Why we celebrate the wrong leaders with Martin Gutmann

In our recent Digital Fireside with Martin Gutmann, bestselling author, speaker, historian and management professor, we explored his book The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership. 

Lauren Cooper interviewed Martin to discover why we celebrate the wrong leaders, what history can teach us about great leadership and the things we need to actually look out for to identify good leaders.

We learned leadership lessons from Homer Simpson. And we explored how our own biases get in the way and why leaders like Trump, who lurch from crisis to crisis in a sensational manner, are considered “great”.

We are predisposed to see leadership in people who:

~ Speak more - regardless of what they say

~ Appear confident - regardless of how competent they are

~ Are perpetually busy - regardless of what they are doing

This of course creates a toxic culture where people actually doing good work feel overlooked and unmotivated.

And this is a self perpetuating cycle.

We need to reimagine what good leadership looks like.

We need to celebrate those who mitigate crises.

And ask ourselves who actually led the team to success?

Martin encouraged us to focus on leaders who have the right contextual balance between:

1) Confidence and Humility

2) Values and Pragmatism

3) Vision and the Mundane 

We also covered Shackleton-related hate mail and the importance of storytelling and self-promotion.

Martin’s reading recommendations included:

The Sociology of Work by Keith Grint

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Spencer Harrison’s recent article in The Atlantic: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7125163/2026/03/20/nba-leadership-culture-mistakes-warriors/

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

You can listen to the full replay on our podcast here or watch it below.⁠