Leading Means Being an Actor

Richard Nixon is not a person we generally think of as a source of “good leadership,” but his book Leaders is a fascinating treatise on the topic. The book profiles many leaders that the former president encountered during his 30-plus year career in public service. 

One of the themes of that work is that the best leaders understand and embrace the performance part of their roles. 

For example, Nixon describes the end of a visit with an elderly and infirm Winston Churchill this way: “When the front door was opened, we were blinded by a glare of television lights. The effect on him was electric. He straightened up, pushed the aides aside, and stood alone. I can see him now: his chin thrust forward, his eyes flashing, his hand raised in the famous V for victory sign. [...] Right to the end his star shone most brightly when the cameras were trained on him.”

On Charles de Gaulle, Nixon says, “He acted a part, playing a role he himself created in a way that fit only one actor. [...] He created de Gaulle, the public person, to play the role of de Gaulle, personification of France.”

On Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s ability to shape-shift in a negotiation: “I realized that it's all acting. He is the greatest actor I have ever seen. He'd laugh one moment and cry the next, and make his audience laugh and cry with him. But it's all acting!"

Interestingly, Nixon does not see using one’s acting chops as a violation of the more typical suggestion that leaders should be authentic. He writes, “[Former Russian Premier Nikita] Khrushchev acted the bully, de Gaulle acted the haughty seigneur; each was playing at a sort of psychological gamesmanship. But although both were calculated, neither was phony. Khrushchev was a bully; de Gaulle was haughty; Khrushchev was crude; de Gaulle was a passionately patriotic Frenchman who believed in his country's grandeur. And this is important: To play the role successfully, the leader has to fit the role.”

In the book Acting with Power, Stanford professor Deborah Gruenfeld also argues that “‘authenticity’ is not the right test. In acting, whether onstage or in life, the challenge is to find ways of telling the truth—of meaning what we say and do, even if the actions themselves are scripted.”

She provides this anecdote about how to act as a leader with authenticity:

“When Bob Joss became the CEO of Westpac Banking Corporation, he was initially surprised to learn that employees were noticing his mood and his energy level when he passed them in the halls. If he was reserved or pensive, or just distracted, people thought he seemed aloof, that he didn’t care about them or the firm, and they worried they had displeased him. So he started paying attention to these things—a friendly ‘hi’ in the hallway, or how he took the stage. He worked on his energy and on trying to show his excitement and enthusiasm—he would kind of “hop up,” he says, instead of walking. He felt he had to be ‘up’ every day even when he didn’t feel that way. And what he’s learned about playing a big role, he says, is that ‘it is not important to act authentically, but it is very important to care authentically. If you really care, that will come through.’”