Or, as Simon Sinek puts it: “To be a leader means one thing and one thing only. It means that you have followers.”

If you are a leader your ‘power’ was given to you by the people you are leading. They are letting you lead because they trust that you will care for them above only yourself. That is a sacred responsibility that should not be violated.

In our ancient ancestors’ time, leadership was fluid; it depended on what needed doing. Leadership was not hereditary or a full time job.  A leader was a person with a good plan and the ability to engage others and make it happen.  

If Pete suggested going out on a hunt even though Pete had never come home with as much as a Bunyoro rabbit, all the men would carry on lazing under the trees.  But if Jack who was extremely proficient at catching wildebeest proposed a walk, everyone would definitely follow.

Leadership can have a dark side.

“I worry that business leaders are more interested in material gain than they are in having the patience to build up a strong organization, and a strong organization starts with caring for their people.” – John Wooden

Unfortunately some individuals will abuse leadership (the power that the people give them) to take advantage of the group.

We want transformational leaders who have the good of the group as their focus and who will self-sacrifice for their group.  We don’t want transactional leaders or narcissistic or sociopathic leaders. Cooperation, high performing groups, fulfilled people, and dominance don’t go together.  

What to do about a bad leader?

Ultimately the responsibility for bad leaders lies in our followership.

“Cooperating in a group context is more effective when aggressive or dominant types are ejected or when the group takes them down a peg or two.  No one individual is stronger than the group.”  Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt, Mismatch

Being expelled from the group 50,000 years ago meant certain death. Our ancestors had ‘STOP’ strategies: Strategies To Overcome the Powerful.  They used gossip, had minimal hierarchy and used humor, ridicule, and shunning.  If none of that worked, then the death sentence by expulsion from the group was meted out.  That was an effective strategy for ridding the group of a narcissistic or sociopathic person trying to take control.

Our current organizations and governments are lacking effective STOPs.  Sometimes our organizations even institute rules against essential STOP tactics like gossiping.  We need to put effective STOPs in place.  We could encourage the gossiping around the water cooler that used to happen around the campfire in the evening.  Leaders used to be chosen by their followers.  In our ancestral groups you were a leader because your followers chose you.  We could still do that in our companies and even review our company leaders with the authority to replace them if they are not serving the group.  As in ancestral times, we could pass leadership around as something that is situationally dependent. Whoever is best at leading the project at hand takes the lead. This allows for more variations and selection and if the results are good, repetition in the future. In this way, the better leaders for particular circumstances will emerge from the group.

Unfortunately, as in so much of our business practices, there is a Mismatch in our human evolutionary design and our corporate leadership systems and in our political leadership systems.

If the shareholders choose the leadership for a company through the board of directors, there is a risk that they might choose the wrong type of person for the job. Parachuting in an MBA from outside is rarely a good choice for leadership of a company. Natural leaders should be allowed to emerge from within. When a CEO is chosen who primarily cares about the stock price and their bonus, there is not much the employees can do about it except vote with their feet. There is a good argument for the employees to choose their leaders at their working group level and, even at the top of the company.

In our politics there are real issues.  We have been designed to exist in groups of up to 150 people. At this size we either know each other directly or we know someone who knows that other person and we can find out about their reputation by asking our friends. 

A great number of us are prone to following self serving leaders who enhance themselves to appear strong. When we are fearful (and sometimes bad “leaders” deliberately create fake stuff to be fearful of or deliberately amp it up) we want someone who sounds confident, and if it is a complex issue we may elect them to take care of it for us.  

We have different personalities, psychologically we are not all built the same. We tend to one end of a given spectrum or the other. 

Liberals and conservatives, for instance, care about the issue of fairness but see fairness in a different way, through a different lens. Some ask; am I, and is my group, getting our fair share?  Others ask, is that disadvantaged person being treated fairly?  We are all compassionate but feel compassion differently.  Compassion can be group-related.  Who is my group?  Is it my family? My friends, My church? My religion? My company? My fellow sports team fans?  My political party?  My country? Or am I a global citizen with global responsibilities?

