"Leadership" Lessons From an Unlikley Source: Carol Burnett

Our cultural view of leadership was, to a large degree, poisoned by the early industrialists who built a system in which all decision making is pushed up the chain of command to a decision making class. All the thinking about how to do a job (everything that makes work nourishing and fulfilling) was the province of managers. In fact, Frederick Taylor famously said that anybody who has the physically ability to handle pig iron cannot have the mental ability to think about how to handle pig iron. I think that there is plenty of evidence around which testifies to the fact that “post smoke stack” industry is struggling mightily to undo the damage that Taylor’s thinking has done to labor management relations.

At Prestwick House we look to the example of more modern leaders like Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang. Huang recently commented that he doesn’t even like the term "leadership" because it makes leadership sound like a quality that only certain types of people are blessed with.

In a Stanford University Podcast on entrepreneurship, Huang said that he thinks of it more in terms of “perspective” than leadership. Everyone can have a perspective and anyone who trusts their perspective can be a leader. Someone with a surprising story that illustrates that type of leadership is Carol Burnett.

I liked the Carol Burnett show when I was a kid, but I had not paid much attention to her and certainly never thought of her as a kind of leadership guru. Not until I was watching the Biography Channel one night and heard her tell the story of how she got her start in show business.

She was living in New York at a place called “The Rehearsal Club” which was didn’t hold rehearsals and wasn’t a club. It was a hotel or boarding house for aspiring actresses.

It was where she and other talented young women from around the country lived between trudging back and forth to the dreary kinds of auditions that are depicted in so many movies. You know the type. The performer sings two words of a song only to have a voice from the back of the darkened theater yell, “Thank You!” or “Next!”

It was on her way back from one of these demoralizing encounters when Carol Burnett decided to trust her talent and her perspective. She said something along the lines of, “This is crazy. We are all talented here. We can sing and dance and act, so why don’t we put on a show?” This is exactly what the residents of “The Rehearsal Club” did. They rented a theater and put on a show that was wildly successful. Burnett signed with the William Morris Agency and her career was off to the races.

I love that story and Carol Burnett’s telling of it made me love her as a leader. She had a business insight and trusted her perspective. She didn’t have to bully anyone into putting on a great show because the simple power and clarity of the problem solving epiphany spoke for itself.


Cross posted at "The Employee Engagement Network"