Robert Baratheon – A Doctor Of Many Things

One of the problems with teaching organisation studies, is that people assume that the principles apply only to modern organisations. Businesses, and maybe to a lesser extent other organisations like charities, NGOs, public sector institutions, and so forth. While it’s true that organisation studies were developed with those in mind, that doesn’t mean you can’t see similar principles in action elsewhere.

Take the case of pathways to leadership. All organisations have them, whether they’re a Fortune 500 company, a grassroots campaign to save a local monument… or a medieval-ish fantasy kingdom embroiled in intermittent bloody civil wars.

The conventional criteria for becoming a leader in Westeros are generally pretty simple. You have to be the oldest surviving legitimate (and able-bodied) male offspring of the current leader. There are variations: in Dorne, for instance, gender isn’t a criterion for leadership (though legitimacy and survival certainly are), and the case of Jorah Mormont shows that you can be formally barred from leadership despite meeting all those criteria.

Hence our case study of Robb Stark, who, after the death of Ned, is, as his oldest son, unproblematically accepted as Warden of the North.

A less explicit criterion, though, is that the man in question also has to be fertile, and, ideally, has to demonstrate this with actual (or potential) offspring. While we’ll be exploring the complicated issue of gender and leadership later, this is why eunuchs, while they can be socially “male” in other ways, are unequivocably barred from formal leadership pathways. More than that, though, the offspring also have to be, ideally, from the right woman. Namely, your wife. We’ll call this the “sexuality rule”.

The driving force behind the entire plot of Game of Thrones, however, is that this pathway is so rigid that exceptions to the rule, however minor or justified, are always problematic. There’s a clear rule that, in the absence of legitimate male offspring, succession passes to female offspring, but the leadership of every single female leader has been problematic and challenged (it’s worth noting that, in “The Last of the Starks”, Bran is seriously suggested as a more legitimate ruler for Winterfell than Sansa, despite being disabled, not wanting the post, and having shown literally no leadership skills at all at any point in the series). More to the point, while everyone seems to accept that it was necessary to murder the Mad King and that Robert Baratheon was the most acceptable candidate to serve as a replacement, his leadership is, as discussed before, weak and problematic; the fact that, despite appearances, he has no legitimate offspring, is as much a metaphor for the problems with him as a monarch as it is a reason for the rest of the country to plunge into chaos on his death.

Which then brings us to Robert’s siblings. Under circumstances in which Robert had come to the throne via the usual pathway, then his brothers would be logical candidates for succession in the absence of legitimate male offspring. The problem is, Robert didn’t. So neither Stannis nor Renly have as much of a legitimate claim to the throne as they would under normal circumstances. Hence the fact that both brothers are contesting the throne, rather than it passing relatively unproblematically to the eldest.

Renly is further problematised under the unspoken sexuality rule. Which is half of the reason why his wife Margaery urges him to get her pregnant as soon as possible. Significantly for our topic here, the other reason is that one of the ways in which women can legitimately govern is as regents for under-age male offspring (hence Cersei’s path to leadership), but again, we’ll be discussing that later. For this post, it’s worth noting that this is why I’m calling this a sexuality rule, rather than a fertility rule– Renly may well be fertile, but his homosexuality means he’s reluctant to produce legitimate (or indeed any) offspring, in much the same way that the problem with his brother Robert’s offspring isn’t biological, but down to the animosity between him and his wife.

Furthermore, the fact that Robert’s succeeding to the throne through murdering the incumbent was accepted as legitimate, throws open the door for conquest becoming another legitimate path to the throne. Hence the fact that Robb himself also contests the leadership of the Seven Kingdoms.

And the sexuality rule also, ultimately, calls into question Robb Stark’s own seemingly unproblematic claim to leadership. Because although he does have legitimate offspring (or at least potential offspring), he’s actually married the wrong woman.

The point of Robb’s insistence on marrying for love, and consequently breaking his agreement with the Freys, is that, in one fatal way, he’s unsuited for leadership. As his mother Catelyn– herself married off to cement a political alliance– knows, part of being a leader in Westeros means sublimating your personal relationships (and, as Renly also fails to observe, sexuality) to the system of marital alliances which dominates the country. So, as with the war of succession following Robert’s demise, Robb’s fate during the Red Wedding stems from his failure to follow the rules of the leadership pipeline as much as from Walder Frey’s desire for revenge.