In our ancestors’ times it was good to have people who cared about strangers outside our group.  People who felt compassion and offered sustenance to outsiders. We see that in the generosity of groups who do not have much but willingly share what little they have with total strangers.  It was also good to have people within our group considering how that would put an additional strain on our group’s resources. A strong in group bias. We still have this range of personality types living among us.  A good leader needs both.

How I participate in leadership is linked to a large degree in how we are hardwired.  Am I one who wants to lead?  Do I prefer to stay in the background?  Am I a good follower?  Do I pledge allegiance to a flag?  Do I respect authority? or do I question authority?  Keep in mind, I am wired a certain way, and so are you. 

The question to ask ourselves is what level is the leader operating on?  Is he putting himself before everyone else in the group?  Is he putting himself and his friends before everyone else in the group? Or is he putting the group ahead of himself?  If he is putting himself and or his friends ahead of everyone else then he is clearly not the person we want leading us.  As soon as things go wrong he will be blaming everyone else instead of helping to solve the problem.  A good leader who cares about the group over himself would be apologizing for what went wrong and offering to step down and let someone else with a better idea give it a try.  That is not weakness, that is putting the good of the group first.

If our leader is putting the group ahead of herself and her friends, that’s great. Then we need to ask a follow up question which is; what level of group is she putting ahead of what other group(s)?  Is she putting our group ahead of the other groups?  Or is she putting everyone in every group’s best interest ahead of her own and our group’s self interest?

It is important not to be just a leader for your own group. After all, Hitler’s power came from the belief in the idea that Germany needed to come first.

To the extent that humanity not only survives but prospers for the next thousand years, it will be because we and our leaders put the greater interest of all of us and our planet (on which we and all future generations depend) ahead of our short term, personal, and national interests. 

We are a global collaborative system of groups of groups within groups, living on a finite planet.  Just like any stakeholder system if a group treats other groups unfairly and takes more than their share, the system is going to collapse.  We followers need to be choosing leaders who understand this and we need to be willing to make personal sacrifices for our global group of humanity.  

This pandemic is a trial run of our ability to put global human interests ahead of our personal, local, political, and national group interests.  So far I am not impressed.  Hopefully we are beginning to learn the lesson.  How this pandemic continues to unfold over the next decade depends on learning the global citizen lesson.  The pandemic will keep teaching us about global citizenship through viral variants until we learn it.  As the followers who give our leaders power to act for us, we are responsible for behaving (and voting) like global citizens.

Cheers for Friday!

Gavin Watson, Chair, Conscious Capitalism Connecticut Chapter

Gavin Watson & Associates

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Mismatch explores the ways in which our “Stone Age Brains” were matched for our ancient ancestors’ environment but now sometimes glitch up in our current environment.  

You see, evolution always relates to the current environment in which a species lives.  An individual or group that is better suited or more adaptable to a particular environment will outperform and out reproduce the less suited. That is, until the environment changes. Then different individuals or groups will have the upper hand.  

It’s interesting to consider, as this book does, all sorts of mismatches we have created for ourselves in our daily lives. Food and supermarkets are an obvious one. Our food no longer runs away so that we have to chase it and expend calories in the pursuit. We can just go buy a box of sugary cereal and eat that. The results are diabetes and tooth decay.

I am just going to focus on the part of the book that covers our work environment.

We humans have dramatically changed our environment.  We are no longer wandering across the African savannah in small groups as our ancestors did for most of the last 200,000 years. We were perfected for that environment, not the one in which we currently find ourselves.

Now we commute to work, punch a clock, get paid money for our labor, manage or have a manager, job descriptions, performance reviews, strategic plans, budgets, paychecks, and bonus programs all of which did not exist while we (and our brains) were evolving.  Biologically and neurologically, we are still the same creatures who traveled in small groups, shared food, and stuck together for protection from much stronger and faster predators.  

Evolution happens minimally and incrementally over at least a dozen or so generations and more likely tens of thousands of years. We have not yet begun to adapt to these new circumstances that we have created for ourselves.   

