The morals of the story

I went to see a Shakespeare play called Coriolanus last week. It is one of my absolute favourite Shakespeare plays, in part because I think it has so much to tell us about leadership and politics (as well as about guys that have slightly weird relationships with their mothers). 

Here’s the plot in a nutshell: Coriolanus (a Roman) is a great fighter and, at the start of the play wins a huge victory over Rome’s enemies, the Volscians. The senate nominates him to be a Consul (some kind of big deal Roman leadership position) but in order to secure this position, he has to stand in front of the Roman people and ask for their support. He’s not keen on this as he doesn’t think much of the people and, when he says as much to them, ends up getting himself banished. In a fit of (some might say childish) rage, he decides to team up with the Volscians and defeat Rome. He’s all set to do this when his mother, and (to a much lesser degree) his wife and son, convince him not to. He tries to make peace between the Volscians and the Romans but the Volscians are understandably pretty annoyed and kill him instead. End scene. 

On the surface, this seems like the kind of play that wouldn’t really do it for me - lots of men, lots of war, lots of fighting. But what I like about it is the gnarly grey area that most of the characters live within, and how complicated it is to try and rule or lead anything. 

Coriolanus’s problem is that he thinks leadership should be simple - in part because he’s really good at leading people in the specific context of the battlefield. In many ways it’s a classic example of something that happens in organisations all the time - you get promoted to a leadership role because you’re really good at your job and then find yourself in a role where you need a whole other set of skills that you don’t necessarily have (or, indeed, want to develop). My parents were both teachers and always used to cite the promotion to Head of Department as one of the great examples of this - brilliant classroom teachers often find themselves promoted to this role, but consequently find themselves doing less classroom teaching and more organising and managing and supporting of other teachers, which is a whole different skillset that they don’t necessarily have (or want). 

One of the many reasons that leadership is complicated is that you have to deal with different people or groups of people who think in different ways and want different things. On the battlefield, Coriolanus leads soldiers who are all there to defeat the enemy and, hopefully, stay alive in the process. If we go back to our teaching example, a classroom teacher, primarily, is there to teach students. This is a very basic view of what is a tremendously sophisticated job - but by comparison, if we look at a headteacher, they need to deal with a Board of governors, handle angry parents, build a relationship with the local authority, manage their school leadership team and work with the admin and operational staff to make sure there’s enough money and ensure that the building doesn’t fall down. Sometimes what the angry parents want isn’t compatible with what the Board of governors will approve. Sometimes ensuring that there’s enough money to keep going means making decisions that your teaching staff will dislike. That’s the deal with leadership - you’ve got to find a path that considers the interests of all these different groups, with the inevitable consequence that, at any given time, there’s probably one or more of these groups that feels a bit disgruntled about the direction of travel. 

Which brings us to Coriolanus’s second problem, which is his refusal to take part in the ritual that happens prior to being made Consul - appearing before the people, showing them his battle scars, and asking them to lend him their voice. He thinks this ritual is stupid - he’s fought in the battle, why does he have to show them physical evidence of this? He’s fairly contemptuous about the people of Rome, in part because, in the play, they are presented as fickle - one week they love someone and want to lift them up, the next week they despise them and are out calling for their blood. Given that they change their minds all the time, why does he have to ask for their voice, when they don’t know what makes a good leader in the first place? And even if they did, having their voice doesn’t mean anything, because they’d change their minds about him the following week (as it happens, they change their minds about him a lot more quickly than that, which is what leads to his banishment).

I’ve mentioned Gretchen Rubin’s concept of the Four Tendencies before on this blog - Coriolanus and I are similar in one regard, which is that I think, within Rubin’s framework, we’d both be classed as questioners. The framework divides people into four groups depending on how they respond to internal and external expectations - an internal expectation is something that you hold yourself to - for example, I’m going to go running every morning. An external expectation is something that another person expects you to do - for example, I’m going to go running with my friend every morning. Quite a lot of people I know fall into the obliger category - they struggle with internal expectations (sometimes because it involves putting themselves first) but meet external expectations - so for them, if they want to start an exercise habit, doing it with a buddy is ideal, because it’s not just about making time and space for themselves, they’d be letting someone else down if they didn’t show up. 

The reverse side of this coin is the questioner - someone who is fine with internal expectations, but resists external expectations. Whilst I’d like to think I’m not as stubborn or belligerent as Coriolanus (although my partner may tell you otherwise) I broadly fall into this category. Part of the way this tendency manifests is that I have an innate suspicion of rituals because, like Coriolanus, I often feel that they don’t make any sense to me, and I instinctively shy away from the idea that we should do things because ‘that’s what we always do’. However, Gretchen Rubin suggests a way that questioners can live in the world without becoming a tremendous irritant to everyone around them: turn external expectations into internal expectations - in other words, have a convincing internal narrative for why you’re doing the thing that you’re doing. 

What’s useful about this is that it often involves looking at something from a different perspective. In Coriolanus’s case, even if the ritual with the people doesn’t make a lot of sense, there is something deeper within it - he holds a lot of power, the people do not. To do something that recognises this, that shows that, despite the fact that he doesn’t need their support, he’s asking for it anyway, reminds him and them that they are important, that just because they don’t have the same decision making power that he does, their needs and wants matter, and his job is, in part, to fight for the interests, just as he fought to protect them on the battlefield. Maybe the practicalities of the ritual don’t make a huge amount of sense, but the spirit behind it does. I think this questioning tendency can be a really useful one in leadership, if used well (i.e. not like Coriolanus). Too often in organisations, routines or practices continue simply because people have always done things in a certain way. A reflective questioner, however, will ask whether these ways of doing things are serving the organisation, not just on the surface but on a much deeper level. 

The reason I love Coriolanus is because it’s quite a messy play. All the characters have shades of light and dark in them, in particular Coriolanus, who has some huge flaws but also comes across as a relatively decent guy who just has some pretty strong principles that he’s reluctant to give up. He thinks these strong principles are all he needs to see him into his position as Consul - an office of state rather than a military position. But, it turns out, this kind of leadership demands something different. I often hear people who have never led an organisation talk about leadership like it’s black and white - it’s obvious that a leader should be doing this not that, if they just had some proper principles and stuck to them then they’d make the right decision, that their problem is that they’re constantly trying to please powerful stakeholders and consequently their decisions are self-serving rather than in the best interests of everyone. Anyone who has led anything - from coaching a sports team, being the chair of your school’s PTA, running a company, or being in charge of your local residents’ association - knows it’s anything but black and white. Leaders are constantly having to make really complicated and difficult decisions in far from ideal circumstances, whilst knowing that any move they make is going to anger someone, and, sometimes, spark mutterings that they don’t know what they’re doing and they shouldn’t be doing the job in the first place. As Coriolanus found out, leading is a messy business - so next time we roll our eyes at a leader that makes a decision we don’t agree with, we’d do well to remember that there’s usually a lot more to it than meets the eye.