Real Leaders: Ernest Shackleton Leads a Harrowing Expedition

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Welcome to the HPR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Adi Ignatius. This is Real Leaders, a special series that examines the lives of some of the world's most compelling and effective leaders, past and present, and offers lessons to all of us today.

Wanted men for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition in case of success.

Legend has it that that's the job AD Ernest Shackleton used to recruit the crew for his expedition to Antarctica in 1914. If you know this story, you know that Shackleton and his crew never set foot on that continent. Instead, their ship got trapped in ice. But it's what happened when their original mission failed that has made Shackleton's remarkable story of survival one of the most famous case studies in leadership history. I'm Adi Ignatius, editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, and I'm joined by historian and Harvard Business School professor Nancy Cain. Nancy's case study about Ernest Shackleton is a classic, and her book, Forged in Crisis, is a great account of Shackleton's story. Nancy, welcome.

Thank you, Adi. It's a pleasure to be here.

We're starting this series with Ernest Shackleton, one of the great explorers in the age of polar exploration in the early 20th century. To set the context in the U.S. teddy Roosevelt is president, Ford Motor Company has just produced his first car, and the race to discover the South Pole is on. So to understand the context even more, Nancy, is this kind of the equivalent of the space race of the 1960s?

Absolutely. It's a great analogy. It was a time when nations and patriotism were duking it out at some level in an international race along exploration lines.

So Shackleton's first expedition to Antarctica takes place in 1902. So, Nancy, what happened in that?

So his first expedition, which happens in the very first few years of the 20th century, is an expedition under the command of a naval officer named Robert Falcon Scott. They're trying to be the first to the Pole, and that expedition goes terribly awry. And Scott is forced to turn around and go back. And they almost die on the way back for a number of reasons, primarily the most important of which is the temperatures and food supplies.

Okay, so this fails. But Shackleton wants more. He goes back.

He wants more. When Scott publishes an account of the expedition that's scathing toward Shackleton, that gets his Dander up. And he immediately begins planning for his own expedition, having learned a lot of things from Scott that he thinks he won't do.

Okay, so here's lesson number one. What do you do when you have a bad boss? To what extent does he learn lessons from an initial foray gone badly?

Extremely important lessons. One, make your decisions and stick with them. That's something Scott has a lot of trouble with. A lot of those decisions in leadership involve displeasing or not making everyone happy. That's a second related lesson. Third lesson. Make sure you have adequate food supplies and transport that you can depend on. He wasn't a very good process engineer and planner. And so Shackleton learns from that and says, I'm gonna be very good about that. I'm never gonna be in charge of an expedition that runs short on food supplies. Again, almost in intentional opposition to Scottish. So what's important I think here for our time and for all of us that have worked for bad bosses or people we don't agree with or people we feel frustrated by, is what can I learn from this person about how I will not act as a manager and a leader?

So Shackleton leads his own expedition to the South Pole in 1907 that fails to reach the South Pole. So in 1914, he returns to Antarctica for his third mission. And this is the one that becomes so famous. So it's interesting to think about Shackleton almost as an entrepreneur. He takes on some of the tasks that are at once both profound but also mundane. Hiring a team, raising money, I think particularly the way in which he built his team, is remarkable and weird and right and instructive.

That is exactly right. That's a great set of descriptives. So Shackleton didn't use this language, but here's what he did and I'll say a word about how he hired for attitude and trained for skill. That's the essence of what he did. So less about what have you got on your resume that makes you look like you'd be a good polar scientist or a good polar navigator? And more about what's your attitude and what has that attitude affect your ability to deal with these very high risk situation. So the way he gets to attitude in the hiring process is he asks people to do things like sing a song, do a dance. He tries to get at their underlying default kind of character. Am I pessimistic, am I optimistic? How do I deal with different kinds of situations?

But so was he hiring people who pleased him or do you think he really was thinking at that High level about these attributes.

Absolutely. The latter. Absolutely. Thinking about, what have I got here? What have I got in this scientist? What have I got in this doctor? What have I got in this enlisted man? What kind of attitudes do I have? How are they suited to the environment that I know? Well, in Antarctica, he knows that. He's been there with good and bad and less good results. And very importantly, not just what attitudes, what collection of attitudes do I have, but how do they fit together? He was a brilliant kind of conductor, if you will, of teams, because teams aren't just kind of the set of resumes you've got. They're the people and their attitudes and their experience and how they work together. So he was very careful about choosing his ensemble.