Genetically, we are lagging far behind. We are hardwired to view, process, and engage with the world in ways we need to understand better so we can adapt our work lives to ourselves, as real human beings.

Our fellow human beings are, in large part, what we have evolved to deal with.  The most common and consistent feature of our environment 100,000 years ago when our ancestors traveled together through the savannah and primordial forests was the other people in our groups. This has not changed. What has changed is the way we interact with each other due to the business operating systems we have invented.

“In the savannah there were no managers or middle managers.  Decisions were taken by the group, on the basis of consensus, not on the basis of hierarchy.  Modern organizations have become excessively formalized and institutionalized, which goes against our small group instincts.  Studies show that employees need a great deal of autonomy, a primeval preference for self-employment. People want to be left alone, they do not want some process supervisor breathing down their neck.  The same studies reveal that employees consider autonomy and social contacts more important than pay.  Our desires have not changed only the circumstances in which we operate.” – Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt

The good news is, we CAN better adapt our workplaces to ourselves. This will enable us to operate more in sync with how we are designed.

We thrive in groups of around 100 to 150 people. It is impossible for us to apprehend companies that are too big for our social brains

WL Gore, a global life sciences company

When a unit grows to a size of 150, a new unit can be set up that does the same work.  Everything in Gore is set up in small groups that are responsible for a segment of a process.  The groups choose their leaders. Every team has a leader, but he or she is chosen by the group itself on the basis of questions and requirements which were also answered by our ancestors: “Who should I follow?” “Who is best able to help me?” and “Who will teach me the most?”  

The Brazilian company Semco likewise works according to this ancestral philosophy and is also successful. Network governance is a method to cancel out mismatch.  Some governance experts believe that this is the organizational model of the future, but in fact it stems from our ancient past.

We are not homo-sapiens, thinking is not our strongest suit.  We are rarely all that logical.  We are homo-collaborens, the collaborative primate.  We have such a strong influence on each other that evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson says; that the smallest human unit is not an individual, it is a small group. We can’t survive without each other and as the african concept of Ubuntu suggests we actually call each other into being.  In different groups with different people I am a different person.  As Margaret Wheatley says this does not make me inauthentic it makes me quantum.

“What is crucial is the relationship created between two or more elements.  Systems influence individuals, and individuals call forth systems.  It is the relationship that evokes the present reality.  Which potential becomes real depends on the people, the events, and the moment.  Prediction and replication are therefore, impossible.  While this is no doubt unsettling, it certainly makes for a more interesting world.  People stop being predictable and become surprising.  Each of us is a different person in different places.  This does not make us inauthentic; it merely makes us quantum.  Not only are we fuzzy; the whole universe is.” Margaret Wheatley ‘Leadership and the New Science’

We are designed by evolution to sense what needs doing and to want to help our groups.  We are descendants of the highly collaborative people. We  carry those same collaborative, generous, and compassionate genes that made our ancestors groups successful. We have everything we need to be high performing groups and organizations. We need to reinvent those organizations in a more human way. Our ancient past is the key to our best future.

Cheers for Friday,

Gavin Watson, Chair, Conscious Capitalism Connecticut Chapter

Gavin Watson & Associates

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The present style of reward… squeeze(s) out from an individual, over his lifetime, his innate intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity.  They build into him fear, self-defense, and extrinsic motivation.  We have been destroying our people, from toddlers on through university, and on the job.  We must preserve the power of intrinsic motivation, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, joy in learning, that people are born with.

W. Edwards Deming

As management legend goes (and every business school teaches,) Deming’s advice on manufacturing quality was falling on deaf ears here in the U.S. but he found a rapt audience when he took his ideas to Japan after WWII.  He is probably the key person responsible for the quality turn around in Japanese products.  This was most evident in the auto industry. U.S automobile quality was terrible, Japan was worse but they listened, and Toyota quickly became and is still now a dominant car maker in the U.S.  Honda, Subaru, Nissan and many others are also doing quite well.

