The Five Roles of a Master Herder. Linda Kohanov
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compliance.
If these leaders inspired anything at all in their employees, it was the tendency to choose between two mediocre options — to take their talents elsewhere or to become more complacent, in some cases machine-like, “retiring in place” decades before receiving that coveted gold watch.
Pandemonium and Paralysis
When I began to teach emotional and social intelligence skills to a variety of entrepreneurs, corporations, and nonprofits in the early 2000s, I noticed that the gap between relationship-oriented and goal-oriented leadership styles widened in certain fields — which increased dysfunction. Social service, educational, and charitable agencies attracted plenty of considerate, openhearted employees, but these people didn’t necessarily know how to get along. Unresolved conflict festered behind facades of politeness. Undercurrents of increasing frustration were expressed through skeptical silences in meetings and toxic whispers in the hallways.
Staff members who considered “power” a dirty word engaged in passive-aggressive moves to gain influence. For example, when differences of opinion and working style emerged, some people in the “caring fields” used the subtle, damaging ploy of undermining a rival’s reputation by diagnosing him or her with any number of personality disorders, behind his or her back, usually while feigning concern for the person’s mental health. This “armchair psychologist” power play successfully gained the person using it some followers — while creating factions that worked at odds with one another as a result. Yet those who employed this increasingly popular technique rarely acknowledged the unproductive results for the organization as a whole, let alone the personal ambition behind this divisive behavior. Instead, they saw themselves as victims or as self-righteous protectors of colleagues who were victims.
Highly sensitive people and abuse survivors, who felt called to these fields for the best of reasons, amplified stress in other ways. These employees were more likely to exhibit hair-trigger responses to minor threats or simple disagreements, take creative debate far too personally, and hold grudges. Such tendencies undermined working relationships, most insidiously because conflict-averse people acted out anger and frustration in secretive yet increasingly virulent ways, making it impossible for supervisors to catch difficulties in their earliest, most manageable stages. Simply by giving one another the silent treatment, for instance, key staff members could make it difficult for colleagues unrelated to the conflict to get their jobs done. Over time, more factions would be created, with each side feeling disrespected or undermined by the others.
Untrained in how to set boundaries, communicate their needs effectively, handle disagreements, and motivate others through unemotional yet compassionate assertiveness, leaders and followers alike had trouble fulfilling their noble goals, and the energy of idealism was depleted by the daily realities of interpersonal unrest. This made it difficult to serve clients, as well as to experiment, debate, and adapt to shifting social and economic climates — no matter how admirable the organization’s mission might be.
Corporate and entrepreneurial settings, on the other hand, attracted more goal-oriented, technologically savvy people. These organizations faced a whole other set of challenges as people with great ideas and relentless ambition rose to influential positions without developing the emotional and social intelligence skills to lead effectively.
To make matters worse, brilliant minds were encouraged to ruthlessly compete with one another, most often through a combination of financial incentives and bell-curve firing practices, breeding mistrust, defensiveness, and the tendency to withhold important information from colleagues.
In the most extreme cases, a “kill or be killed” mentality focused on short-term profit at the cost of long-term company growth and sustainability. This led to all kinds of callous acts resulting from institutionalized predatory behavior. In one of the most famous examples — Enron — executives purposefully created a “survival of the fittest” culture, encouraging ravenous competition, not only with other companies, but within the corporation itself. Championed by Jeffrey Skilling, who served as president and chief executive officer, this philosophy promoted increasing aggression and, in some staff members, unethical business practices. As Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind observed in their book The Smartest Guys in the Room, traders and executives “who stayed and thrived were the ones who were most ruthless in cutting deals and looking out for themselves.” The strategy backfired for everyone involved. Enron’s subsequent downfall not only resulted in jail time for Skilling and other employees, but the company imploded at a significant cost to stockholders, employees, and society at large.
In politics, the gap between relationship-oriented and goal-oriented leadership styles evolved into a strange combination of pandemonium and paralysis as the twentieth century came to a close. To this day, social service concerns clash with competitive corporate ambitions on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, resulting in all the dysfunctions described above, acted out in a confusing free-for-all of unproductive behavior.
No wonder even the most well-meaning democratic governments can’t seem to get anything significant done: The challenges that every modern organization faces are magnified exponentially when an entire country gets involved.
Where Do We Go from Here?
In the last twenty years, a number of studies have explored “masculine” and “feminine” styles of leadership. From this perspective, command-and-control, task-oriented, winner-takes-all practices resulted from a long-standing preponderance of men in business and politics, a trend that ruled well into the twentieth century. Then, after women gained the right to vote and began to enter the workforce in increasing numbers, a revolutionary shift occurred. More collaborative, relationship-oriented, mutually supportive practices began to emerge as the daughters and granddaughters of the pioneering spirits of the women’s movement gained advanced degrees, excelled in professional fields, and were promoted to management positions.
Inc. magazine’s editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan divides the subsequent evolution of leadership into three rapidly shifting eras: the Age of Autocracy (ancient times into the 1980s), the Age of Empowerment (mid-1990s to the mid-2000s), and the Age of Nurture (mid-2000s to present). Buchanan describes this sequence in her June 2013 article “The De-Machoing of Great Leadership,” but all three styles continue to exist side by side, allowing us to compare them in real time.
Modeling himself on samurai principles, Oracle’s Larry Ellison is a modern poster child for the Age of Autocracy, “as he attacks competitors and pushes employees to the limit.” Buchanan also cites General Electric’s Jack Welch “for his propensity to get rid of employees while leaving buildings intact,” gaining him the uniquely disturbing nickname “Neutron Jack.”
To exemplify the Age of Empowerment, Buchanan cites Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s strategy to “rely on store-level employees making decisions based on knowledge of their regions.” She also looks at eBay’s Meg Whitman “whose business model is all about autonomy, which requires her to trust people while insisting on integrity.”
For the Age of Nurture, interestingly enough, Buchanan lauds the antics of three men: David Neeleman, who “dons an apron and serves snacks to JetBlue passengers”; Whole Foods’ John Mackey, who “contributes $100,000 annually to a fund for workers with personal struggles”; and Tony Hsieh, who “enshrines honesty, humility, and weirdness among Zappo’s core values.”
“Increasingly,” Buchanan asserts, “the chief executive role is taking its place among the caring professions. It takes a tender person to lead a tough company.”
And, I would argue, it takes a tough person to lead a caring organization. But not in the way we usually define “tough.” I’m not talking about a Larry Ellison or Neutron Jack. I’m thinking more along the lines of an Abraham Lincoln or a George Washington, two exceptional leaders who upheld controversial, socially conscious goals during exceedingly dangerous, pivotal moments in history.
What we’re really talking about here is a long-standing, though initially slow-moving, trend toward balancing assertive, goal-oriented behavior and compassionate, relationship-oriented behavior that reached a tipping point in the late-twentieth century. In her June 2013 article “Between Venus and Mars: 7