When I interview people, should I have them tell me a joke and sing a little song and just get a sense of their ability to respond to a weird request?

Absolutely. That's exactly what he's doing. That's a very good way of characterizing it. You can also ask them when you hire people about what was their most confusing, what was their most. What was the greatest moment of self doubt? Shackleton got that kind of thing as well, and he understood it long before we were writing about it here at places like the Harvard Business School.

So by now, Shackleton has his team for the Endurance mission assembled. What happens first?

So he sets off in August 1914, almost exactly at the time that World War I breaks out. And he has to ask the assistant Lord of the Navy, Winston Churchill, if he can go ahead and go if they need the ship and the men for military service. And Churchill says, proceed. And Shackleton hightails it at a dodge and gets himself down first to South America to take on supplies. And then they head south and east to a small whaling station. This is their last outpost before they get to Antarctica, the continent. And the whalers say to Shackleton, the icebergs are very far north this year, and you're gonna have trouble getting through the jigsaw puzzle ice going down there.

Right. Remember, we're heading south.

We're heading south. And Shackleton waits a month waiting for the ice to kind of clear, and it doesn't, and he sets off. So he was arguably reckless or a little bit cavalier, maybe a little bit more than a little. But he heads south. They make their way and their astounding pictures through this jigsaw puzzle of ice to the coast of Antarctica and in January. So they left in August, in January, late January, just as they see the coast of Antarctica, but as they're still 80 miles away. Icebergs lock the ship in a vise. Tons and tons and tons of ice, locking it in place. No one knows where they are. The radio doesn't work. After a month or so, it's really clear that they're not gonna break free of the ice. They'll have to wait for it to melt. And if the ship survives being held in a vice that long, there's very little if it survives, they may get back to the coast. But he thinks increasingly, as the days become weeks and the weeks become months into 1915, that their expedition is over. So very interesting leadership moment. I can't get to my original goal. What in the heck do I do? And that is a very interesting pivot moment for Shackleton.

We're talking months and months, you know, locked, locked in the ice. Freezing temperature, no light. At times, I mean, it's sort of unfathomable. It doesn't even kind of register in today's terms.

It doesn't. So the ship is locked in January of 1915. They will live on the ice for almost two years, about 20 months all told. Most of that time they will be living in tents because the ship sinks. The ice crushes the ship and sinks it in November. Ten months after they are first stuck, the ship is battered into pieces and the men live for the rest of the time in tents with lifeboats on the ice. So it's a tremendously long, as you said, unfathomable period that they are living in this high stakes situation. But he now has another issue, and this is really important for leaders today. How do you manage the energy of yourself and your team? When the stakes suddenly get high, the volatility or uncertainty increases the and there's suddenly a new worst case scenario that people can just keep running as a movie in their heads that all those things are his enemies, right? If his men start doubting that they will survive, if they start fighting among themselves, if their anxiety becomes its own actor on the stage, other things can kill them than just the temperature and food supply. So what is so interesting about Shackleton in this moment is how he quickly pivots into I got to manage their energy. I gotta create stability for them. I gotta give them the sense that they can do harder, better things together and under my command than they could do on their own. And that is what he proceeds to do.

Coming up after the break, we will learn exactly how Shackleton did that. Welcome back to Real Leaders, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. Hi, I'm Adi Ignatius With Nancy Cain.

Hey there.

All right, let's get back to the story. So Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men are stranded on an ice floe near Antarctica with no idea when or how or if they will ever be able to get home. What I want to know is how in the world does Shackleton keep his crew motivated for all this time?

