and everyone attended each event on time with adults shuttling to the designated spot with no issues.
By the end of the event, everyone remarked how well our youth leader handled and managed our decent sized group so well. It even caught the notice of my dad who decided that next years Revival at Belfast, he would attend himself.
But between those past two events, a lot changed.
The tightly run event was more chaotic and disorganized the second time around. Hardly any food was prepared, our group was still overlooked by our youth leader, and by my dad’s account, everything was much worse compared to the previous year.
What changed?
Well aside from members of the congregation making other plans, what really changed was the people helping to organize our trip (a group of three women) weren’t around this second time around, leaving the youth leader to run the show and organize.
And it was at this point that my dad realized that our youth leader, wasn’t actually a leader at all. In fact, they were one of many bad leaders.
The youth leader to the church I went to was the same youth pastor since I moved into town when I was just 5 years old. Long after I stopped going to church, I remember my dad still dealing with this youth pastor time and time again.
All of it culminated in more and more issues beyond a poorly managed youth trip.
Between the youth leader, the secretary, and the minister’s own incompetence, the combination of their efforts squeezed the congregation to “build a new church”, ignore the 167-year old church to the point of it having to be demolished, and burn every major donor in the congregation to the point they left.
This new church they built still stands, but the new minister that’s in place now is trying to win a losing battle.
The new church isn’t so much a church as it’s more of a look-a-like of a school’s gymnasium. Even the outside of it reminds me more of my elementary school since it uses the same sort of bricks and has the same architectural style.
Beyond that, the ventilation is poor, and the building was rushed in its assembly making it not a great place for the elderly and children to come in. In fact, the walls that are designed to separate the “church hall” from where kids were doing arts and crafts were so thin, the congregation could hear them.
This made praying and concentrating an impossible task.
By all accounts, the church I grew up in and attended on Sunday’s is long gone and it’s all by three people whom two of them passed away with the last remaining, the youth leader, now trying to be a minister last I heard years ago.
I have no idea what this leader is like now or if they changed their ways, but as far as I know, they are a prime example of an incompetent and bad leader that people still prop up and regard as a genuine leader.
We all have similar stories about terribly bad leaders we’ve had to deal with. Maybe it’s not in a church, but perhaps you ran into them in school group projects, at work, or maybe they’re an “industry leader” that you read about or heard about from some over-eager fanboy.
Regardless of the case, so many of us have fallen into this trap where the end result is simply that we think these individuals are great when they’re bad leaders. It is to the point that we’ll quote them, write articles about them, post endless streams of social media posts talking about how great they are. We’ll do podcasts and video essays too. Some might even go to write best-seller books praising these incompetent leaders tactics.
It feels like we’re sucked into some sort of cult where we just talk about how great a certain individual is and omit glaring facts about them.
And while we think we couldn’t be any of those kinds of people, I’m willing to bet there is at least one person we have thought this way about at some point in time in our lives.
But the real question is why do we do all this?
Bad Leaders Thrive From The Action Fallacy
Several months ago, Martin Gutmann, a historian studying history’s leaders, stood in front of a crowd and spoke about two Arctic explorers: Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton.
Amundsen has successfully charted through all four poles of the world. Out of them, he was the first to successfully chart through three of them.
Shackleton on the other hand travelled to Antartica four times — three of which he was in charge of — and each one ended in absolute failure, catastrophe, and sometimes death.
Gutmann presented these two candidates and asked us a simple question:
Who would you pick to be in charge if we were to go on an Arctic expedition?
Without a doubt, we’d pick Amundsen, or candidate A.
But Gutmann explains how when we look at this situation, we’re actually more prone to pick candidate B, or Shackleton.
Why?
In his 16 minute TedX Talk, Gutmann explains the reasoning…
On one end there are specific biases, such as racism or sexism, that can steer our decision making. But another is something he calls Action Fallacy.
It’s a situation where we think someone taking action to solve problems conveys leadership skills.
And it’s a very powerful fallacy given the fact how we treat Amundsen and Shackleton historically. Despite you knowing Amundsen played a key role to early arctic exploration, there are very few books about him. In fact, he’s hardly mentioned at all despite being the greatest Arctic explorer of that era.
Meanwhile, Shackleton is praised in numerous articles for his cautiousness, his general leadership skills, his honesty, and his heroics. There’s even movies and at least 26 best-selling books praising his skills.
