Solutions

Everything I want to say about leadership is in these excerpts from an article written in 2008 and published in New Scientist magazine. Now, ‘contain’ may not be the correct word because the author , Mark van Vugt, does not say exactly what I would like to say. I disagree with some of the ideas he expresses in the article and I am also certain that he did not intend his words to be interpreted the way I will. But those excerpts do point us in the direction of everything I think we need to consider if we are serious about gaining the greatest benefits from our exercise of leadership. The first excerpt comes from the end of the article. The second excerpt is intended as background for discussing how our ancestors developed the psychological bases for leadership.

There are major differences between modern leadership roles and the kind of leadership for which our psychology is adapted, and this mismatch can be problematic. For a start, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have deferred to different leaders depending on the nature of the problem at hand. Yet today a single individual is often responsible for managing all aspects of an enterprise. Few leaders have the range of skills required, which may account for the high failure rate of senior managers – in corporate America it runs at 50 per cent ( Review of General Psychology, vol 9, p 169 ). Surveys routinely show that between 60 and 70 per cent of employees find the most stressful part of their job is dealing with their immediate boss. This may be partly because ancestral leaders only acquired power with the approval of followers, whereas in modern organisations leaders are usually appointed by and accountable to their superiors, while subordinates are rarely allowed to sanction their bosses. What’s more, our psychology equips us to thrive in smallish groups of closely related individuals, which may explain why many people feel indifferent to large organisations and their leaders. Finally, in ancestral societies there would have been minimal differences in status between leaders and followers. In the US, average salaries for CEOs are 179 times those of their workers.

The following excerpt does more than just briefly detail the history of leadership among humans. I will highlight the significant points in a subsequent blog:

The animal evidence supports the idea that adaptations for leadership and followership tend to evolve in social species. In humans, they were probably further shaped by our unique evolutionary history. There were three distinct stages in human development where the nature of leadership altered to reflect cultural and social changes ( American Psychologist, vol 63, p 182 ).

The first and by far the longest phase extended from the emergence of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, until the end of the last ice age about 13,000 years ago. Natural selection for certain successful strategies of leadership and followership during this long era is likely to have shaped the distinctly human leadership psychology we still have to this day. Throughout this time, our ancestors probably lived in semi-nomadic,hunter-gatherer bands of between 50 and 150 mostly related individuals. Their lifestyle is widely thought to have resembled that of today’s hunter-gatherer societies such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert and the Amazonian Yanomamo. These groups are fundamentally egalitarian, with no formal leader. Although there are “Big Men” – the best hunters and warriors or wisest elders, for example – the influence of each is limited to their areas of expertise and, crucially, it is only granted with the approval of followers. This suggests that collaboration among subordinates allowed early humans to move beyond the dominance hierarchies found in other primates, towards a much flatter prestige-based hierarchy with a more democratic style of leadership.

With the development of agriculture some 13,000 years ago, groups settled, populations grew rapidly and, for the first time in human history, communities accumulated surplus resources. They needed leaders to redistribute this surplus and to deal with increasing conflict both within and between groups. The power of leaders grew accordingly, and with it the potential to abuse this power. Leaders could now siphon off resources and use them to create cultural elites, while disgruntled followers were less free to move away from exploitative rulers. The result of such changes was a more formalised, authoritarian leadership style and the emergence of the first chiefs and kings, as well as warlords bent on extracting resources through force.

The industrial revolution, some 250 years ago, paved the way for the final phase of leadership – the one to which academic discussions of leadership, which tend to focus on business and politics, almost exclusively refer. At the beginning of this era followers were little more than slaves, but as citizens and employees acquired more freedom to defect from overbearing leaders, the balance of power shifted away from authoritarian leaders and back to something more like the egalitarian approach of ancestral times.