He shows up every day in terms of his mission. So we are rarely taught as leaders, managers, parents, teachers that how you get through your day, how a leader shows up, what your body language is, are you looking at your phone as you sit down in a meeting immediately with everyone around you. If you're doing that, everyone else will be doing that. Shackleton understands that. He looks confident. He carries himself carefully. We know from his diaries that he was nervous. He didn't always know the answer, but he is not showing up with his team saying, hey guys, I didn't sleep well. Can anyone help me get, get right with this anxiety? He never does that. He has someone, his first mate, Frank Wilde, that he can talk to. But he is consistently showing up as a man who cares about his men and who believes that they together will get home safely. That's the first thing really important lesson today as volatility pace of change increases. Second thing he does is he understands something that all parents come to understand, which is that routine is incredibly important to creating stability and confidence and belief in self for human beings. So he has all the way through this story, has the men on routines on the ship and then when the ship goes down, is crushed by the ice in November of 1915. He has a routine for the men on the ice. He has a duty roster. Everyone has a job every day. Everyone is responsible for walking three miles around the ice so they get their exercise. They don't have Fitbits, but he knows that exercise is good for the men. He thought of it as mental medicine is what he called it. There was forced socialization. So no one was allowed to retreat to their cabins when they were on the ship after dinner or in the case of their tents, no one was allowed to be alone in their tent after dinner. They mixed. There were games, there were presentations, there were plays. So this idea that routine and camaraderie prevents doubt and disillusionment and its relative despair and then discord among the team. He understands very well and he acts to prevent that. And the third thing I think that he does that's incredibly important, just as important as these other two things is he has this great sense of empathy. So when he sees a man, for example, energy flagging. And this happened a number of times over the course of the time that they were stranded. He will order up hot milk for everyone, but he does it for everyone so that the man who he sees flagging isn't embarrassed, isn't called out, isn't singled out. He does it. And the idea is energy, food, food and feeding and watering is something that bolsters your spirits, gives you more confidence, can help you combat doubt or despair or ennui. And so he does that all the time. These small things that, without making a person embarrassed, give them more confidence, give them more strength, give them more resilience.

So a few points. One, you're certainly making the case that it's good to hire people who can sing a song and dance a drink if you have a year of nights to somehow spend together. But also delivering hot milk to everyone when there's one person who's flagging, I think it avoids the embarrassment. I guess it also avoids signaling to somebody that we're worried that you're circling the drain.

Exactly, exactly. There's a moment when the men are so miserable and he's so worried about, as he called it, morale that he says ordered up double rations for four days needed to improve morale. And like the men's diaries, most of them kept diaries, say things like, feeling much better, full as a tick. So he understands in this empathic intuitive way that my most important resource is my men's self belief and their belief in their group ability to get home safely.

So Shackleton clearly has this enormous reservoir of empathy. To what extent is that just his personality and to what extent is that calculated?

I think most of what he does is calculated once he's on the ice and the ship goes down and the mission of walking across the Antarctica is over. Everything he does in that very high stakes situation where he's talking about keeping his men alive is calculated. That's what's so interesting, and I mean calculation with a great deal of admiration and pragmatism. When I say that this is someone who says I have to keep them alive, I'm gonna be very thoughtful and serious about what I do and very aware. And so it's calculated empathy that he's using. And he's very careful to think about how he distributes it so that no one feels left out. And it's done in the interest of what he sees now as the, you know, as an extremely important goal. I'm responsible for these people, I must bring them home alive.

And is that Goal. And is that mission selfless or selfish?

I think it's got parts of both, if you will. I mean, he really cares about bringing them home alive. Is he, in a sense, rising into how service to others can make us our best selves, make us our strongest, unlock and unleash our superpowers? So there's that piece. But this man who's been thirsting for fame and glory, right, for all his life, in some sense, or since he first decided to join the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. So there's an element of, not I, I'm not gonna be the man who sees 27 men and myself die on the ice. So there's a real self interested piece too. But I think the most important piece is what he discovers inside himself, which is, I owe it to these men. I owe it to my command to bring them home alive. And I think that is primarily what powers him through his own moments of doubt.

But it's this incredible flexibility of realizing, okay, the mission of going to the South Pole, this is long over, but we're not retreating with our tail between our legs. And by the way, this is the hardest thing in the world to try to get us all back, but this is the greatest mission of my life.

Exactly, exactly. And the ability to say, the flexibility, the adaptability, the ability to say, that's no longer our mission. I'm turning to the future, the new mission, and I'm not gonna look back constantly. So what he doesn't do with his men or himself is keep saying, how did this happen? This is terrible. Let's do a court and a tribunal to uncover why this thing didn't work and why we got stuck. He doesn't do any of that. And that's so important for leaders in a transforming organization or a very volatile time. Howard Schultz came to my HBS classroom, he was then CEO of Starbucks, to talk about the company's transformation. His own kind of, you know, really difficult moment when the company was about to go under in 2007 and 2008, and someone asked him about what he did with the mistakes that he made and what they were. And he said, that's a great question. I tried to learn quickly from them, but I couldn't allow myself the luxury of looking backward for very long or very often. We had too much work to do. I had to face forward. So that's a really important lesson as well, I think, for lots of high achieving, highly controlling, highly successful people.

But what about owning them? I mean, I think we demand that our leaders own their Mistakes, you know, with Shackleton, he disregarded advice. Yeah. Like maybe he shouldn't go so far south because of the ice floes. So I guess, you know, like today we would say, well, you have to own it. You have to. I'm not sure he did that. It seems like more.

