The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow
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But our thinking about leadership has not kept up with events. A fastmoving current of technology and social revolution moves some people to a new practice of life and leaves others in its wake. People relate to each other in new ways with identities that didn’t exist in previous generations. Everyone is in some way touched by what happens in places that once seemed far away. Work moves to low-wage countries, but there is even more of an impact from the information and communication technology that continues to wipe out millions of factory and transactional service jobs, replacing them with work that calls for more brainpower and interpersonal skills. Bureaucratic hierarchies are pulled and stretched into complex systems, and the new roles demand flexibility from employees.
Persistent tension and anxiety keep people on edge. Corporate executives who once felt invulnerable now need to worry that someone else’s innovation will blindside them and send their companies into a tailspin. Information about highly competitive international markets, global warming, terrorist threats, natural disasters, and weapons of mass destruction, all funneled through radio, television, and the Internet, send people instant and alarming images of events they can’t control. Individuals have information at the touch of a mouse that before was available, if at all, only to privileged experts; yet they struggle to parse its meaning. At the same time that people yearn for protective and soothing leaders, they have become skeptical about leaders in general and distrustful of their motives and competence.2
The social changes have also upset historic patterns of family relationships. The liberation and empowerment of women has transformed workplace, family, and the way men and women view each other. The whole experience of growing up has been shaken up and with it, the dynamics that shape the deep-rooted emotional attitudes that drive people’s values—what we can call the social character.
Social character is a key concept at the center of my research. It can be thought of as a kind of macro personality, describing the emotional attitudes and values shared by people whose personality has been formed in a particular culture or social class. It’s a concept that clarifies how cultures shape human nature. And in this age of globalization and cultural change, I believe it’s an essential concept for understanding the leaders we need and why people will follow them. Yes, we all share needs and strivings for selfprotection, sustenance, and relatedness—love and work, self-expression and self-worth. But these needs play out differently, shaped by culture, acting through institutions of family, school, workplace, and places of worship. Yes, we each have a unique personality, and our genetic patterns are as different as snowflakes. Yes, we take on different identities, some of which are membership cards for interest groups. However, despite these differences, most people who have grown up and adapted to the norms of similar institutions share ways of almost instinctually relating to their work and to others. We all think that the way we feel and act in social relationships is human nature, yet those in other cultures who feel and act differently think the same thing. We and they are both wrong; human nature is always formed and expressed through the social character.3
With such radical changes in the context in which people live and work and in the social character, it is not surprising that how people view their leaders—what they want and need from them—has also changed. Our theories of leadership were formed in other contexts. Leaders, especially those in the most advanced organizations, can no longer gain followers in the old ways. In particular, how we have been taught to think about organizational leadership—a one-size-fits-all manager in a bureaucratic hierarchy with uniform roles—is now misleading. The bureaucratic theory of leadership assumes a psychology of followers that no longer describes a growing number of working people, especially in our dominant organizations and global companies.
I argue that in the evolving knowledge organization, it’s more useful to know how different personality types fit specific leadership roles, and how they can get people to collaborate with them. I’ll explain why changes in social character and the knowledge-creating workplace make it essential to raise our understanding of personality, not just intellectually but also experientially, to develop what I call Personality Intelligence.
To describe the leadership we need, we can’t extrapolate from the past. People have changed—both would-be leaders and potential followers. People today respond to different qualities in leaders than they did a generation ago. Take corporations in the 1970s. Most managers were white men who were raised in families with one male wage earner, the father. Today there are fewer of these families than those headed by a single woman.4 While many top leaders have come from traditional families, most people now entering the workforce have not. Likely, they were raised by parents who both worked and shared authority in the family, and this will be even more likely for their children. As I’ll discuss in chapter 3, it appears that many people raised in nontraditional families feel stronger ties to sibling figures than to parental-type bosses.
Furthermore, women now hold key leadership roles, and that makes a big difference for workplace psychology. Instead of hierarchies of men following father figures, would-be leaders face a diverse group of followers who may project any number of images—mother, sibling, friend—onto them.
During the past few years, whenever I’ve met groups of managers, mostly in their late thirties or early forties, in workshops on leadership in the United States and Western Europe, I’ve asked for a show of hands from those born into families with a single male wage earner. It’s usually about 75 to 80 percent. Then I ask how many now live in this type of traditional family. It’s usually about 10 to 20 percent, mirroring the historic shift in the role of women and the makeup of families.
