Should leaders be feared or loved? with historian Niall Ferguson (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Niall Ferguson: That's the world I come from in which the leader is capable of rage and perhaps potentially of physical violence. I don't know about you, but I find that concentrates the mind somewhat more than a hug. I.

[00:00:15] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us Tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is historian Neil Ferguson. He's currently a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He's been named one of times 100 most influential people and been knighted for his service to literature. He's published 16 books, advised John McCain's presidential campaign and won an international Emmy for best documentary, and in 2021 he co-founded a new institution, the University of Austin, to say Neil is contrarian and controversial is putting it mildly.

But I don't think we should shy away from conversations with respected voices on the basis of objecting to some of their ideas. In this case, Neil's approach to counterfactual history, considering events that could have happened but didn't, has made me think differently about effective leadership. Our

[00:01:18] Niall Ferguson: conversation began by a discussion of whether you can achieve that through being nice alone.

Whether you have to be a bit nasty too, like history is strongly on the side of the view that you need to have at least the, the nastiness there as a potential.

[00:01:35] Adam Grant: Neil and I don't see eye to eye on much, and that's why I appreciate a conversation with him. I learn a lot from how he thinks, even when, and especially when I disagree with what he thinks.

I hope it sparks some thoughtful conversations for you too.

You know the drill. Feel free to interrupt yourself. Correct yourself, correct me. All of the above. I never

[00:02:01] Niall Ferguson: do any of

[00:02:01] Adam Grant: that stuff. You've never corrected me, ever. I. Or anyone else for that matter. Well, this is gonna be fun. So the, the genesis of, at least this, this idea for this conversation for me came from an event we were at together a couple months ago, and I think you were on stage maybe the next morning and I was speaking at dinner and you asked a, a fairly contentious question from the audience.

And I thought it led to a fascinating dialogue that more people ought to listen to. I, I think it was something to the effect of. Are you saying that leaders should always be

[00:02:38] Niall Ferguson: nice? I think I just quoted machio words to the effect that if you can't make yourself loved, make yourself feared. And I think you were presenting a, a portrait of modern leadership that was more empathy than anger.

And my impression of leadership in history is that fear plays a considerable. Part and my own experience suggests that if people aren't a little bit afraid of you, they really don't work terribly hard. If they are afraid of you, they work that bit harder. So there must be some elements of fear in leadership, and I think we are deluding ourselves

[00:03:15] Adam Grant: if we think that that's not true.

My first reaction is to think of the great philosopher Michael Scott from the office who said that, do I wanna be feared or loved? Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me. That was actually, in some ways, a preface to my thinking on this, which is. I don't want people to be afraid of their leaders.

I do want them to be a little bit afraid of disappointing their leaders or falling short of their expectations. And I wonder if the type of fear that we're talking about really matters. Can I do my most creative thinking when I'm afraid that my boss is gonna fire me every day? Probably not. Can I do my most creative thinking when I'm afraid that my ideas might not live up to my boss's high standards?

Potentially? What do you make of that?

[00:04:01] Niall Ferguson: Being a historian, I've of course studied, uh, era in which leadership was very often war leadership. There must be some elements of fear to make men do frightening things. The way I encountered leadership was, as you've suggested. This admixture of, of fear, and I'm not gonna call it love, but, but the desire to impress the most famous soccer manager of modern times shares a name with me, Alex Ferguson.

Now Ferguson was famous for his halftime berating of, uh, Manchester United players when he was the manager of Man United and. The hairdryer was Ferguson's, famously loud onslaught at halftime on players who'd under underperformed.

[00:04:50] Adam Grant: Well, Neil, where where you historians love to argue by example, we, organizational psychologists, prefer to build theses based on evidence.

So let's talk about examples

[00:05:01] Niall Ferguson: are evidence, Adam. They're just particularly detailed forms of evidence and you lose the detail when you start creating. Dataset.

[00:05:10] Adam Grant: So beware. That's a risk. But I'll, I'll take rigorous evidence any day over collections of anecdotes. So let me, let me, let me throw one out there for you.

One, one study that I love because it looks at, at halftime speeches, and this is in college basketball. That's not a serious game,

[00:05:26] Niall Ferguson: but Okay, go ahead, go ahead with

[00:05:28] Adam Grant: your So-called evidence about your So-called Sport. That's fine. So Barry Sta colleagues, uh, they scored college basketball coaches halftime speeches for anger, and they were interested in whether teams were more likely to win games after an angry halftime speech was given.

