Twelve ships sailed from Troy under Odysseus. None came home, and he reached Ithaca alone.
Christopher Nolan’s film opened on July 17th, and within days, the leadership commentary had arrived. Almost all of it lands in the same place. Odysseus was brilliant and arrogant; his ego cost him his crew, and leaders should watch their pride.
That reading is correct, but the poem has more to it than that. And three other key events point to a leadership lesson we’d all do well to remember.
Aeolus
In the original text, Aeolus, king of the winds, gave Odysseus a bag holding every wind except the one that would blow him home. Odysseus steered the ship himself for nine days and nights, refusing to hand the sheet to anyone. On the tenth day, with Ithaca in sight, he fell asleep. His crew, who had watched him guard that bag for nine days without being told what it held, decided it was gold and opened it. The escaping winds blew the fleet all the way back.
Notice what that mutiny was not about. Those men were not short of motivation. They were nine days from home and rowing hard. They were short of information, and that gap did what all such gaps invariably do: it licensed the least generous explanation available. Nobody had told them what was in the bag, so they decided they were being robbed.
For the past forty years, nearly everything written about leadership communication has focused on charismatic, motivational and transformational speech: the ability to articulate a vision and inspire and energize people. Yet hidden behind all this attention, an unglamorous but essential variable keeps quietly showing up. Across decades of studies, not knowing what you are meant to be doing, or why, is consistently negatively related to performance.
So ask yourself. In your last all-hands, did people leave more inspired, or did they leave knowing something they had not known before? Most leaders track the first and never measure the second. Odysseus’s crew did not need a better speech. They needed to be told what was in the bag.
The Sirens
The famous piece of the Sirens episode is the mast. Odysseus assumes in advance that he will fail, has himself lashed down and gives a standing order that if he begs to be released, his crew are to tie him tighter. The bit that matters is the order. He knows precisely what he is about to become, and he takes action to contain it.
Leaders transmit something to the people they lead, whether or not they intend to. Put a leader in a poor mood in front of a group, and the group’s mood follows; its coordination degrades, and its members work harder to produce less. The higher you sit the more of this you do and the less of it you see, because nobody tells you what your Tuesday morning did to the department.
Most leadership development is about expression. Find your voice, be authentic, show up as yourself. Containment is the opposite skill and almost nobody teaches it. We should call it what it is: the recognition that above a certain level, your internal weather becomes somebody else’s working conditions. And it is up to leaders to manage that.
Penelope
While Odysseus lost twelve ships, Penelope held Ithaca for twenty years, with no army and no title she could enforce, against a hundred and eight claimants living in her house and eating the estate. Her instrument was a shroud she wove by day and unpicked by night, a process engineered never to finish.
Nothing about that is transformational. She launched nothing and led nobody anywhere new. She just kept the thing intact until it could be saved. But without her efforts, all of Odysseus’s heroics would have been for nothing. Hers is the least celebrated work in business and among the hardest to do well, because we overvalue the ability to deliver change and undervalue the ability just to keep things on track. So, look at who your last three promotion rounds rewarded. If all three ran something new, your system has already told everyone that holding the core together is not a career.
What runs through all three
Clarity, containment and quiet delivery may look like three subjects, but there is a common thread that unites them.
Odysseus was a superb leader in individual moments but a catastrophic one over time. Every episode where he shone was a crisis, and every crisis he survived left him with fewer people. What he lacked was the property that matters most in an organization: the ability to attend to it personally. Call it durability, whether the thing keeps working. Clarity is what makes it work while you are asleep. Containment is what makes it work while you are at your worst. Quiet delivery is what it looks like when nobody is filming.
We should perhaps judge leaders more by what survives them, by what happens when they are not in the room. On that measure, the hero of the poem comes home alone, and the leader who actually held things together never left the house.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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