Because people are less likely to idealize leaders as father substitutes and they’re more critical of parental figures in general, you can’t lead in ways that worked in the past, especially in the advanced industrial democracies. Yes, fear or pervasive anxiety may, in psychoanalytic terms, regress people for a while so that they project a protective parental image onto a leader who exploits their fear. This is what Freud called transference. It causes us to idealize a leader and ignore his or her faults, and it dulls our own critical faculties. But once that protective image cracks, the new social character asserts itself and we become skeptical about all leaders. This is particularly dangerous in our present time of disruptive change, when we desperately need leaders to inspire diverse groups of people to pull together for the common good.
This book will help readers understand why people follow different leaders in different times and circumstances, including the present time, and it will show how the leaders who are needed in a given context must engage the social character of followers. I’ll also explain why people sometimes follow the wrong leaders. After illuminating the dynamic nature of the leader-follower relationship, I’ll provide a useful typology of the different kinds of leaders we now need, how they can engage followers, and how they need to develop themselves. But first, a brief account of how I came to the views of leadership and followership presented in this book will be useful.
STUDIES OF FOLLOWERS AND LEADERS
Over the past forty years as an anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and then a consultant to business, government, educational, healthcare, and union leaders in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, I’ve interviewed a global spectrum of people at work: peasant farmers; entrepreneurs; workers in factories and offices; professionals; civil servants; military and Foreign Service officers; elected and appointed national and local officials; World Bank managers; and corporate managers, executives, and CEOs. Actually, I began to study leaders as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1950s, interviewing political and academic leaders for The Crimson, the daily student newspaper. After receiving a doctorate in 1960, I joined Erich Fromm in Mexico to train as a psychoanalyst and study a village where entrepreneurs were beginning to change the culture and institutions that formed the social character.5
After returning to the Uni
ted States in 1968, with a grant from Harvard, I led a study of managers in high-tech companies and initiated projects to improve the quality of working life at Harman International Industries and AT&T. Because of these projects I was hired to consult to companies, unions, and government agencies. Through these studies and consulting work I was able to observe that the attitudes and values in industrial societies—the social character—were changing, mirroring the historic transformations of work and family that started in the 1960s and that are still playing out today.
What most causes the social character to change is the dominant mode of production in a culture, the way of working in the most competitive and dynamic businesses. Those people with the skills, emotional attitudes, and strong values that fit this mode of work are the ones who do well, become models for others, and influence how the next generation is raised. Parents and schools strive to prepare children to become like the people who are making it in the world of work. And the successful innovators, the entrepreneurs who create the new modes of work, lead efforts to change education to develop the next generation for the new workplace. This was the case a century ago as innovators like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford financed foundations to influence education. And it’s happening again today with innovators like Bill Gates, Don Fisher, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, Oprah Winfrey, and others.6
In this way, we might say that social character changes by a process of social selection, an analogy to natural selection. The difference is that while in natural selection certain traits determine biological reproduction—that is, which offspring survive—in social selection, the traits of the most successful people are reproduced in the educational and work practices that shape the social character.7
FARMING-CRAFT SOCIAL CHARACTER
To understand the changing social character, consider the differences between traditional peasant farmers, workers in the industrial bureaucracies, and the technical-professional knowledge workers of today. In Mexico, the social character of the most prosperous villagers Erich Fromm and I studied was adapted to work that had changed little for centuries here and in villages throughout the world. The successful farmers were just like their parents and ancestors: self-sufficient and rooted in the land they farmed, hardworking, cautious, and conservative, with a strong sense of dignity based on independence and self-reliance. Respectful themselves, they expected to be respected by others. Used to the repetitive tasks of the seasons, they were patient as nature took its time to make their plantings grow, but also fatalistic, emotionally prepared for unpredictable calamities—droughts and disease, shifts in market prices. Often cheated by middlemen and politicians, they trusted only family members. A close-knit family with paternal authority reinforced by a patriarchal religion made for a strong economic unit that provided security for the old as well as the young.8 Village decisions were typically made by consensus among the heads of family, mostly men but also some women.
These people were suspicious of all leaders as out to use them for their personal gain. Leaders were followed only in times of crisis, as when, in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, villagers in the state of Morelos hired Emiliano Zapata to protect their lands from being grabbed by owners of large sugar-planting haciendas in collusion with the federal government. However, some of the farmers I interviewed did follow entrepreneurs who seduced them with visions of getting rich if they would sell their land to build weekend houses for rich people from Mexico City and transform their village into a tourist attraction. These entrepreneurs also persuaded villagers to invest in schooling, roads, and electricity to support changes that connected their village more closely to the modern world.
Reading studies of peasants in other parts of the world and working with George M. Foster, the University of California at Berkeley expert on peasant life, I learned that the social character of these campesinos was typical for peasants in Latin America, India, China, and eastern Europe. And the villagers’ behavior conformed to what appears to be a general law about why free people want to follow a leader who pulls them out of their comfort zone. They will do so if they feel they need the leader to rid them of threats and oppression, or to help them get rich—in other words, conscious self-interest.