And they control for what the score was beforehand and, and a host of other factors that might matter. And they, they do indeed find that if as a coach you give an angry halftime speech, your team is more likely to win. But there are a couple of caveats. The first one is, it only works if you're not too angry.

So moderate anger is more effective than completely berating your players. And secondly, it only works if you're not typically angry, because if you're angry all the time, people think you're just a jerk and they tune you out. Whereas if this is unusual, they think, well, we've done something wrong and we've gotta now step up our game.

And so. I look at that evidence and say, okay, should Ferguson berate his players? Probably not. Should he hold them accountable when they're underperforming? Yes. But he should be careful about how often he goes there because it loses meaning just like a parent who always yells at their kids. If you

[00:06:36] Niall Ferguson: actually go through all the people who discuss Ferguson's style, it's clear that he didn't.

Always used the hair dryer. In fact, it was rarely used and this is the critical point about anger. It, it can't be overused. In fact, ideally you hardly ever use it, but it has to be known. That you could use it. This is deterrence theory, and for it to be credible, there has to be some awareness that you are capable of being angry.

The study of history is about taking enormous numbers of cases from multiple periods and not just the recent past where American social psychologists have been active. The great leaders. Let's take Winston Churchill. Churchill was really angry and generally appeared to have a kind of alcohol propelled bmy in his, in his manner.

But if you read Andrew Roberts' excellent biography, you'll see that there just are moments when the lion roars and. I've applied this approach to my role as a parent. I have five children, so I have a bigger data, data set than most of the people you talk to about this. They will all confirm if you ask them that I'm capable of being angry, but that I've very, very, very rarely been angry.

With them as individuals. And I do the same at work. So I once threw a chair at a student. You can't do that anymore unfortunately. But, but I, I remember in the distant past at Oxford before there were any real rules about how professors should behave, but I only had to do that once, and I didn't have a late essay again for the rest of the near 10 years that I taught there.

So the key thing with anger is you need to use it once as a demonstration effect.

[00:08:28] Adam Grant: And that should be enough. I'm finding us in much more agreement than I expected and frankly, than makes me comfortable. But I, I think that there's, there's real convergence here between your take as a historian and, and a point that evolutionary psychologists have made, which surprised me at first, given that self-control has an almost endless host of benefits when it comes to performance or success in, in just about any domain, you can measure it.

Why do people have the capacity to lose control? And it turns out that if you don't think someone could ever lose control, then you might get a little bit complacent with them. Correct. And I think that's what you're speaking to. Absolutely. I would not

[00:09:07] Niall Ferguson: condone chair throwing. I wouldn't want you to think that I threw chairs that students at Harvard, I mean the lawsuits would've ruined me.

Growing up in Glasgow is a great education in itself because Glasgow is a place in which there's a level of violence, and this is part of the culture of pubs and football clubs, sectarianism and all of that stuff. The culture of a hard man, and it's quite a good introduction to the nature of power to grow up in a place where there are gangs and where the alpha male is supposed to engage in violence.

That's kind of where you start to learn about power as a child and. You learn quickly that the successful alpha male in that environment doesn't fight very often. Doesn't need to. 'cause at some point that person establishes dominance in usually some spectacular act of violence. This is essentially the Glasgow strategy, which is your retaliation should be awesome and terrifying.

Something so. Dreadful to behold that people never want to see it again. I think that was part of what impelled me to throw the chair. I knew that within half an hour, everybody in the college would know that Ferguson was this potentially explosive glaswegian. Who would throw a chair at you if you didn't get your essay done?

There's a key point I wanna make. In modern ideas of leadership. Oh, you couldn't possibly throw a chair at a student. How terrible. You know, you reacted in such a typical way. God. But really, you're gonna take that off the table. We're just gonna have, oh, no. Oh, your, your essay's late. I'm sorry. Do you need counseling?

Are you suffering from any issues I should know about? As soon as that's your default, it's like every s is gonna be laid.

[00:10:51] Adam Grant: Uh, you're, you're creating such a false choice though, aren't you? No, it's a real one. Well, I've never raised my voice as a student, let alone thrown a chair, and I also don't think I've ever had a paper turned in late.

So I just think your primitive meth methods are lacking. Creativity.