What you may not expect from such a guru on manufacturing quality and performance is something like his quote above.  Deming comes out very clearly and firmly against extrinsic reward systems!

Here are a couple more Deming quotes to reinforce that point:

        ”The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: ‘pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good.’ Well, the effect is exactly the opposite of what those words promise. Everyone propels himself forward, or tries to, for his own good, on his own life preserver. The organization is the loser.”

        ”The merit rating rewards people who conform to the system. It does not reward attempts to improve the system.”

The book Punished by Rewards is all about this. I return often to one of my favorite examples of how rewards backfire, pulled from its pages.

A group of psychological researchers is studying the effect of different sorts of rewards. The study is done using young children in a school setting. The study starts with the researchers handing out art supplies. It is a free period, so they can do whatever they like.  As you might expect, some kids run around the room, but a great number of them settle down to make some art. The researchers take note of which kids are engaged in artwork. With this baseline established, the next week begins the experiment.

The following week, kids who spent the most time doing artwork are randomly divided into three groups. The first is the control group. They are given the art supplies and just like the first week, they settle down to do art. The second group is a test group. They are told that if they do great artwork today they will be given an art appreciation award. This award is a ribbon of the sort schools often give out (I am sure you have seen them). This group settles down and does art just like the first group and just like they did the first week.  At the end of the period each child in the second group is given an “Art Appreciation Award,” as they have been promised  The third group is also given the art supplies and they settle down to do art.  At the end of the time they are all surprised by being given an Art Appreciation Reward. They were not expecting it! 

The third week rolls around and again the control group is given art supplies and they settle down and do art.  The second group is given art supplies and told that unfortunately “we are all out of art appreciation awards.” This second group proceeds to do almost no art. The third group is given the art supplies and told that unfortunately “we are all out of art appreciation awards”.  This group settles down and does the same amount of art as the first group.

What happened to the second group? They liked to do art.  They were randomly selected from kids who like to do art.  The third group did not get any rewards either and were told that there were none, but they did just as much art anyway.

The difference is subtle but obviously extremely important. The kids in the second group were given an IF=THEN reward.  If you do this = then you will get that.  The third group was given a NOW THIS! reward.  They were not expecting anything, and yet they got a reward.

The second group was doing something they liked doing. However, all the while they were doing art they were thinking about an extrinsic reward. And it was a really small thing, just a ribbon.

An if=then reward is an extrinsic reward.  It is essentially, as the title of the book suggests, a bribe.  The kids were all randomly selected from a group of kids who intrinsically liked to do art.  They quickly became trained not to do it unless there is something extra in it for them. They have been refocused on the reward instead of the art itself. As Deming says so well, “squeezing out their innate intrinsic motivation.”

One takeaway from this is that if I am being bribed, then the thing I am being asked to do must be something that people don’t want to do, hence the bribe for doing it.  

The third group was unaffected because they did not expect the reward, hence it did not become a bribe. They were still doing the art because they just liked doing it.  The presence of a reward or lack thereof the third week was therefore of no negative consequence.

One of the great joys in life is doing what we do well for the benefit of our group.

Gavin Watson

When our workplaces give us bribes to do what we do best and what we love doing it squeezes out the intrinsically rewarding nature of our work lives. If this continues to happen, as Deming says it will also destroy our motivation, self-esteem, and eventually our dignity.  Who wants to do that to anyone?

How many of our workplace systems are set up to extrinsically motivate us?

Now I know that some people may read this and think, “but I can’t get people motivated any other way!”  If that’s true, and to some extent I hear you and agree with you, it is not because people are born to be extrinsically motivated. It is rather because they were trained to become that way, through reinforcement over time.  Effectively, many managers have unwittingly “destroyed” what was not broken in the first place! Most of the destruction may not have occurred while they have been working in your company. It may have begun at school as Deming suggests and continued at other places they have previously worked.  This will take some time and patience to reset.