INDUSTRIAL-BUREAUCRATIC SOCIAL CHARACTER
Back in the United States in the 1970s, the success of a project I led to improve productivity and the quality of working life at Harman Industries propelled me to study organizations at the heart of the industrial world, among them Volvo and AT&T’s Bell System, which included Western Electric and the regional telephone operating companies, giants then at their height of power and importance. These were prototypical bureaucracies, with uniform roles structured in a pyramidal hierarchy.
The personality of bureaucratic managers is described in chapters 3 and 4 as inner-directed, obsessive, and father-oriented, with values of loyalty, stability, and expert knowledge. But the only leaders that workers at AT&T and other industrial bureaucracies wanted to follow were not the bureaucrats who managed with carrots and sticks, but those exceptional managers who allowed them to experiment with how they performed their work, listened to their ideas, and coached them. But these companies did not usually place such people in leadership positions. More likely, they promoted people who were themselves good workers and were most like themselves.
However, it was in the rural Tennessee Harman factory where I learned that people did not always conform to popular academic theories of motivation. 9 Many workers there were also farmers and homemakers who took factory jobs only to supplement the uncertain income from farming. The prevailing theories taught in business schools predicted that workers like these would be on a low level of Abraham Maslow’s needs hierarchy and be motivated solely by money. Other academics like Frederick Herzberg disagreed and argued that almost all factory workers would be motivated by more challenging work.
Yes, challenge did motivate some workers, especially those with a bureaucratic social character who sought a career in the company and wanted to show off and also improve their skills, but many rural workers with a farming-craft social character were most motivated by the prospect of going home early to do what they considered their real work on the farm or running a household: cooking and cleaning, preserving fruits, making clothes, raising children. This was more important to them than earning more money at the factory. And when they were given the opportunity to have a say in designing their jobs, with the promise that they could share the time saved and leave work early, the workers doubled their productivity. One group of women on an assembly line actually rejected the offer of more challenging work: since the work had become automatic, they passed the time chatting about friends and family. More challenge would force them to concentrate on work rather than enjoying gossip.
Another, more positive exception I saw in the late 1980s was at a Toyota factory at Nagoya, Japan, where the workers promoted to foreman roles were natural leaders who already had followers because they helped others and created group harmony. This was one example of Toyota’s extraordinary ability to combine social intelligence with technical excellence.
It’s not that the academics were all wrong. Rather they formed their theories within one context, one type of workplace with one type of social character; and then they overgeneralized. We will see in chapter 2 that this is still the case for popular academic theories of motivation and leadership that neglect the psychology of followers.
KNOWLEDGE WORK AND A NEW SOCIAL CHARACTER
In the mid-1970s, in the budding information age, my study of managers at Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, Intel, Xerox, Bell Laboratories, Schlumberger, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Texas Instruments revealed an emerging mode of production involving teams of knowledge workers creating new technology.10 Companies needed high-energy project leaders to fire up the engineers who had been raised in a slower-moving bureaucratic world.
I called the most effective leaders gamesmen because they treated their work like a game they
were driven to win. They began to break up the bureaucratic hierarchies with a spirit of competition. The obsessive, craftsmanlike engineers followed them because they stirred up excitement and heady feelings of being part of a winning team.
At that time, computer programmers operated at the fringes of technology companies like IBM and HP, whose main products were hardware. Managers and engineers saw programmers as oddballs, nerds who worked odd hours and dressed like perpetual adolescents. But the software revolution of the 1980s and 1990s transformed some of these social character mutants into charismatic visionary leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison who formed cultlike organizations around revolutionary products.11 Employees followed them because they promised riches and a role in a great adventure that would change the way people lived and worked.
In this period, the mode of production evolved, as did the experience of growing up. In the 1980s, for the first time, I met the new social character in knowledge work, fields like telecommunications, finance, health care, consulting, entertainment, professional services, and government. The surveys my colleagues and I gave to managers and professionals showed that their numbers were growing. Unlike the bureaucratic social character, the interactive social character is focused less on status and autonomy, more on teamwork and self-development.12 The strengths of Interactives lie in their independence, readiness for change, and quick ability to connect with others and work in a self-managed team. Many of them, especially those who have grown up playing video games with people around the world, feel at home in the global economy. As long as the rules are clear, and the purposes meaningful, they’ll play the game at work, take responsibility for their decisions, and keep learning to stay sharp and marketable, but they don’t want to follow autocratic, insensitive bosses who don’t listen.