[00:11:06] Niall Ferguson: The way to determine this is really the performance of our students,

[00:11:10] Adam Grant: isn't it? Ooh, I like this. So what we need to do is we need to teach them some common material and then run the experiment and see who does better on the exam or the paper.

[00:11:20] Niall Ferguson: The question is really. In any standard, any group of students, there's, there's a distribution that's normal and there are a few brilliant people. The question is, can you get the few brilliant people to produce work of exceptional quality? That's the thing.

[00:11:33] Adam Grant: If those students are highly intrinsically motivated, then I think none of this is relevant.

I think if, if they're reliant on extrinsic motivation, then what you're, what you're arguing is that we need leaders who are not just supportive, but also demanding. Yes. And. I wholeheartedly endorse that. I think it's well documented that high expectations, um, and accountability are sort of half of that equation, right?

What I take issue with is the narrow and primitive range of strategies that you consider for being demanding and setting high expectations.

[00:12:03] Niall Ferguson: But let me be clear, this whole. Rage and theater element has to be part of a broader psychological strategy to inspire in machiavelli's sense, love as well as fear.

There. There's no doubt in my mind that the rage is this rare thing that should only occasionally happen, but it needs to be known. It needs to be part of your reputation and it needs to be the thing. That in a sense is in contrast with your otherwise emotionally sophisticated engagement with the person who's working for you.

You've want to understand them and you want to motivate them, and you want to give them a vision of the Olympian Heights to which they can aspire. And that's, that's the, I would say the, the, the quotidian approach to, to good management or good leadership is that, is you want them to feel motivated, praise them when it's good, you should.

You should praise them. But there needs to be this, I think, without the elements of fear, without the potential, uh, for that to be not just disappointment, but real anger. I think the, the process of collective endeavor, I. Of leadership and followership. It's, it's diminished and people will not produce their best work.

[00:13:20] Adam Grant: I just bristle at the, the use of the term need. Right. I'm a systems theorist. I believe in the principle of EQU finality that there are always multiple paths to the same end. And I think that we shouldn't, we shouldn't confuse the descriptive with the pre, the prescriptive. The fact that throughout much of human history being a little bit nasty, or having the capacity to be a little bit nasty has produced results, doesn't mean it always has to be that way.

And you as a counterfactual list would be the first to agree with that, wouldn't you?

[00:13:46] Niall Ferguson: No. Be because I think in the counterfactual that Alex Ferguson's much nicer is sort of like you or maybe your managing Manchester United, they just don't win nearly so many trophies.

[00:13:56] Adam Grant: You

[00:13:56] Niall Ferguson: don't respect

[00:13:56] Adam Grant: basketball. But Phil Jackson and Greg Popovich would be the counterpoint.

I don't respect basketball. I don't even know who those people are. Arguably the two greatest coaches in NBA history whose styles are much more aligned with what I typically recommend, which is servant leadership with extremely high expectations and a commitment to pushing everyone to reach their potential.

[00:14:18] Niall Ferguson: Well, we'll never know how that style would've worked in the much more demanding context

[00:14:24] Adam Grant: of

[00:14:25] Niall Ferguson: the

[00:14:26] Adam Grant: English Premier League. I think where I hesitate a little bit is that the, one of the risks of anger is that it leads people to feel disrespected.

[00:14:34] Niall Ferguson: Well, I don't respect somebody who's done bad work. They are being disrespected.

They've lost my respect. If the work that they produce is no good, it's gone. Respect gone. You wanna win it back? Do better work. People can't expect me to respect them. 24 7, regardless of performance, how's that gonna play?

[00:14:53] Adam Grant: I, I think there's a distinction. Christy Rogers and her colleagues in Maine between earned respect and owed respect and owed respect is treating people with dignity because they're human beings.

Earned respect is evaluating. The quality of their work and their contribution. And I think what you're saying is we shouldn't lose that element. But there is a risk. I think that when you feel people haven't earned your respect with what they produce, that then you lead them to feel more disrespected at a basic level as a human being that can lead to, to defensiveness.

It can also lead to withdrawal. What I like better about disappointment as opposed to anger is that we know that when you express disappointment, that leads to guilt in the other person. And I think Irma, Bombach probably put it best when she said that guilt. Is the gift that keeps on giving. It may be the ultimate pro-social emotion in that I wanna right my wrong and I wanna make sure that I prevent it from happening again.

