The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  But don’t count on these steps to eliminate such projections. So long as they are unconscious, transferences remain strong. What’s worse, the positive transference of the follower is likely to become negative before it disappears, as we have seen in public attitudes toward U.S. presidents.

  Since subordinates will almost never lose all fear of a leader with power over them, childlike transferences—positive and negative—won’t totally disappear. But increased candor and knowledge between leaders and followers can turn a leader from being a projection of hopes and fears into a flesh-and-blood role model that collaborators can emulate. Furthermore, the more people know each other, the harder it is to project, and the more obviously unreal the projections will be.

  Leaders will never be able to completely control their followers’ unconscious motivations—transference is too deeply ingrained in human nature for that. And no leader can fully understand all followers and collaborators. Yet if the organization is to be protected from itself, followers’ projections and motivations must be channeled and managed. The challenge is especially urgent for today’s organizations, in which an increasing diversity of people requires us all to move away from stereotyping and really understand differences in personality and ways of thinking and learning.

  In this chapter, I’ve described how a powerful unconscious process, the father transference was the glue that tied followers to leaders in bureaucratic organizations. Leadership was relatively easy because leaders didn’t have to understand a diverse bunch of followers. But as family dynamics and the mode of production have changed, leaders can no longer count on paternal transferences. Furthermore, as organizations become global, leaders are faced with a diversity of identities, cultural values, and personalities. To gain followers and collaborators, would-be leaders would be wise to understand their attitudes to work and leadership. In chapter 4, I’ll describe the changing social character—the psychological frame that organizes all the other elements of personality so that people are motivated to do what they need to do to succeed in a particular socioeconomic context. Then, in chapter 5, I address the challenge of what we should know to understand people in the global knowledge workplace.

  CHAPTER 4

  From Bureaucratic Followers to Interactive Collaborators

  IMAGINE THAT YOU’RE a forty-five- or fifty-year-old executive, brought up in a traditional family, now leading knowledge workers in a global company. You think back to how you rose up ranks by helping your boss to succeed. And he in turn showed you the ropes and stuck out his neck to tout you for upper management. You now have some subordinates who want this kind of relationship, but you’re not sure they’re the best of the bunch. You’re impressed by some of the younger men and women who are more entrepreneurial—they don’t wait for you to give them objectives; they tell you what needs to be done. But while these go-getters work hard and well together, they don’t seem committed to the company; you don’t feel the kind of warm tie you felt with your boss. You’re not sure they’d be good leaders.

  I invite you to put yourself in these three types: the traditional executive and the bureaucratic and interactive subordinates. To create collaboration, as a leader you’ll have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each type of subordinate in order to bring out the best in both.

  Social character is an elusive concept, because like individual personality, it refers to both conscious and unconscious aspects of human psychology. We are conscious of our values that give our lives meaning, our talents, and our identities or sense of self. The unconscious aspects have to do with emotionally charged attitudes or motivational systems—experiences from childhood that shape how we relate to others and what most drives us at school and work: what makes us want to do what we need to do in order to prosper in a particular social context.

  In well-functioning people, the conscious and unconscious attitudes and values are for the most part connected; the total personality is in tune with the social character, and the social character fits a person’s social role. For example, a key element of the bureaucratic social character is the hardworking obsessive personality that has internalized a dominant father figure from early childhood. Someone with this social character will consciously value order and expertise and will want to follow those managers who are like good fathers—demanding but caring mentors. While this person may be aware that he values a fatherlike leader, he’s unaware that he’s projecting an infantile image onto a manager who may not be very caring and, in doing so, making himself dependent on this manager, imputing knowledge and understanding the manager may not have and undervaluing his own competence.

  For people with an interactive social character, the significant person from the past they project onto a leader is often not a parent but a sibling or a close childhood friend who might have brought them into a team or music group or initiated them into a new activity. To be sure, these ties may be weaker than traditional parental transferences. But for Interactives, raised in the new context where the traditional family is breaking down, parental images are not the dominating father or nurturing mother, but rather a more ambivalent figure who couldn’t always be counted on to be there when needed.

  Furthermore, a defining aspect of the interactive social character is its ability to easily take on new identities, like roles in a video game. That makes some of these people argue they’re unique and can’t be described in terms of a social character stereotype; they just adapt, whatever the situation. But Interactives are hardly conscious of how they adapt to different situations. It’s the need to design themselves according to what sells on the personality market that differentiates the interactive social character from social characters of the past.

  Compare the interactive social character to that of the Mexican campesinos Erich Fromm and I studied. Their social character wasn’t adapted to the industrial world that was fast overtaking them. They were farmers and, with the exception of the hacienda peons who had been liberated by the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, their way of life was the same as that of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Their social character had not changed from that of their ancestors as far back as they could imagine. Their identity or sense of self was rooted in family and place.