The lesson for Westeros watchers? There’s been a lot written about Westeros being focused on the control of female sexuality, but it’s worth noting that male sexuality, is also subject to strict, if tacit, controls.

The lesson for non-Westerosi organisations? Don’t be too rigid when developing your leadership pathways, and ensure that at least some of the less traditional ones are recognised and accepted as legitimate.

Next episode: alternative pathways to leadership, with the Bastard of Bolton.

Behavioural theories of leadership: Robert Baratheon

With the new series of Game of Thrones in the offing, it’s time to start doing Leadership lessons from Westeros again…

After reading the title of this installment, you are probably thinking “Wait, Robert Baratheon was no kind of leader!” Bear with me, though, that’s the point. However, I’m going to be taking a little while to get to it. First we’ve got to delve back into organisation studies.

The leadership theories we’ve been covering over the past three sessions are all what we call “behavioural theories of leadership”. What they have in common is that they generally assume that a) there are leaders (as opposed to followers); b) leaders can be identified and classified into types; c) those types can be defined by certain ways of behaving.

Because management studies is supposed to be about helping people to run their organisations better (through SCIENCE!), however, we then go a couple of steps further. The first is that you should be able to identify leaders through their personal traits, even at a fairly early stage, and get them on the path to running things.

We can see this in action in Game of Thrones when Jeor Mormont identifies Jon Snow as a potential leadership candidate early on in his time with the Night’s Watch, and clearly puts him into what people like me refer to as the “leadership pipeline” (of which, more later).

The second step is that, just as one can learn new ways of behaving through cognitive behavioural therapy and similar, one can turn oneself into a leader through learning what these traits are and copying them.

To switch franchises for a moment: there’s a scene in Star Trek: Discovery where the ships’ first officer, Saru, winds up as acting captain of the ship. Being, at this point in the narrative, more of the passive-aggressive than the take-charge sort, he goes into the ready room, shuts the door, and asks the computer for a list of the most successful captains in Starfleet. He then asks the computer to cross-correlate their personality traits and come up with the ideal way to be a leader.

However, there are a few problems with the basic premise, and the two corollaries. For one thing, it’s a problematic thing to split the world into Leaders and Followers. In the cases we’ve looked at so far, there have been situations where the characters have led… and where they’ve followed. Tyrion has never held a top-level leadership position, except temporarily and by accident. Daenarys spends most of the first book (and/or season) literally leading no one, even by virtue of charisma.

Which brings us to another problem. Inasmuch as leadership qualities exist, they can also be overlooked, just because the person possessing them has the wrong set of gonads, or is the wrong height. Jon, as Mormont himself notes, might not have stood out as a potential leader quite so quickly if he hadn’t had the benefits of being brought up at Winterfell among the Starks and learning alongside his ostensible half-brothers. This is to say nothing of cases like Bran and Theon, where potential leaders wind up out of the pipeline (and, in both cases, back in, just in a different sector) through reasons completely unrelated to their leadership qualities or not. So: you can’t just consider behaviour, without considering other social factors.

The second… well, here’s where Robert Baratheon comes back in.

Robert is, in many ways, doing everything right as far as being King of Westeros is concerned. He’s the right gender, and the right age. He came to the throne by what are, if not necessarily desirable, at least acceptable means of succession in Westerosi terms. He’s not hugely smart, but he does have a sense of his own limitations and is good at recruiting a team which compensates for them.

And he can be a good leader in the right conditions. There’s a reason why he spends most of the first season drinking with his old war buddy Ned, and reminiscing about the campaign (beyond the fact that the writers need some way of conveying the backstory to the series in a not-too-boring fashion): He was a good leader in wartime. He’s still got those same traits, too. But he’s just not the sort of guy who can lead a country in peacetime. For instance: it’s perfectly true that if he had succeeded in getting Daenarys assassinated early on, it would have saved everyone a lot of fuss and bother later. But it’s also true that assassinating teenage girls who don’t even live on your continent, in peacetime, is the sort of thing that tends to get the Hand of the King remonstrating with you in public, creating political splits that the more ruthless members of your administration can exploit the hell out of.

And, in the end, of course, he turns out to have rather less in the way of political savvy than his own wife.

So, the case of Robert Baratheon (and indeed the case of Saru, over in the other franchise) shows that, while the three types of leaders we’ve been talking about are a good place to start from, there are dangers in leaning on that particular theory too far.

Next time, we’ll be looking at contingency-based theories of leadership, taking the High Sparrow as our case study.