Article

"Four Lights": Leadership Lessons from Captain Picard

Some actors play leaders. A few of them actually teach us how to lead, and this week we lost one.

Sir Patrick Stewart died Wednesday, October 28, at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. According to his family’s statement, reported by the Associated Press and the BBC, he died after “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, in the care of his wife, Sunny.

Most people will remember him as Professor X. For me, he will always be Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation for years, and if I’m honest, I was learning about command long before I ever had any.

Picard wasn’t the loudest captain. He didn’t win by throwing punches. He listened. He thought. And when it mattered, he said the hard thing, calmly and out loud. Here are four lessons from that bridge.

You can do everything right and still lose

In “Peak Performance,” Data loses a strategy game to a visiting grand master. He can’t find a single thing wrong with himself, and that scares him. So he takes himself off the bridge, afraid he’ll give his captain bad advice.

Picard goes to his quarters. He doesn’t lecture him. He sends him back to his post: “Commander, I require your presence on the Bridge.” Then he tells him, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”

Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. The call where the officer did everything by the book, and somebody still didn’t go home. We owe that call an honest review. That’s accountability. But sometimes the review doesn’t find a mistake. And then the hardest part of the job is sitting down with that officer and saying, “I still need you at your post.”

Integrity under pressure, and honesty about your limits

In “Chain of Command, Part 2,” Picard is captured and tortured by a Cardassian interrogator who puts four lights in front of him and insists there are five. Picard won’t say it. As he’s finally led out of the room, he turns and shouts, “There are four lights!”

The part that stays with me comes after. Back on the ship, he tells Counselor Troi he was going to give in. “I would have told him anything.” And then: “I believed that I could see five lights.”

Somebody in your career will try to make you say there are five lights. Integrity is refusing to say what isn’t true. Real strength is being honest afterward about how close you came to breaking, because the people coming up behind you need to know they’re not weak when they feel it too.

Take counsel, then own the call

In “The Best of Both Worlds,” the Borg are coming. Lieutenant Commander Shelby arrives from Starfleet Tactical with an aggressive plan that Riker, Picard’s first officer, thinks is too risky. She goes around Riker and takes it straight to the captain.

Picard listens to both of them, and then he decides: “I entirely agree with you, Number One. It’s not the time.” But he doesn’t throw her idea away. He tells Riker to keep it as a fallback. “Make the necessary preparations.”

You back your people. You make room for the person who disagrees. You actually listen. And then you make the call and you own it. Nobody gets to hide behind the committee, including the chief.

Your scars made you who you are

In “Tapestry,” Picard is dying, and Q gives him a chance to undo the fight from his youth that cost him his heart. He takes it, and wakes up a lieutenant junior grade, an assistant astrophysics officer carrying reports for other people. Q tells him that version of Picard “learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.”

Picard asks to go back. “I would rather die as the man I was than live the life I just saw.” Later he tells Riker that when he pulled on one of those loose threads, “it unraveled the tapestry of my life.”

Every leader I respect has a few threads they’re not proud of. I have mine. Don’t hide them from your people. Those threads are part of why you can lead them.

The part that wasn’t a script

Patrick Stewart spoke openly about growing up in a home where his father was violent toward his mother. He remembered the doctors and ambulance men who came to that house telling his mother she must have done something to provoke it.

As an adult, he worked for Refuge, a domestic violence charity, and for Combat Stress, a veterans’ mental health charity, after learning his father came home from the Second World War with shell shock that was never treated. In his words, he did it “for my mother” and “for my father.”

Every one of us has stood in a kitchen on a call like that and looked at the kid in the doorway. Patrick Stewart was that kid. And he grew up to spend his voice protecting others.

Rank is earned. Leadership is demonstrated.

Picard had four pips on his collar. That’s not why his crew followed him. They followed him because he stood by them when they lost, he held the line when it hurt, he listened before he decided, and he never pretended he didn’t have scars.

So here’s the question I’m asking myself: which of those four is hardest for me right now, and what will I do about it on my next shift?

Thank you, Sir Patrick.

Sources: AP, BBC, NPR, Refuge, Combat Stress, The Guardian (2009). Episode dialogue from Star Trek: The Next Generation, via transcripts at chakoteya.net. Star Trek is a trademark of CBS Studios; this tribute is not affiliated with or endorsed by Paramount or CBS.

Art: original illustration (four lights and starfield) by Rank Doesn’t Lead; no Star Trek imagery used.