  Although villagers liked to think of themselves as unique individuals and even had a saying for it—“Yo soy yo y no me parece a nadie” (I am myself and I’m not like anyone else)—they had the social character shared with free peasants around the world that I described in chapter 1: cautious, independent, hoarding, patient, fatalistic, dignified, respectful, and egalitarian, but suspicious of anyone outside the family. There were two exceptions to this social character. One was the families of the landless hacienda peons. They had been so damaged by their virtual slavery that they didn’t believe they could ever succeed as independent farmers. Even when given land, their passive, fearful, and submissive social character, which was a survival strategy in the hacienda where independence provoked beatings or worse, made them vulnerable to new entrepreneurial bosses. These bosses were the second exception, the productive narcissists who in less turbulent times seem out of sync with society, but who are the first to exploit new opportunities whenever there are dramatic changes in the mode of production.1

  As noted in chapter 1, free peasants throughout the world share a social character; they are in many ways more alike in their attitudes to work and relationships than they are like city people in their own countries. And if we look back at the United States in the nineteenth century, not including the native Americans and slaves, the large majority of American families also made their living from farming (over 75 percent as late as 1870) as independent land owners. They expressed some of the attitudes of free, liberty-loving peasants throughout the world, but there were important differences, observed by the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville in his tour of America in the 1830s. Many American farmers combined business with agriculture. They wanted to get rich, and a number of them were specul
ators, risk takers. Since most had fled oppressive European societies, they were more daring and less fatalistic than peasants whose families have been rooted to the same ground for centuries. Also, as Tocqueville noted, unlike Europeans (and most peasants throughout the world), Americans were educated for public affairs, encouraged to participate in a democracy.2

  In contrast to the Mexican peasants, who were kept in check by a semifeudal society until the revolution of 1910, American entrepreneurs, some leaving farms for the cities, flourished in the late nineteenth century, exploiting the new technologies in transportation (railroads and cars), metals (steel), energy (oil), and communications (telegraph and telephone).

  THE BUREAUCRATIC PERSONALITY

  The outcome of these entrepreneurial ventures were great companies organized into bureaucracies with functional departments and specialized roles, regulated and controlled by rules and, increasingly, by professional managers. As Peter Drucker, the outstanding interpreter of management, wrote, bureaucratic management deals with the integration of people into a common venture, and so what managers do in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Japan, in Brazil, is exactly the same, even though how they do it may be quite different.3 And one thing they were doing was shaping the bureaucratic social character.

  By the start of the twentieth century, many American families were raising their sons not to be independent farmers, but to be managers or government employees in bureaucracies, and their daughters to support their husbands’ careers rather than their farms. That meant not only taking care of home and children, but also joining clubs and socializing with the wives of men who could help their husbands’ careers.

  To be sure, bureaucracies and bureaucrats had been around for a long time. From Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, bureaucrats have served emperors, pharaohs, and kings. They’ve been tax collectors, scribes, clerics, or clerks in the court, custom house, or archives. Czar Nicholas I supposedly said, “Not I but ten thousand clerks rule Russia.” As far back as we can see, large organizations have been run by bureaucrats.

  And bureaucrats have long had a bad reputation, spread by novelists and social scientists as well as politicians. Nineteenth-century novelists pictured bureaucrats as dry, narrow, and heartless. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens describes Tite Barnacle, who runs the Office of Circumlocation with the mission of making sure that nothing ever happens for the first time. Writes Dickens, “He wound and wound folds of tape and paper round the neck of the country. His wristbands and collar were oppressive, his voice and manner were oppressive.”4 In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), the American bureaucrat becomes a zombie whose only vestige of humanity is to resist all orders, saying, “I would prefer not to.”

  And this view expressed the American stereotype. Even before the rise of big business and big government, Americans were especially opposed to bureaucracies and bureaucrats, and this view still distorts popular views of dedicated public servants and industrious managers. The negative attitude goes back to America’s Calvinist founders, rebels against all forms of state and church authority—any institution that imposed intermediaries between citizens and elected representatives, between individuals and their God. The ideal for American Protestants was voluntary service to create community. When the new national government was formed in 1789, there was a small public service, with most jobs in finance, record keeping, and copying official documents. But liberty-loving Americans, who feared the kind of controlling bureaucracy that served George III, agreed that if they had to have one, they wanted a bureaucracy that served the people in a society of equals. And to a degree, they succeeded. In 1830, Tocqueville was impressed with the egalitarian behavior of American public servants.5

  That all changed in the post–Civil War period. The bribe-taking customs official, land agent, and Indian agent soiled the relatively clean image of the American public servant. Reforms, beginning with merit system instituted by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, somewhat improved the bureaucratic image, and new functions of science and technology increased the prestige of federal employees as the public recognized the civil servant’s productive role in agriculture, public health, and education. But the negative stereotype persisted, even though bureaucracies in both government and business have been essential in organizing experts to create and protect our fabulously rich society.

