Leadership Rambling

Lord Acton Was Right

Book Suggestion

I've marveled for years how so many soccer players appear content to win the starting job, or be selected as a captain, or be simply pleased with themselves as senior players on a team.  None of which ensures a team's success on game day.  Certainly the most frequent stumbling block of a team endeavor, this balance of the intermediate individual goals and the aim of creating a successful team.  Consider this stat:

Of the approximately 10,000 men's NCAA Division III soccer players, 3% of all players earn All-Region (and by extension 41 of those same players are selected to the 41 All-American spots) whereas one quarter of one percent of teams win a title. If you select for All-Conference honors, assuming that each of the 43 conferences select 1st, 2nd and honorable mention teams, that's about 1419 players, or almost 15% of all players earning an individual honor.

Bottom line, it's way easier to be noticed individually than as a team.

Everyone gets a trophy, right?

Pithy quotes about leadership are tossed about frequently, but upon the rare occasion when empirical research offers a qualitative endorsement of a particular point, it's worth paying attention.  In Daniel Goleman's "Focus" he cites research by Dacher Keltner of Cal Berkley about the emotional and empathetic attention of people by hierarchal status:

Keltner's group has found similar attention gaps just by comparing high-ranking people in an organization with those at the lower tiers on their skill at reading emotions from facial expression.  In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation - all signifying a lack of attention.
In contrast, people of lower social status tend to do better on tests of empathetic accuracy, such as reading others' emotions from their faces - even just from muscle movements around the eyes.  By every measure they focus on people more than do people of higher power.

(From P.124 "Focus")

Power corrupts....and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the good Baron observed.  And here we might see why.  People in positions of greater power (ostensibly leaders) simply stop paying attention to others.  That's not a anecdotal observation of a 19th century aristocrat, it's an empirical fact of 21st century social science.  The implication of the research of course is that the trickle-down effect of this sort of behavior may be what keeps teams from performing at their peak.  At each step of the hierarchy, the person holding a higher power position is tuning out the person(s) "beneath" them.

Of course, were a leader to be empathetic and inclusive, would they be lauded and held up as an example to be followed?  You wish, pollyanna.  They'd be torn apart as weak and uncertain.  A killer catch-22.

Which brings to mind another smart fellow who said "Those who seek power are not worthy of that power."  That's been around for a while; since 400 BC, give or take a few decades.

Effective teams and effective leaders somehow manage to dodge some of these obstacles...but there can't just be one effective leader- the whole group has to be populated with some pretty fertile raw material in leadership terms to ensure smooth, top-to-bottom attention (and by extension, value) is paid to all stakeholders.

Blustering like Chris Christie or making grandiose promises like Obama get you elected (because too few understand what truly effective leaders look like?)...but true leadership and effective team building is the product of a much humbler and inclusive approach.