Margaret Thatcher, Fast Eddie, and the problem of character
To be a storytelling leader, you've got to be a character. But on it's own, that's not enough.
Eddie Felson: “You’re some piece of work. You’re also a natural character.”
Vincent Lauria: “You see? I been tellin’ her that. I’ve got natural character.”
Eddie Felson: “That’s not what I said, kid. I said you are a natural character; you’re an incredible flake.”
Leaders as characters
If you think about the unexpectedly influential leaders in our society, past and present, you’ll find pretty quickly you’ll have a strong sense of them as a character.
Even if you aren’t very interested in British Conservative politics, if I ask you to write a character profile of Margaret Thatcher, you’ll be scribbling happily for the next twenty minutes just as you would James Bond. You’ve probably got a hint of her backstory, her clothes, her voice, her tone of voice, her opinions, her allies, and you’d be able to assess in a matter of seconds whether you’d expect people to like her or not.
At a different end of the political spectrum, you could know next to nothing about the process to end apartheid in South Africa, but you could probably write at least a children’s book worth of material about Nelson Mandela. It’s likely to be quite dependent on superficial attributes and stereotypes, but you’d definitely be able to get started, and the chances are that just thinking about it would put a smile on your face.
These are not just powerful people. They are potent characters.
Unlucky losers
What kind of story would you be able to write about John Major? He was Thatcher’s successor, a man of incredible talents, and probably the most extraordinary rags to riches story in the history of British politics. But as a character – the grey man. All but forgotten.
This week, Novak Djokovic nearly pulled off the most extraordinary feat in the history of individual competitive sport. Not a loser in any conventional sense of the word, but the story of his potential success had no theme to it…and when the crowd realised that they weren’t going to see this unprecedented feat, they were largely pleased.
Major and Djokovic are poles apart on all kinds of metrics, but for sure what neither of them have succeeded at doing is creating a sense of character that people want to go along with. On the villain to hero scale, they sit on opposite sides of the middle – but mainly they remain defiantly complex, inscrutable.
Amongst the galaxy of people past and present, these figures have clearly achieved incredible things. If you are looking for strength of character, in one way or another, they have it.
But as public characters they are curiously hard to define.
Character vs character
Then let’s chuck another technicolour character into the mix. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
The magnetism of this character is absolutely beyond doubt. His ability to hoover up attention, conversation, opprobrium, loyalty and every emotion in-between is absolutely extraordinary, and in a way that has had far more than trivial consequences for economics and politics in the UK and beyond.
Again, if you are in the UK and I did the James Bond test on you with Boris Johnson, you’d be scribbling for the rest of the day. You might be able to provide forensic debriefs of his hairstyles (or lack thereof), his public appearances, his political misadventures, you might even be able to paraphrase him at length on topics from Brexit to buses.
Yet it’s clear that on any objective standard, you’d struggle to place his time as a leader in any bracket labelled success.
Johnson is a character, for sure. As politicians go, a character for the ages. But the story he is playing out is surely, depending on how you see it, a picaresque comedy, or a tragedy. His many remarkable characteristics swirl around a central challenge.
He is a character – but you might struggle to say he has character.
Leaders as characters
Our audience tend not to be national political leaders, or indeed world class sportspeople.
But a lot of people read our pieces who are leaders, in their own teams, businesses, social groups, or industries.
This means that we are all, from time to time, called on to behave as significant characters in the lives of people around us.
We may seek to avoid the limelight, and to focus on how we can help, serve, advance the stories of others. But a leader is also an important point of navigation for people, and the more powerful the position a leader is placed in, the more important they are to help people around them to orientate.
Leaders and leadership teams have to be storytellers, because they are a source of inspiration, and drivers to action.
And it is inevitable that they become characters in that story, either by design or by accident.
Be a character, with character
To be effective storytelling leaders, you need to be authentic characters. This requires self-knowledge about how others see you – and the ability to make these details resonant, interesting, and charismatic.
But above all, what you need is character itself. Character comes from a sense of an arc. Of a driving purpose, from source to destination. Of the ability to listen, to learn, to embrace others, but combined with a refusal to waver from your purpose in response to events.
To be an effective leader, you need to be a StoryTeller – and to play a moving role in the story, you need to be a character. But above all, like Fast Eddie Felson, you need to have character.
We are currently running StoryTeller workshops with leadership teams across sectors. If you want to work out how to be characters with character, get in touch via matthew@wearelookup.com or caroline@wearelookup.com