ICYMI: “You want people … who can see the moral complexity”: Professor Joseph L. Badaracco on leadership and Shakespeare
Joseph L. Badaracco, who teaches on business ethics, strategy, and management as the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, has a unique approach in his teaching. One of the tools he uses to illuminate business ethics and leadership is literature. His book Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature presents “eight fundamental challenges that test a leader's character and proposes exploring them through the lens of literature” and “argues that serious fiction provides us with memorable characters facing compelling challenges similar to those that confront business leaders.” One of the authors he teaches is Shakespeare. In this interview, we asked Professor Badaracco about Shakespeare’s insights on leadership, the place of principal in ethical decisions, and whether leadership lessons must always be learned through tragedy.
This interview was conducted with Professor Badaracco in summer 2022. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why do you think Shakespeare in particular is a good place to look for lessons or questions about leadership?
Well, let me say this — I think Shakespeare is a challenging place to look. And the challenge is the language, which is, for many students, even who grew up speaking English, almost a second language. And for students for whom English is their second or third language, it's really tough. So I encourage students to watch as opposed to read, and to select passages and reread them several times, and then check the notes that explain the foreign vocabulary. So that is a real obstacle.
I also say to students that if they read aloud, for some reason they will understand a lot more than if they simply read. There's something about the way these were written to be performed. But this is the challenge. Okay. What, of course, is the enormous advantage? Is it that the plays and the characters … are almost sort of protean? I think a broad standard of good literature or great literature is you can come to it with a very wide variety of questions and … you won’t get answers or solutions, but you'll get some new perspectives. And so you can read a play of Shakespeare’s and ask about leadership, and you will get some fresh perspectives and you can ask a wide variety of questions.
So, for example, with Othello, I tend to ask about the tendency of leaders and everybody to overestimate their autonomy, their independence, their capacity for self-direction and independent thinking.
[That’s] the basic answer, and it's life perceived from the outside and, of course, from the inside. That's an advantage of all literature, but the more acute the perceptions of the writer, the more you have a sense that these are people really different from me and yet really like me.
What questions you might ask about Julius Caesar or Macbeth, in the way you ask questions about literature in your book Questions of Character?
… Macbeth is peculiar because in a way he's not a leader, or he's kind of the leader of a successful coup d'état … of course, there's a question to what extent is he an autonomous actor or an agent of his wife? And she may actually be the more interesting character for thinking about leadership in the play. And I've tried to do that because she, being a woman, was in a subordinate position, and yet she was quite compelling with her husband. And there's a lot, I think, that can be discussed, if not learned, about powerful communication by a leader who's in the formal position or somebody who leads from outside a formal position.
[With Macbeth and Othello,] you have a person who [has] significant vulnerabilities, and other individuals – Iago and Lady Macbeth [who have] very high EQ – play on them brilliantly.
I was wondering if you see a difference between the qualities that a leader needs and the qualities that a follower needs. [In Questions of Character] you are suspicious about people who are highly devoted to principal and about how effective they’re going to be [in leadership roles] … where do those kinds of people then go? … Is there a place for them?
I think there are certain basic ethical principles that, if you're hiring or associating with people or raising children, you want them to adhere to. Okay. But I think you also want to have people in senior positions who understand complexity. And these are people who won’t take a single principle and apply it quickly and in kind of a meat-cutter way to a complex situation. Often there are different principles at stake. You have to understand them. You may have to trade them off against each other. And the challenge is often understanding what these broad principles that we all agree on actually mean in very specific circumstances.
So if you want to work with other people, and you're leading an organization and you've got a team, you want people on that team who adhere to basic principles, but then when you bring a tough issue, a gray area issue, a right-versus-right conflict, they can see the moral complexity, they won't simplify it away. And then you’ve got the beginning of a good discussion.
This question of, Do you want people who are like you or different from you? That's a tough one. I mean, there's a cliche that I think has some truth to it, that if you're the smartest person in the room, you’re not in the right room. And a lot of people will say that they've led organizations where many of the people around them were smarter than them, both in kind of an IQ sense sometimes, and in terms of these other individuals understanding some area of technical complexity, law, technology, etc. – they just know more.
And so in that sense, you want people who are somewhat unlike you, smarter, quicker, better informed in other ways. On the other hand – this is really tricky – you need for people to be able to communicate with each other, drawing on different perspectives. And if you have too much fit, communication is easy and you miss a whole lot. So you want a certain degree of sort of misfit, a certain degree of tension. But people have to be able to communicate across those tensions. And that’s all very general, but I think all of those things are simultaneously true. And some of the best leaders have welcomed and encouraged people who disagree with them, and then they engage with them, and then they try to look at facts, rely on judgment, and come to some resolution. So this question of “fit” is really a tough one.
… my course [at Harvard Business School] is called “The Moral Leader.” So the focus is on moral challenges, and of course, you find those throughout Shakespeare, large and small. And morality is very, very complex. It's a vast range – you know, broad, ethical principles, some of which are incompatible with each other; norms and values in communities, those vary enormously; and we’re all members of a variety of different communities. And then each of us as individuals, we may … agree on something common, say, Aristotelian virtues, but Aristotle had a very long list of virtues, it wasn’t just the standard four, and they mean different things to different people … so you really need people with a range of moral perspectives [that] care about getting things morally right. But you want this range brought to bear on problems that are complex.