He didn't own it publicly. There was no, you know, it's my fault or I take responsibility. There was no, you know, Johnson and Johnson kind of moment. Right. With Jim Burke, the CEO, and Tom. Right. This is our problem. We own it. We'll make it right. And yet he owned it completely. I can't help but think that some of the resilience and the determination and the extraordinary improvisation of this story, which just gets more and more and more and more difficult for almost two years, some of that that he harnessed or accessed and honed in himself was partly about the guilt that he felt that under my watch, with my decision making, we got into this place. I think that was part of this story, too. I think Howard Schultz would tell you that was part of his motivation for using all his powers. And he worked incredibly hard to save Starbucks because he felt responsible. So that piece, he did own it. He didn't own it publicly, but he didn't have the luxury because he had to keep the men's faith in him. And a public admission, a public confession at that moment in the naval hierarchy of early 20th century British seamen and scientists would not have worked better.

Just hand out some warm milk.

Hand out warm milk and show the men that you are on it.

I guess what's remarkable is that the group didn't turn on him. It's hard to imagine, I don't know, a parallel situation. A company, let's say, that isn't succeeding, that isn't producing for month after month after month and just trying to survive. And at some point, people saying, this isn't working. Let's try plan B.

They do. And there's one moment, one real moment, when mutiny becomes a possibility and Shackleton quells it. One of the important things he does is say, in violation of maritime law, to the troublemaker or the person who wants to mutiny, he says, look, I know the ship went down, and by maritime law, you're not allowed to be paid. I don't have to pay you from the moment the ship goes down. He says, I'm gonna pay you out of my own pocket. You'll get paid till we pull into the, you know, into London on the Thames. And so that quells a lot. That does a lot to you know, appease the doubting Thomases because it says something about what he cares for and what he's willing to do for his men. But in any event, here's the secret sauce on the mutiny. Years after this expedition, the BBC went back in the early 30s and interviewed the radio, interviewed all the survivors and they asked them, how did you do this? And all of them, all the men, 201 said the boss, which was their nickname for Shackleton, made us believe that we could each do it. So there was something incredibly sustaining about that definition of leaders, you know, from David Foster Wallace, that leaders help us do things that we could better, more important things, harder, better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own that Shackleton tapped into with each of those men that 20 years after this happened, they would say his faith in me made me believe I could do it. And that was the most important thing.

And what do we know about how he did that? I mean, part of it was his own posture and countenance. But how did he connect with people that they believed that about themselves?

Well, a combination I think of again, frequent, if you what today we call town hall meetings with the group that he talked to them as a group every other day or so about what was happening, what he thought was happening, weather, navigate, longitude, latitude, partly as important through this individual one on one stuff. Now he had 27 men, so it was a lot easier to do than if you're in a company of hundreds or thousands of people. But he made a point with each person on a regular basis to connect with them in a very intimate way. Sometimes he talked about poetry, sometimes we talked about stamp collecting, sometimes we just talked about the seal meat that cook just made. But that combination of we can do this, I got your back and oh, right, Chris or oh, Randolph or Velidz, we've got it. So that was incredibly important, the personal and the large scale leadership that he evidenced over and over again. And as you just said, he's showing up, they believe, he believes and that was incredibly important.

That to me is one of the biggest takeaways for any time, that there are plenty of people who rise to the top, get the top job and then they're not present, they can't sustain it. And really that's a great contrast that Shackleton was present, he was a leader every single day, whether it was giving orders or more kind of soft power things. But just being present, you don't walk into the office and sit at your computer and shut your door. Shut your door.

Absolutely. And I think the personal piece is important as well. It was personal. I think all great leaders have a big element of what they do that's very personal to them. It's part of who they are and it's part of their identity and that's part of what fuels them.

The rest of the story is like something out of an adventure movie. Shackleton and his crew drift on the ice for almost two years. Finally, they spot an island in the distance. They fly three lifeboats that they had taken off the ship before it sank. So they decide to set off and try to sail to that island.

And it is a hellacious journey. The seas are really rough. The boats risk getting lost from each other, so they have to anchor them together. The men get terrible diarrhea. Shackleton worries by the end of the third day that some of his men are going to die en route.

But they make it to Elephant Island. They're on dry land again, but they're not going to be rescued there. Way too remote. So Shackleton decides to make an even more dangerous journey by boat to head back to the whaling station where they had warned Shackleton about the ice being too thick. This is South Georgia island. It is 800 miles away. So Shackleton and five men head out in a lifeboat that they have sort of converted into a sailboat. Everybody else stays behind the on. On Elephant Island.