Knowing this, we need to reset work practices. Eliminate all extrinsic rewards (AKA bribes) from the workplace. Including even (and this might come as a shock!) the bribes considered essential to motivate that separate species of human, the “salesperson” who is usually the primary target of this bribery.  You want your sales people thinking about the customer’s needs and how your company can creatively help them, not how large their bonus is going to be. So, compensate them fairly, with an amount typical for a salesperson living where they are doing the work in your type of industry. I would also add in some great advice from Janet Yellin that you should “pay above average”.  This builds in a bonus, and takes the issue of money and fixation on bribes off the table and out of mind.  Your salespeople can now focus on doing what they love to do.  Find that sweet spot, where the company provides what helps the customer get their needs met. 

If=then rewards are particularly destructive.  “Now this!” rewards (the kind the third group of kids were given) can become “if=then” rewards if they are expected.  If every time you do something I surprise you with a gift card you will begin to expect a gift card when you do it.  It has now become an “if=then” reward.  If you do the thing and you don’t get a gift card you might even ask me why I didn’t give it to you.

Don’t let HR tell you (as my HR department did) that we need to set up a gift card reward system to reward ABC type behaviors predictably and equally with XYZ rewards, and that all managers should have a meeting and agree on the metrics we would all use consistently to give them out.  That’s the surest path to an If=Then reward system.  Treating people fairly is not the same as treating them equally.  We want to be treating people fairly.  Fairly means treated as the individual (i.e, distinctly different) person I am. Conformity does not equal fairness. 

Now, I do like surprising people with gift cards. Or just seeking out someone to thank for a job well done.  It’s fun! Just keep mixing it up.  

People should be coming to work for the intrinsic rewards. Two Intrinsic rewards are positive emotion and relationships.  So, a Hi-5 is a good thing.  Someone may be a consistent high performer and not get a lot of recognition, yet they are happily engaged in what they find fulfilling every day.  Work can be (and should be) its own reward.  Someone else who has been working really hard to learn a new job may just barely manage something for the first time.  It might be far from perfectly executed, and it may have taken them a lot of time to do it, but YEA! They did it!  Hi Five!

So am I saying eliminate all extrinsic rewards: bonus money, special parking places, a corner office, a company car etc?  

If it is an If=Then bribe to elicit a certain behavior then yes, that is exactly what I am saying.  If it is rare, spontaneous and unexpected, a fairness issue or a group reward that is OK.  

If for example everyone who works for the company for 20 years gets XYZ then you can keep doing that.  That is just a fairness thing.  It is not something you did as an individual to get it,   it is something related to the job or role you are doing and everyone who is in that same group doing that same thing gets the identical same thing no more or less.  That’s just fairness.  Fairness is good.  

It is also better to give rewards to groups instead of individuals.  That fosters group collaborative effort instead of selfish effort.  We don’t want to create a system in which an individual wins and “the organization is the loser” as Deming says.

The best sort of reward is a bonus (pizza for everyone on Friday, or a company trip, or whatever) to everyone in the company.  Afterall, everyone who showed up contributed to the company’s success that week.  It is best to give the same amount to everyone regardless of position, or possibly even more to those who earn less.  It will mean more to them, and we all like taking care of each other.  Leaders who take care of those who need it most are regarded much more favorably by their group.  If you want to instill loyalty, take care of the ones who need the most help.  We all care about and will protect our group when our group cares about and protects the most vulnerable among us.  It’s a sign of a healthy group.

In any case, sharing an if=then reward with everyone in the company, or possibly just the people in a given location signals that ‘we are a team, and we are all in this together.’  Which is exactly the message you want to send.  We may be thinking about this reward while we are doing our work, but we will be thinking of the good it will do for the others in the group.  It is not a selfish motivation now.  Now I am motivated by doing something good for my whole group.

Bottom line: If your people are not engaged in their work and not being intrinsically fulfilled it could be that some of the company “compensation” systems may be unintentionally getting in the way. Have YOU had an experience like this? Let us know! Leave a comment on this blogpost or email us at [email protected]

Cheers for Friday,

Gavin Watson, Chair, Conscious Capitalism Connecticut Chapter

Gavin Watson & Associates

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