Leaders: don’t push your luck!

Asked why he believed he had been so successful in his life, US author, academic and serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway attributed his many achievements to a surprising factor. “A lot of my success,” he said on Bartlett’s podcast, The Diary of a CEO, “is not my fault.” Instead, he put it down to being born a “white, heterosexual male” in California in the 1960s, which he described as akin to winning the lottery. In other words, he attributed his success to luck.

Galloway’s words possibly stem from a sense of humility and a desire to downplay his achievements. But is this response helpful? Does it satisfy the curiosity of listeners eager to understand the capabilities he has nurtured or the decisions he has taken to attain success?

These are some of the questions addressed by ongoing research by London Business School PhD researcher Özlem Tetik, Assistant Professor of Marketing Dafna Goor and Associate Professor of Marketing Jonathan Berman.

This paper is in collaboration with Nicole Kim from PolyU in Hong Kong.

The relationship between success and status

“We are social and hierarchical beings, and success is something inherently interesting to us,” says Özlem. “We equate success with value. It confers higher status on those that have it and demands respect from those that don’t.”

She and her co-authors were keen to understand how high achievers broach the topic of their own success and whether they talk about it differently in public and in private. They were also curious about what other, less successful people want to hear.

It turns out that most successful people attribute their achievements to luck, at least in public. They typically overemphasise external factors, such as being in the right place at the right time, and minimise the role of talent, skills and hard work. And they likely do so to signal their humility and that they are grateful for the success they have enjoyed. The problem is this is not what others want to hear.

Dafna explains: “We find that highly accomplished individuals, despite their many achievements, struggle to fully own their success, especially in public. Instead, they often attribute it to luck. But here’s the thing: other people don’t want to believe that success is purely a matter of luck.”

Search for secret sauce

People seek insights that will inspire them or help them grow in some way. Telling them that a high-octane career is the product of contingency is essentially unhelpful. And, as a strategy to engage with others or signal equality, it backfires because it fails to deliver the information they want. Dafna says, “People want to know what blueprints or secret sauce you used to get to where you are.” It turns out that when someone like Scott Galloway tells you that they got lucky, it can undermine the value of success.”

The researchers’ findings were culled from a detailed analysis of interview material from popular podcast ‘How I Built This’ and five controlled lab and online experiments.

‘How I Built This’ features interviews with well-known entrepreneurs and industry leaders; purporting to share their “moments of doubt and failure” and insights into their eventual success. The team parsed 108 hour-long interviews in total, coding responses where interviewees put their success down to hard work or luck.

Separately, the experiments randomly organised respondents into “highly successful” and “less successful” individuals. In each study different groups were invited to respond to hypothetical situations where successful individuals talked about their achievements: a private conversation with friends; a commencement speech at an MBA graduation ceremony; and a chat with a more or less fortunate neighbour (someone with a bigger or smaller house or car).

The researchers found clear and consistent behavioural patterns. “When reflecting in private, people are inclined to link hard work to their achievement, but this effect vanishes when they’re speaking publicly. When participants were asked to reflect on success in a private context, just 9% put their accomplishments mainly down to luck,” Jonathan reveals.

This changes dramatically in a public setting or in dialogue with someone they don’t know, increasing to around 60%. With the podcast interviews, the outcomes were around 50:50 – “many interviewees said that they just got lucky.”

But such revelations do not go down well with listeners. According to the experimental studies, over 60% of people did not want to hear a success story that was the product of luck. Özlem says, “What we see is that hearing luck attribution demotivates them and it hurts the relationship. They perceive their interlocutor as arrogant or disingenuous, even if that is not their intention.”

What’s going on?

In psychology, attribution theory and self-serving bias suggest that human beings typically associate positive outcomes with innate qualities, effort or abilities. Simply put, most of us want credit for the things we achieve.

Indeed, successful people privately acknowledged their success is due to hard work, but – as this research finds – when speaking to public audiences or addressing unknown interlocutors, more often than not their behaviour contradicts such theoretical predictions.

Dafna says this shift may be driven a growing trend toward inclusivity: “There’s a rising demand for fairer distribution of opportunities. Our findings align with the idea that our society increasingly values inclusion as much as it values success. Leaders, in particular, seem mindful of signalling equality and gratitude as part of a broader commitment to inclusivity. Successful individuals aim to be relatable and uphold a moral identity that emphasises care for others – and essential aspect of belonging in a society that prizes these values.”

However, leaders might benefit from understanding that people want to be inspired and care more about their own potential success, and modify the way they communicate accordingly.

“Our studies also looked at instances where leaders define luck in a more agentic way, where they talk about making their own luck, and the benefits of working hard and being lucky,” says Özlem. “This perspective not only serves to inspire others by positioning leaders as role models but also preserves an element of mystery, reinforcing power and status. It allows leaders to be both humble and inspirational at the same time.”

Ultimately, she and her co-authors say, leaders need to be both. Or, as Scott Galloway aptly puts it: “To be great at anything, you don’t only need talent, you don’t only need luck, you just need a tremendous amount of grit and a tremendous commitment.”