And this is as dreadful as the open boat journey was to get to Elephant Island. This is worse. They're going to try and traverse these incredibly difficult seas, seas that even the most experienced mariner would tell you are almost impossible to sail through. At one point, close to the end of the journey, a huge storm erupts in that part of the South Atlantic. It's such a big storm that it sinks a ship with over 500 people on it in nearby waters, although the expedition doesn't know that. So they're going to face these huge weather obstacles. Everything seems stacked against their success. But somehow they make it to South Georgia island, the other side of the island from the whaling station. And because the boat is damaged, they can't sail around. They have to to dock there.

So they make it. And I mean, these guys never get to do the victory dance. They have to walk across the entire island. It's unchartered territory, mountains, rough terrain. But they do finally get to the whaling station. But even now, it's not exactly story over.

No, it's not. Shackleton now has to get a ship capable of getting back across those 800 miles of difficult ocean to pick up the 22 remaining men on Elephant Island. He gets a boat pretty quickly after they arrive at South Georgia. But the boat goes only a certain distance before again those terrible icebergs threaten to grab it and lock it in the ice, so he has to turn back. That happens not once, not twice, but thrice in the coming months. So May becomes June, June becomes July, July becomes August, and Shackleton still doesn't have a boat. He is worried. He is going gray. He is starting to drink. On August 31, 1916, in a Chilean tugboat, he finally makes it. And the men who see the ship on the island come pouring out of this little overturned lifeboat in which they were having lunch. That was what they were living in. And he starts counting them as they run to the shore. And he sees that all 22 are alive. And the man with him, Tom Crean, one of the crew members who'd stayed with him, said the years just fell off his face and he looked so incredibly happy.

So they all make it.

They all make it. They all make it home, where they are met by a world completely different than the one they left. You know, millions have been killed because the war is still going on. It's 1916. Tragically, two of the men on the expedition die within months of getting home on the battlefields of Europe. And the war ends. And Shackleton is heavily in debt from the expedition. And he travels to America and gets on the speaking circuit where he has some acclaim and interest by virtue of the story, and then comes back to England and starts hatching plans to go again. I mean, of all the interesting pieces of the story, this part is just as interesting. I think we'll go again. You know, it was such a great experience.

It was so fun.

This last time we had such a success. It was so enjoyable. Let's go again. And beginning in 1920, he puts the call out to his old crew. And they're scattered, they're in four corners. Some of them are in Asia and whatnot. One's in Russia. And he puts the call out and says, you know, my lads, let's go again. And amazingly, about 12 come right back to London to join the Boss. I mean, talk about the power of leadership in individual lives. Like, the boss calls, we're there.

Amazing. So at what point then does. So you said Shackleton wrote a book and there was some. But at a certain point, his story really becomes a big deal, that people realize that this was an expedition that failed miserably and yet is one of the greatest examples of leadership that we know, and how does that happen?

So beginning in the 1980s, there's this kind of groundswell of interest, not just in England, but around the world in Shackleton. There are Shackleton societies, there are Shackleton conventions, there have been a spate of movies, documentaries, books, cases. I mean, this is by far and away the most. I'm a historian. People don't buy Harvard Business School cases to study history. But of all the cases I've ever written in, long time at the school, this is the most popular. He is incredibly interesting to people today and I think a lot of it has to do with who he became in a very turbulent situation, the way he made himself better in very dire circumstances, and how that self making, right, great leaders are made, not born, how that self making affected all these other people. Those are tremendously important issues today. And he, in the stark white surroundings of that story in Antarctica, teaches us with great clarity their importance and how they can be used, accessed.

I don't want to blow by that. Great leaders are made, not born. And I know you believe that. And I know you.

I don't believe it. I know it because I've been studying it for 25 years.

On our next episode of Real Leaders, Nancy Kane and I will be talking about the writer and environmentalist Rachel Carson.

Many of us know her as someone who really helped create the modern environmental movement by writing an incredibly important book that was published in the early 60s called Silent Spring. But something that's less well known is that she was a complete introvert. She preferred walking along Maine coastlines to the corridors of power in Washington. And yet her influence, her impact, are as great as those of some of our greatest and most influential presidents.

This episode was produced by Anne Sani and edited by Kurt Nickish. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart and Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. I'm Adi Ignatius, editor in Chief of Harvard Business Review. Thanks for listening to Real Leaders, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast.