What Can Leaders Learn From Actors?
“All the world is a stage and we are merely players.” — William Shakespeare
Last Friday, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, became “emotional” during an online interaction with healthcare workers struggling with the country’s COVID-19 crisis. But despite Modi’s emotional moment, he failed to convince his fellow citizens, who for the most part just saw “crocodile tears.” This is the third time this year that Modi tries to cry in public.
Displays of emotions such as this one have become more and more common among leaders in politics and business around the world. They have become a fundamental quality of inspirational leadership. Expressing sincere vulnerability allows leaders to communicate their humanity and accessibility.
Such communication is also at the heart of acting. The best actors inhabit their roles to the point where the boundaries between character and reality seem to blur and they are no longer “faking it.”
So what can leaders learn from actors?
Warren Bennis, considered the father of leadership studies, thought about this question more than anyone. Bennis’ thinking focused on the premise that leadership is not an innate quality, but rather a set of skills that could be developed. For him, the real role of the leader was “to inspire and motivate.”
One of Bennis’s ideas which has been largely overlooked in leadership studies is the connection he established between leadership and acting. Bennis argued that leaders, like actors, have to perform a role in order to inspire others. They have to engage followers by creating shared meaning. “Hitler is a ghastly example of this ability, and a reminder of the under-appreciated role that rhetoric and performance play in leadership,” Bennis once noted.
For Bennis, as for many other leadership thinkers, inspiration is at the core of the leadership process. The inspirational element is what makes leadership and acting quite similar. The actor inspires an audience in the same way the leader inspires followers. According to Bennis, “like great actors, great leaders create and sell an alternative vision of the world, a better one in which we are an essential part.”
Mastering the paradox of acting
The paradox of acting is that actors portray fictional characters, but must find the truth of their characters within themselves. It is not about faking being someone, but rather about being someone truthfully. Actors draw on their own lives to produce authentic performances, finding characteristics and experiences in themselves that can be related to the realities of their characters.
Leaders, like actors, must strive to find themselves truthfully in their leadership roles. Self-awareness and authenticity become critical in the leadership process. Leaders must look for values and beliefs in their own lives that correspond to the leadership situation in which they find themselves. They should make their values and beliefs explicit in order to share them with their followers. The authenticity related to sharing their own values and beliefs will inspire their followers the same way actors’ authentic performances inspire audiences.
Acting training generally consists of developing internal and external elements. Actors spend hours working on their own memories, senses and emotions to be able to produce authentic performances. They train their bodies and work on their breathing, movements, voice and speech to improve their stage presence. This combination of internal and external elements, of authenticity and presence, makes their performances inspirational.
Like actors, leaders must learn how to strike the right balance between presence and authenticity. Leadership development, like acting training, should focus on developing both internal and external qualities that will allow leaders to inspire and motivate followers. The benefits of acting training in leadership development are based on the premise that acting and leadership can be seen as two sides of the same coin. As Bennis once noted: “They are unavoidably yoked together, these two, by a common social purpose: the creation of mutuality, of transforming feeling into shared meaning.”