  Many social scientists as well as fiction writers have reinforced the negative image of the bureaucrat. Although the German sociologist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as a more just alternative to arbitrary rule and a spoils system, he also wrote that the iron cage of bureaucracy had clamped shut on the free spirit of the Enlightenment. He called bureaucrats “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart,” adding, “This nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”6

  Other social scientists elaborated Weber’s stereotype of bureaucrats. John Dewey wrote about their “occupational psychosis,” an extreme version of Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “trained incapacity”—the loss of ability to reason or think creatively that results from following rigid rules. Daniel Warnotte agreed and described bureaucrats as becoming intellectually and emotionally damaged by their roles, suffering “professional deformation.” 7 Erich Fromm put it in psychoanalytic idiom, writing, “Roughly equivalent to the sadomasochistic character, in a social rather than a political sense, is the bureaucratic character. In the bureaucratic system every person controls the one below him and is controlled by the one above. Both sadistic and masochistic impulses can be fulfilled in such a system. Those below, the bureaucratic character will hold in contempt, those above he will admire and fear.”8

  Although the sociologist Robert Merton was less harsh in his judgment of the bureaucratic personality, he emphasized that bureaucratic structure reinforces a pecking order.9 A psychologist might add that it formalizes the hierarchical motivational patterns found in all primates. However, Merton notes that bureaucracy, power, and privilege belong to the role, not the person, and rules can protect people lower down in the system from arbitrary authority.10

  Merton does affirm that although the bureaucratic personality tends to be precise, reliable, efficient, and prudent, bureaucrats are or become timid and conservative, resisting change. This begs the interesting question of whether certain personalities are attracted to bureaucratic roles or whether the role shapes their personality. I believe it’s a mixture of both, but the forging of the bureaucratic personality begins in the traditional family, long before entry into a bureaucracy, and some people develop a personality with strong needs for clarity, precision, and unambiguous authority that fits smoothly into bureaucratic structures.

  It’s notable that neither the novelists nor social scientists who have stereotyped the bureaucratic personality ever studied these people systematically. Of course, some of them, like Franz Kafka, experienced working in bureaucracies, but most have tended to be radical anarchists who naturally resent bureaucrats who make them conform to rules and regulations in universities and publishing companies.

  Having worked as a consultant in government and industrial bureaucracies in twenty countries and in the process interviewed hundreds of managers and employees, I’ve found variations of the personality type. To be sure, as Drucker stated, managers, almost all of whom share a bureaucratic social character, have done the same kind of thing and have fit in more or less the same kinds of structures everywhere. However, as Drucker went on to state, they may play the role somewhat differently, because of variations in personality type and cultures.11 Once you view bureaucrats from inside bureaucracies rather than from afar, you will see that while they fit Merton’s stereotype in some essential ways—particularly, most find meaning in being respected as experts—there are variations in their intrinsic motivations at work. Some bureaucrats want to help or educate people; others want to defend the public; most take their greatest satisfaction in just doing their job well.12

  A notabl
e example of public-spirited bureaucrats were AT&T managers and technicians before the breakup of the Bell System. In the late 1970s, what most gave their work meaning was service to the public. And while over time their roles and rules came to be defined in an increasingly rigid way, whenever there was a disaster—hurricane, blizzard, or flood—they ignored the rules and worked together day and night until they had restored telephone service. When people were in need, the hierarchical system was suddenly transformed into a heterarchy where the person with the relevant competence took the lead and others were quick to follow.

  Furthermore, even bureaucratic Americans never lose their love of liberty, and they always try to maximize their autonomy at work.13 Note the popularity of Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO) or the cartoonish version, The One Minute Manager, the pipe-smoking daddy figure who sits back after giving brief one-minute instructions or feedback and lets subordinate managers do their jobs their own way as long as they reach the agreed-on objectives. 14 But this approach no longer works in the increasingly interactive workplace, where autonomy can get in the way of the collaboration needed to achieve results.

  The description of the bureaucratic personality by the novelists and sociologists was a caricature, an extreme example of the type, verging on psychopathology. It would be like describing the interactive personality in terms of Woody Allen’s Zelig, a human chameleon, a plastic person without a center who shapes himself to fit whatever sells. Sure, there’s truth to this description, but it’s the extreme case. As we’ll see, the positive potential of the interactive social character supports a more collaborative community at the workplace.