Crisis Leadership Lessons from Polar Explorer Ernest Shackleton

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In early 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship became trapped in ice, north of Antarctica. For almost two years, he and his crew braved those frozen expanses until Shackleton led them to safety in December 1916. Not a single life was lost, and Shackleton’s leadership has become one of the most famous case studies of all time.

In this episode, Harvard Business School professor and historian Nancy Koehn analyzes Shackleton’s leadership during those two fateful  years that he and his men struggled to survive.

You’ll learn how to assemble a team capable of weathering  a crisis, the lessons that Shackleton learned from bad leaders in his early career, and the important role empathy played in his own, leadership. 

This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in March 2020. Here it is.

ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to the HBR 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.

NANCY KOEHN: 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: Legend has it that that’s the job and 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 Koehn. 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.

NANCY KOEHN: Thank you, Adi. It’s a pleasure to be here.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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 its 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?

NANCY KOEHN: 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, Shackleton’s first expedition to Antarctica takes place in 1902. So, Nancy, what happened in that?

NANCY KOEHN: 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: OK. So, this fails, but Shackleton wants more. He goes back.

NANCY KOEHN: 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: OK. So, here’s lesson number one. What do you do when you have a bad boss? I mean, to what extent does he learn lessons from an initial foray gone badly?

NANCY KOEHN: Extremely important lessons. One, make your decisions and stick with them. That’s something Scott has a lot of trouble with. And 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 going to be very good about that. I’m never going to be in charge of an expedition that runs short on food supplies. Again, almost in intentional opposition to Scott. 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: So Shackleton leads his own expedition to the South Pole in 1907. That fails to reach the South Pole. So, 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 instructive.

NANCY KOEHN: That is exactly, 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 how, what has that attitude affect your ability to deal with these very high-risk situations? 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?

ADI IGNATIUS: So, was he hiring people who pleased him, or do you think he really was thinking at that high level about these attributes?

NANCY KOEHN: 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’s knows it, 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 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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?

NANCY KOEHN: Absolutely. That’s exactly what he’s doing. That’s a very good way of characterizing it. You can also ask them, you know, when you hire people about what was their most confusing? What was their most, what was their 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, by now Shackleton has his team for the Endurance mission assembled. Now what happens first?

NANCY KOEHN: 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 or if they need the ship and the men for military service, and Churchill says, “Proceed.”  And Shackleton hightails it out of 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 going to have trouble getting through the jigsaw puzzle ice going down there.”

ADI IGNATIUS: Remember we’re heading south.

NANCY KOEHN: 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. 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 through these, and there’s astounding pictures of this, 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 vice. 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 going to break free of the ice. They have to wait for it to melt, and if the ship survives being held in a vice that long, there’s very, if it survives they may get back to the coast, but he thinks increasingly as the days becomes 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: We’re talking months and months 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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, 10 months after they’re 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, your uncertainty increases, and there’s suddenly a new worst case scenario that people can keep on 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 supplies. So, what is so interesting about Shackleton in this moment is how he quickly pivots into I gotta 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: Coming up after the break we will learn exactly how Shackleton did that.

ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome back to Real Leaders, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Adi Ignatius with Nancy Koehn.

NANCY KOEHN: Hey there.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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?

NANCY KOEHN: 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 right with this anxiety?”  He never does that. He has someone, his first mate Frank Wild, 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 tells them its mental medicine, is what he called it. There was forced socialization, so no one was allowed to retreat their cabins when they were on the ship after dinner, on 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 it’s 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’s, 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, 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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 jig 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.

NANCY KOEHN: 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, order 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.

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

NANCY KOEHN: 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 this very high-stakes situation, when 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 going to 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 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: And is that goal, that mission selfless or selfish?

NANCY KOEHN: I think it’s got parts of both if you will. I mean he really cares about bringing them home alive. It 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 is a man who’s been thirsting for fame and glory 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 going to 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: It’s this incredible flexibility of realizing OK, the mission 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.

NANCY KOEHN: 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 going to look back on stalling. 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 and his own kind of 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.

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

NANCY KOEHN: He didn’t own it publicly. There was no, you know, it’s my fault, or I take responsibility. There was no Johnson & Johnson kind of moment with Jim Burke the CEO –

ADI IGNATIUS: The Tylenol moment.

NANCY KOEHN: 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 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 it 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 the 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 seaman and scientists would not have worked.

ADI IGNATIUS: Better to just hand out some warm milk.

NANCY KOEHN: Hand out warm milk and show the men that you are, you are on it.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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, it 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.”

ADI IGNATIUS: 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, the person who wants to mutiny, he says, “Look, I know the ship went down and my 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 going to pay you out of my own pocket. You’ll get paid when we pull in to the, you know, into London on the Thames.”  So that quells a lot. That does a lot to appease the doubting Thomas’s 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, two or one 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 from David Foster Wallace, that leaders help us do things. Better, more important things. Harder, better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own, that Shackleton tapped into which each of those men. That 20 years after this happened they would say, “he, his faith in me made me believe I could do it. And that was the most important thing.”

ADI IGNATIUS: And what do we know about how he did that? I mean part of it was his own posture and continence, but how did he connect with the people that they believed that about themselves?

NANCY KOEHN: A combination, I think of again, frequent 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 100s 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, Chris, or oh, Randolph, or [Thomas] Orde-Lees, we got it right.”  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.

ADI IGNATIUS: That to me is one of the biggest takeaways for anytime that, you know, there’re 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 —

NANCY KOEHN: Shut your door.

ADI IGNATIUS: Shut your door.

NANCY KOEHN: 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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 have three lifeboats that they’d taken off the ship before it sank. So, they decide to set off and try to sail to that island.

NANCY KOEHN: 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.

ADI IGNATIUS: 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 sailboat. Everybody else stays behind on Elephant Island.

NANCY KOEHN: 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 dock there.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, they make it. I mean these guys never get to do the victory dance. They have to walk across the entire island. It’s uncharted territory. Mountains, rough terrain, but they do finally get to the whaling station. But even now it’s not exactly story over.

NANCY KOEHN: 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 grey. He is starting to drink. On August 31st, 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 is what they were living in. And he starts counting them as the 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 stayed with him, said the years just fell off his face and he looked so incredibly happy.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, they all make it.

NANCY KOEHN: 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’s 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. 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 this last time.

ADI IGNATIUS: That was so fun.

NANCY KOEHN: 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 and individual lives. Like, the boss calls, we’re there.

ADI IGNATIUS: Amazing. So, what point then does, so you said Shackleton wrote a book and it was something. But at a certain point his story really becomes a big deal. That people realized 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?

NANCY KOEHN: So, beginning in the 1980s, there’s this kind of ground swell of interest, not just in England but around the world, in Shackleton. There’s 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 sell you history. But of all the cases I’ve ever written in a long time at the school, this is the most popular. He’s 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, you know, with great clarity their importance and how they can be used and accessed.

ADI IGNATIUS: I don’t want to blow by that. Great leaders are made, not born. And I know you believe that and I know you —

NANCY KOEHN: I don’t believe it. I know it because I’ve been studying it for 25 years.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn – in conversation with HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius on the HBR IdeaCast. Koehn is the author of the book, Forged in Crisis: The Making of Five Courageous Leaders.

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This episode was produced by Curt Nickisch, Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Nicole Smith, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.