Leaders, Followers, and Jokers
As an organizational psych professor, I would ask my students to list leaders. They could name anyone from real life or fiction. The list invariably included famous historical figures like George Washington and Abe Lincoln, well-known business figures like Steve Jobs or (later) Tim Cook, fictional characters like James Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard, Luke Skywalker, and even Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.
Eventually, I’d pause and ask the students if they could identify anything that all of their leaders had in common and anything that was missing.
With enough prompting the class eventually noticed the obvious: the lists were almost entirely made up of men, usually white men, and the choices of leaders listed were mostly unaffected by the racial and gender makeup of the class. This is one of those results that is both unsurprising and surprisingly unimportant. While race and gender are certainly factors, they are also hard to change. Going down the rabbit hole of the obvious obscures the more interesting questions: what else did these leaders have in common, and what causes some people to be seen as leaders and others not to be seen as leaders?
The key point that students consistently missed is that leaders have followers. A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk. While this may sound like the first rule of tautology club (which is the first rule of tautology club), the relationship between leaders and followers changes the question to “how do I get followers?” This isn’t always easy.
How leaders get followers varies considerably with the leader and the situation. For example, being tall and having a deep voice — characteristics more common in men than women — can provide a significant leg up. However, if that doesn’t describe you, there are plenty of other methods. Indeed, one of the key points in understanding leadership and how to become a leader is realizing that there are many paths and part of being a successful leader is figuring out the techniques that work for you. While I’ll talk about a few of them here, I can’t possibly cover all of them in a short article.
Leaders are perceived as being confident. Therefore, appearing confident is a way of looking like good leadership material. Unfortunately, appearing confident doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is actually competent. Appearances can be deceiving, and often are. However, just as our fictional leaders always seem to know what to do and always appear very confident when they take risks, we expect the same of our real leaders. Similarly, appearing to be energetic makes you seem more like a leader; conversely, if you can make other people seem low-energy, they will also be seen as less charismatic, and hence less like a good leader.
One of the currently popular concepts around leadership that we hear in politics is the “beer” metric: is this someone I’d like to have a beer with? The beer metric is really a narrow slice of the more general concept of likability. It’s well established that people like to do business with someone they like, so good salesmen try to get you to like them. Some leaders will do the same, particularly if likeability is important to them being a leader. Naturally, it is to a potential leader’s advantage to define likeability in terms that favor them and exclude as many other people as possible. If it’s the case that the beer metric were to favor, as a wild example, men over women, then it is clearly advantageous for a man to emphasize that metric. Understanding that’s what is being done makes it easier to reframe the debate and focus on other areas of likeability.
A powerful likeability technique is demonstrating that you are similar to your potential followers. This can be done via speech patterns, cultural references, modes of dress, shared activities, and pretty much anything else you can think of. A particularly pernicious form of similarity is created by attacking outside groups, such as the other teams in sports, other companies in business, or other racial or ethnic groups in politics. Attacking the Other creates a point of reference that is not your target group of followers. Because the Other is now a psychological anchor, the differences between the would-be leader and their potential followers are minimized (or erased) by comparison. This may not be such a terrible thing if we’re talking about Red Sox vs. Yankees, but can easily spin out of control as the stakes get higher.
A strong situational component of leadership is that leaders are seen as providing safety, structure, and inclusion. How much these factors matter depends on the specific circumstances. In small groups where no one really knows anyone else, the person best at providing structure and sense of safety often becomes the leader. Even when a formal leader is assigned to the group, de facto leadership may well devolve on the person who best provides for a sense of safety and inclusion. Creating structure, for example by helping people know how to behave or how to deal with a confusing situation, is seen as a mark of leadership. Potential leaders who can do that, even if by creating chaos that they then solve, can build followers, particularly since chaotic situations are harder to keep track of and the relief when the chaos is resolved is often a powerful form of “safety.” Indeed, one of the very effective strategies I’ve observed in years of live role-playing games is that if you can get people excited, scared, confused, or into a variety of other strong emotional states, and then provide them a path of action, they will usually take it. That’s in a game; it works even better in real life.
One of the funny things about attracting followers is that eventually it becomes a self-perpetuating process. Here’s a simple experiment you can do with the help of a few friends: on a city street, stare up at a spot on a building. Every five minutes or so one of your friends joins you. While one person staring at a wall is just a joker staring at a wall, once several people are doing it random people start to join in. They might even convince themselves that they’re seeing something. So yes, one way to get followers is to pay people to be followers until the real ones show up.
Ultimately, leadership is really about attracting followers. Without followers, you don’t have a leader, you have a joker. The mere presence of followers is often enough to attract more followers, and so on, leading to the impression that you are following the leader. Therefore, when someone impresses you as a good leader, see if you can spot the techniques they’re using to get you to feel that way.
There’s a lot more to this topic and I’ll talk about some other techniques in future posts.
