The Accidental Captain
In praise of the understudy
In early 2022, the English golfer Lee Westwood was favored to become the next European Ryder Cup captain. The Ryder Cup, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a biennial contest between Europe and the United States. Each side appoints a non-playing captain to choose the team, decide who plays with whom, and somehow persuade a dozen golfers—accustomed to competing only for themselves—to function as one.
But Westwood ruled himself out of consideration for the captaincy, because he wanted a shot at making the team as a player. As a result, that March the Europeans announced that their captain would be the Swede Henrik Stenson—who was described by European Ryder Cup director Guy Kinnings as someone with “all the qualities to be a great captain.”
Except that a few months later Stenson announced he was joining the breakaway LIV Golf tour, and was promptly stripped of the Ryder Cup captaincy.
Instead, in August 2022, Luke Donald was named Stenson’s replacement. Donald had enjoyed a successful playing career, spending 56 weeks as the top-ranked golfer in the world in the 2010s and winning 17 times on tour. He was considered “a calm, unflappable figure.” But he had been neither a frontrunner for the role nor the first pick. He was, in many ways, an accidental captain.
And the fact that he went on to become arguably the most successful Ryder Cup captain of all time suggests something awkward about leadership: we may be worse than chance at choosing the people best suited to do it.
The phenomenon of the highly successful accidental leader is more common than we might imagine. Harry Truman, the thirty-third President of the United States, was little more than an afterthought during the last Roosevelt administration—on the day Roosevelt died and he became president, it became clear that no one had thought to inform him about the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb, for example. He went on to narrowly win election in his own right, oversaw the end of the Second World War and the creation of the international post-war order, and is now generally ranked among the more successful presidents in American history.
Kathy Hochul became governor of New York only after a harassment scandal felled Andrew Cuomo. She was not the obvious center of political gravity in the state, but went on to win election in her own right and now looks likely to do so again.
Michael Carrick, the current manager of Manchester United football club, was brought in as an interim manager when Ruben Amorim was fired, in part for failing to secure a place in European competition for the club next season. Carrick has quietly turned the club around, with the result that United are back in Europe and many are calling for his appointment to be made permanent.
And Donald himself, having been appointed captain of the Ryder Cup team, won in Rome, was reappointed captain by unanimous consent, and went on to become only the second European captain ever to win two contests—home and away—in a row. When he captains the side for the third time in 2027, he will be the first person on either side to do so since Bernard Gallacher in 1995.
There are countless more examples—it’s not hard for any of us to think of someone who found themselves in a leadership role unexpectedly and went on to excel. And it’s even easier to think of people who were initially lauded as leadership superstars only to fall flat on their faces.
This happens too often to dismiss as coincidence. Something in the machinery by which we choose leaders is miscalibrated.
In last week’s post, we looked at personality assessments and the peculiar faith organizations place in them despite the difficulty of using them, in practice, to make better decisions. Their popularity suggests that we are searching for a more rigorous way to choose leaders. It also suggests something more awkward: that we are not especially confident we know how to do it already.
In part this is because we struggle to agree what leadership actually looks like, and so resort to proxies. We are drawn to certainty, to eloquence, to ambition, to “executive presence,” even to height. We want our leaders to look the part, and so those who do not—only eleven presidents have been shorter than Truman; Hochul is the first woman to serve as governor of New York—are devalued. We want our leaders to inspire confidence in us and so we tend to choose those who do, even though inspiring confidence and leading are not always the same thing. And we tend to overweight the person of the leader, and underweight the complex dance between person and context. Only when he arrived at United did Carrick’s knack for calmness in a pressure cooker environment become a meaningful competitive advantage.
And then there is the question of motive. It’s hard to climb the greasy pole. As an inevitable result, those who ascend to the top of it tend to have wanted to get there really badly. They value the attainment of the job—status, control, visibility—more than the doing of it.
The accidental captains quietly subvert all this. They don’t tend to campaign for the top job; they arrive there by contingency. They are not selected on the basis of our familiar lists of leadership traits, because the circumstances of their elevation are hurried and the usual filters fail to engage. And because very often they come from the inside, or have prior experience in the organization, they know very well the context in which they are being asked to lead. They have been watching it, quietly, for a long time.
They are the ultimate uninspiring formula: the safe pair of hands.
But every so often, when the leadership machinery breaks and someone accidental slips through, we are reminded what leadership actually looks like. That a good way to lead is to be other-centered. That the people best suited to lead do not always rise to the top, precisely because they are less interested in rising.
And that a safe pair of hands is not merely the recipe for stability. More often than we care to admit, it is the recipe for success.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership, performance, and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.