Hardwired Humans. Andrew O'Keeffe
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It’s clear that bosses are important and have a significant impact on people’s morale and output. Leaders should maintain a focus on serving their team. While it’s most likely that the team leader was appointed to their role by their own boss, a guiding principle should be that if the team was asked, they would elect their boss to indeed be their leader and along the way would re-elect them to remain in office.
Implication 4. Protection of the family unit
An extension of our mental framework of belonging to a small intimate work group as if we are family is that we expect the leader to protect members of the team. We expect a manager not to compromise the interests of the group in favour of their own. We expect a manager to protect us from criticism, to protect our resources and keep us from being overloaded and under-appreciated.
Of course, we shouldn’t expect managers to fight for us as much as they would their real family. For primates, protection of family is also primal. Close family genetic ties can sometimes lead to dark behaviour. Taronga chimps Koko and her daughter Kamili on one occasion attacked Shabani when he was an infant. Shabani’s mother, Shiba, came to her son’s rescue. A year later Kamili had her first offspring. Shiba, presumably holding a grudge that had festered over the year, attacked and killed Kamili’s newborn. Perhaps the score was settled, or perhaps the family feud was consolidated.
Implication 5. integrating new members
Like the gorilla Mbeli joining the group, the dynamics of a newcomer to a team can be delicate and the leader plays a key role in effectively integrating new members to the team.
Primates have a cute way of signalling that a youngster needs to be given time to learn the society’s ways. Chimps and gorillas are born with a tuft of white hair around their bottom. The infant will have this white tuft until around the age of four or five. The keepers call this tuft a ‘learner’s plate’. While they have this tuft of hair they are given great latitude by the adults. They are allowed to take food, to jump on the adults, punch the alpha and generally run amuck. After all, the little chimp doesn’t know any better. It’s like the latitude we give to a toddler. But when the young chimp starts losing its tuft of white hair, then it’s welcome to the adult world! As the youngster starts to be disciplined and first incurs the wrath of an adult, this can be quite a shock.
New members need to be integrated into the work group. In instincts terms the challenge is to quickly move new members from stranger status to in-group status. Through the lens of human instincts, leaders need to look after the basics of integration: of having equipment and space ready for the person on their first day, of informal introductions to break the ice, of providing clarity of the group’s purpose and values and to facilitate the new person becoming an immediate contributor to the group’s purpose. The lens also explains why the team leader should take the lead in the integration and not be too quick to pass the person to others, a theme we return to at various places in this book.
Implication 6. Freeloaders and social rejection
For a social animal, rejection from the group is of ultimate significance. On the savannah plains to be stranded alone or with just your family without group support would most likely be catastrophic. No wonder managing poor performers to the point of dismissal is one of the hardest things a manager gets to do. A social animal would not take such a situation lightly.
Yet as long as we have been around human societies have needed to respond when it has a freeloader in its ranks, when someone is flouting group culture or harming group success. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, anthropologist Christopher Boehm outlines the four levels of increasing sanction that human groups traditionally deploy to discipline a difficult member. First the person might be treated as a nonperson (ignored). If that didn’t do the trick, then the person might be shunned (ostracised so nobody cooperates with them) after which they might be expelled from the group and the ‘ultimate distancing is execution’. As we might talk about at work that the objective of attending to a poor performer is to try to correct their behaviour rather than result in termination, Boehm points out that, ‘Social control … is often about pro-socially oriented manipulation of deviants so that they can once more contribute usefully to group life.’
Instincts helps explain a leader’s discomfort in confronting and perhaps threatening termination of employment of a team member, yet also provides a message to leaders that every so often a leader might need to address asocial behaviour of an individual for the benefit of the group. This has been an aspect of human living and a leader’s lot for the duration of our history.
Clan
Apart from our family-sized group, there is a second group that gives us our sense of identity and which is critical to humans as social animals. This group is known as our clan and, in the natural course, comprises up to 150 people.
Social living was the key survival strategy for early humans. The savannah was a hostile and short-lived place for a solitary human or even a small lonely family. Compared to other animals on the plains of Africa also battling to survive, humans don’t have the same natural survival tools—we’re not strong like an elephant, we don’t run fast like a cheetah, we don’t fly like eagles or vultures, we don’t have sharp night vision like a cat and we’re not armed with poison like a scorpion. Our method of survival was social living—our families gathered in groups.
Group size is related to the size of the human brain. Our brain size allows us to associate with groups of up to around 150 others. Oxford professor Robin Dunbar is an expert on the topic. He argues that living in complex social groups demands a significant amount of intellect. Being a social animal, to get on you need to know who’s connected to whom, which family is not getting on so well with another, who is on the outer with the leaders and who recently won favours. This takes a fair amount of brain power. Dunbar has found a link between the ratio of brain to body size and the group size of animals (well, more accurately the ratio of the neocortex and body size). Humans have the biggest brain per body size of any animal on the planet. This larger brain allowed us to live in bigger groups than, say, chimpanzees, gorillas or monkeys. On Dunbar’s analysis the brain per body ratio of humans correlates to a community size of 150, which is indeed the size of primitive, or natural, human groups.
Chimpanzees are the second brainiest animals on the planet. They have the second largest brain per body size. On Dunbar’s analysis, chimpanzees would live in groups of around 55 on average in the wild, which is what happens. The main Gombe community, the Kasekela clan, numbers around 50 chimps.
For animals with a survival strategy based on family groups, there are great incentives for families to gather together. For starters, it’s the best defence against predation where bigger numbers can protect each other. There’s also attraction in sharing duties and sharing the search for food. In sourcing food, there’s a fair chance that if you miss out on finding food for a few days your family might not starve because another family will have enough to share, as yours did last time or might do next time.
The magical 150 appears in various places.
On Facebook the average number of friends in a network is 120.
For most people, if you take the time to list your friends and acquaintances your list will total around 150.
The ex-global CEO of Proctor & Gamble was personally involved in the career planning for a key group of 150 high potential people.
The prehistoric Tonga navy, a highly effective conquering force, built war canoes that were powered by 150 rowers.
If 150 is the number of people we naturally associate with, we have a fundamental challenge when our organisation grows beyond that size. Our brains are just not large enough for individuals to associate with and gain identity in organisations of 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000. Our brains are not big enough to manage the social and political complexities in groups significantly beyond 150. In larger organisations, then, people will naturally associate with their department, subsidiary or geography of a human scale of up to 150. ‘Silos’ will naturally occur in large organisations, so any search for an organisational structure that removes silos in large organisations