Even though in the biggest of Shackleton’s expeditions that made him a household name resulted in the death of three other explorers.
Why we praise bad leaders is simple: we have a bias that appearing to be busy and overcoming “challenges” gives off the vibes of a qualified leader.
We’re Easily Swayed By Words & Disregard What Really Happened With Bad Leaders
There are hundreds of Amundsen’s and Shackleton’s in the world today and they’re all treated in the same manner. With the case of my youth leader, people were wrapped up about them leading so well they didn’t realize that it was all performative.
That youth leader I know tends to perform well when they don’t have to do all that much. After all, a lot of things were done for them by the actual organizers of our group.
That much was made clear by the following year where those same organizers weren’t helping out the youth leader in organizing.
The youth leader had to rely on their own skills and abilities and that fell flat.
Scenarios like this happen all the time and underneath action fallacy rests a few other persuasive tools to hook us in and be enamoured by these individuals and their so called leadership. Two of which are their — or their fanbase‘s— own words and our own disregard of key facts.
Incompetent and bad leaders and their fans can quickly change the narrative of their stories on a whim. Whatever is able to persist in the public conscious becomes the norm, and thus, whoever is able to scream the loudest about whatever is able to steer what people think about something.
A good example of this at work is Elon Musk.
Even though Musk’s reputation is spiralling down the drain ever since his acquisition of Twitter, the question we should be asking ourselves is how did he get into this position in the first place? What makes him one of many bad leaders?
Financially speaking, it’s the emerald mine. He’s a success in that regard, but a success in privelege only.
But in terms of his popularity, it was a carefully crafted image that was cultivated over the years. One that made him look good, when he was just another one of those bad leaders and terrible bosses.
Musk appeared on the scene as some great entrepreneur who “invented electric vehicles” which was a new and revolutionary thing. People from that point on started to give him the Shackleton treatment.
They wanted to know his habits.
They wanted to know his work ethic.
They wanted to know about his life, how he runs a thriving and successful business.
They wanted to know his story.
People were so interested in him and he fed them exactly what they asked for. He told them about his success story filled with the ups and downs of his life. He made it sound like a disaster story and a story about persistence in the face of adversity and hardship.
Though he conveniently omitted the parts about how he self-sabotaged himself which resulted in these failures.
Like the fact his first marriage ended in divorce because he was treating his then wife as nothing more than a trophy. Turns out, telling the woman you just married “I own you.” tends to sour that union.
But people dismiss that. It’s just another “travesty” that Musk has to overcome. He’s “persistent” after all.
All because the fanboys are the ones screaming louder about what isn’t happening than those saying what actually happened.
True Leadership Looks More Boring
But probably the biggest reason we elevate incompetent and bad leaders in the first place has to do with the fact we hardly notice the genuine and great leaders. At the concert I attended all those years ago, I never knew things went smoothly because of a group of women decided to take matters into their own hands.
All the same, we credit Elon Musk with the creation of Tesla and not its original founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who built the company up, brought in investors — like Musk — and put in a lot of the grassroots efforts.
We do all this because of the reasons above but also because genuine leadership looks boring. I’d even go as far as to say it is boring.
Boring to the point that we’d not notice it at all or watch it and think to ourselves that it all looks easy.
This branches off into two ways:
- Either we don’t notice the feat at all.
- Or we do notice it, but disregard it as anything impressive because they made it look easy and we assume anyone can do it.
We see this all the time with people who have great skills in certain areas. These individuals hone these skills to great effect and achieve great things, however we might not always notice these things.
We dismiss their talent and skill for something that anyone can do. And there’s truth to that in the sense that we could all get to the same skill level as others given time, resources, and opportunity to do so.
But just because someone can doesn’t mean that someone should or is able to.
In the end, true leadership has us trick ourselves that the person displaying these great qualities isn’t as important as the loud mouth on the other side of the room trying to appear more important looking and surrounded by other people who look up to them.
The good thing about all of this is that we can change things around. Just like how we’re seeing with Musk, the more people pay attention to his words, the more he sounds unhinged, deranged, and not at all the brilliant mind that we think he was. Over time we can see him as one of many bad leaders.
In fact, it’s better for us to continue to look at people in this manner. This view grounded in logic and focusing in on what is being said and what actions are being taken.
Maybe then, we can learn to grow past that and give credit to the Amundsen’s of our time.
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