Your book has a frank awareness of the need to be pragmatic, to learn from figures like Machiavelli and to take success and consequences into consideration. But I wonder if people might look at the questions posed in the book, such as, “How flexible is my moral code?” or “How do I balance principles and pragmatism?”, and say, “Well, as soon as you’ve made your moral code flexible, it doesn’t really count as moral anymore; if you’re balancing morality with something else, that means you don’t understand what morality means.”
And a Shakespeare play where people might bring up this kind of question might be Henry V. He invades France in this war of aggression and tries to figure out what he can do to make this war successful, because it has all kind of gains for England. And the term “pragmatic” or “Machiavellian” gets applied to him, and that often translates immediately into “immoral,” or “not morally sympathetic, not morally motivated.”
A key phrase you used is in describing the play is “good for England” … Once you take on a position of responsibility, typically you have what are technically called “role obligations” … if you become a lawyer in the American system, you've got duties to your clients and so forth.
And going back to Machiavelli, his view is, if you take responsibility for leadership in a city state in a tumultuous period, you have to do what's best for that community, all in long term. And you may have to do some things that you find uncomfortable or even wrong to some degree by your own personal standards. Now that’s not to say anything goes … you raise the question [about] consequentialism. You really do have to look hard at the consequences of the options open to you in a realistic way. And then you want to typically pick the one that works best for everyone who is affected. Around that is a set of boundaries demarcated by certain principles that you don’t want to violate, you can’t violate because of your role, you can’t violate because you’re a human being. Okay … It’s not a sharp boundary, but within that, if you’re in a position of leadership, you have to find something that works for the people you’re responsible for. Otherwise you're just kind of an analyst.
One of the things that struck me reading Questions of Character is that you have a broader notion of what counts as a leader. Like Willy Loman — he doesn't get to be the leader he wants to be, but he’s the leader in a family. He's a father and husband and his decisions affect other people. And I think you could say many, if not most, people in society could be considered a leader in that way, or at least in that there are people depending on them, they have responsibilities ... so what’s the overlap and what’s the difference between being a good leader and being a good person? If we broaden that definition of “leader,” is there anyone who gets to step outside of that and say, “Well, I can afford just have that private sense of morality, I can afford to just follow my intuitions, I don’t have to think about leadership morality”?
… You mentioned Willy Loman. And when I lead the discussion of Death of a Salesman, I try to get students to focus on [Loman’s wife] Linda, because I think she, in many ways, is the leader in the family. And in many ways, a really exemplary one. I can’t think of a Shakespearean parallel there … but Linda Loman is, I think, a wonderful example of quiet leadership. And she was actually in a major role, because … Willy was away. She was the leader of the family week by week. And then, was she an enabler of Willy, or was she an agent of her own? I don't know. I think along the way she may have been to some extent an enabler of Willy, she shared the dreams. In the end, when the family is breaking apart, Willie’s going crazy, I think she’s really trying to keep things together, and also be strong and communicate effectively … this is all part of the theme of looking beyond the major characters [for leadership lessons].
A lot of the plays where we see these questions coming up most urgently in Shakespeare are the tragedies and histories … and a lot of the literature that you consider in Questions of Character has that tragic cast as well. Does there always have to be that tragic translation in the lives of managers, or can we find examples, like Linda, who show us a more attractive picture of what it can look like to be a good leader … does [the learning experience] always have to be tragic?
… Do leaders need to have had tragic experiences? No. But I think that somebody who has been in the flow of success – you know, right family, right genes, right neighborhood, everything just worked out – may not be as prepared for leadership as somebody who has had either some big bumps in the road, or for some period of their life felt they were an outsider rather than an insider and had to deal with that – maybe became a more astute observer of things around them as kind of an outsider.
There’s lots of problems with being outsiders, we don’t want to create outsiders, [but outsiders] may have had to deal with a somewhat complex relationship between themselves, other people, and an organization. I think that, instinctively, they are more likely to be aware of the complexities in a situation rather than someone (and I think there's very few people in this situation) who have just been on kind of a glide path. You don’t have to have a tragedy or a crucible, but I think hitting some bumps in the road, stopping and thinking about them, and thinking about whether you’re on the right road, that's valuable preparation.
… What I use Othello for is … to discourage [people] from overestimating their own autonomy and capacity for independent thinking. And there’s a wonderful quotation I came across by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset: “I am I, and my circumstances.” And that is so true of Othello. I mean, he was a brilliant warrior and surmounted all the prejudice that he was dealing with, but then when Iago created these circumstances, they elicited part of his identity and revealed part of his identity. His circumstances really revealed and accentuated another aspect of who he was. So I think that’s a profound thing that I find in that play.
What would you say to high school students about why studying literature is important, even if you don’t go on to major in it in college?
Well, I think two things are important. One is finding books, and they don’t have to be old, hard-to-read books, that really speak to you, that are worth reading a second or third time. And then secondly, I think you simply learn more about yourself and the world when you really engage with a piece of literature. But the key thing is finding it. And it doesn't have to be literature. For some people it’s a film. For some people it might be Star Trek, I don't know. But you’ve got to have that first step of engagement … In my junior year, I took an AP English course … And we spent a good bit of the year on Macbeth, memorizing parts of it, acting it and all the rest, and who knows how that affected me?