Why do you not believe that disappointment to guilt is just as powerful as anger to fear? '

[00:15:46] Niall Ferguson: cause there are plenty of people where I come from who don't feel guilt. Are they sociopaths? No, they're Calvinists. It's just a different religious culture where you are a member of the elect. What happened to Noble obl?

There's no nobles in Glasgow. It's pretty much a nobles free zone. Are you claiming there's no such thing as Scottish kilt? The culture's different, and I think I'm very, I mean, American academic life has been infused with certain Jewish sensibilities because the extraordinary success of of, of Jews in, in scholarship of the last century has, has naturally had that consequence.

But guilt tripping doesn't work everywhere. It really doesn't, and Sha shame tripping can work in some cultures, but it doesn't work in

[00:16:29] Adam Grant: Glasgow either. I'm not aware of any, any research on cross-cultural differences in reactions to disappointment and guilt, but on shame. My initial read of the evidence was that shame was counterproductive everywhere because it leads you to feel like you're a bad person, not just you've done a bad thing, and then that leads to attacker withdrawal, neither of which is the reaction we want.

And then, um, my colleague, Rick Bagozzi published a paper looking at salespeople in the Netherlands and the Philippines, and showed that reaction among Dutch salespeople. But in the Philippines, it was different that when they felt ashamed, they actually regulated it differently and said, well, I've, I've gotta transcend that shame and, uh, and earn honor, and now I'm gonna work harder to build relationships with my customers and be as, as helpful and caring and effective as possible.

[00:17:18] Niall Ferguson: Insane if people in the Netherlands and people in the Philippines behaved in the same way, be completely at odds With all we know about the, the history of those countries and their religious, uh, histories. Particularly one of the key lessons that you learn as a historian is that even in, in the most extreme circumstances of a combat close combat, there are profound cultural differences.

And these have huge, huge consequences. Uh. So I, I think you should not be surprised to find that that one strategy that works in Cambridge, Massachusetts would not work in, in a, you know, comprehensive in a public school in Glasgow. It almost certainly wouldn't.

[00:17:56] Adam Grant: It speaks to something that I've often been struck by as we've had these thought provoking clashes, which is, I, I think that the research I do is informed by.

Everyday behavior of ordinary people most of the time. And what you've spent most of your, your career studying is extreme cases, uh, where the stakes are extremely high and we get to see people in their greatest moments and also their worst moments. I'm curious about what else that teaches us about effective leadership.

What else would you say as a historian is, is vital to being an effective leader?

[00:18:28] Niall Ferguson: Can I ask you a question, Adam? You may. Have you ever punched somebody in the face? Only in the six years of karate that I did, but never in a kind of,

[00:18:37] Adam Grant: oh, no, definitely not.

[00:18:40] Niall Ferguson: It's interesting. Are you

[00:18:40] Adam Grant: saying I should? No, it's just, that's kind of what we're really talking about here.

You've never had to do that, but, um, I do, I do think there are people who should have been punched in the face, but not by you. Yeah. I'd rather, I, I guess I, I think it's more of a challenge to see if I can reason with them.

[00:18:59] Niall Ferguson: See, I just think there's, there's a kind of big dividing line in, in the world between people who've been in context where they.

Had to use violence and those who've been so fortunate as never to have to use violence when you are confronted with the risk of death or at least of being hurt when you have to risk your, uh, life or at least risk injury. Uh, this is when there's a moment of revelation. So I've been much more interested in that kind of thing than in what you called everyday life.

And the reason is that for most of history. Everyday life for most people was violent with a meaningful risk of violence. Just going about your ordinary business with very limited protection from any state. If you were. An ordinary person and, and so actually for most of history, people have been grappling with this problem, and it's still the case that all over the world, the people who aren't in the privileged bubbles that we inhabit have this to deal with day daily life is being able to be sufficiently credible in your potential use of force that people won't murder mug,

[00:20:14] Adam Grant: hurt you, steal from you.

Hunter gatherer societies were extremely peaceful. On average is my read of anthropology. Well, and that's most of human history, isn't it? That's

[00:20:25] Niall Ferguson: debatable, Adam. The evidence we have on prehistory, of course, it's archeological evidence, is that prehistoric societies were really quite violent with lots of clashes of, of a violent nature from lots of, of premature death.

And the interesting thing about human history is it, it, it can be construed as a, a. Civilizing process where the amount of of daily or ordinary violence diminishes and violence then becomes structured into warfare, but during periods of peace.