What’s in it for me? Learn what defines true leadership.
Our need for hierarchy and leadership is rooted in our biology.
A feeling of safety is our main engine of progress and must be ensured by the group and its leader.
When it comes to survival, living in a group offers many perks, the most important of which being that we don’t have to face threats alone.
But safety doesn’t just come out of nowhere: it is a group’s leaders who draw a circle of safety around their community members.
Given that living in a group makes us feel safe today just as it did when we lived in caves, we also need a leader who can help us pool our resources and achieve progress.
Today, the leader decides a company’s culture and values, and thus their employees’ mentality.
This is because a company is more than merely the sum of its buildings, investors and workforce. It also embodies a culture that dictates how employees approach various problems, treat customers, and prioritize values. And because leaders, such as CEOs, determine how the company is run, they also craft its culture.
Company culture doesn’t just affect leadership – it stretches all the way down the hierarchy by setting the standards that employees have to meet in order to get hired and ultimately stay with the company.
Our responsibility comes from our proximity to and empathy for others, without which we can cause great harm.
Our feeling of responsibility comes from our empathy, the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Without empathy, we risk becoming emotionally removed from decisions that affect others. And if we add physical distance to the mix, it leads to abstraction, where the consequences of our actions seem less real than they otherwise would.
Bad leadership has contributed to modern-day selfishness and the dehumanization of others.
We see this easily when we examine the baby boomers, or the generation born after World War II. Having grown up spoiled by a thriving economy and outnumbering their parents’ generation, they became more selfish than their parents. In addition, the natural instinct for the younger generation to oppose the values of the previous one made the baby boomers more self-centered and critical of authority than their parents, who had survived the war by pulling together.
Think, for example, of the 2009 salmonella outbreak that took the lives of nine people and contaminated hundreds more. How did this outbreak occur? The Peanut Corporation of America delivered contaminated peanuts to more than three hundred companies, thus allowing the disease to spread.
The truly horrifying part is that this was no accident: the PCA management knowingly shipped contaminated peanuts just so it could maintain its cash flow.
Modern society has become addicted to better and faster performance.
It may surprise you, but you can also be addicted to performance.
Consider the company America Online. The part of their staff responsible for customer acquisition came up with offers for “free” hours as a way to entice new customers. These employees were encouraged to focus on that singular area of performance, i.e., get as many people signed up as possible, and they eventually started making offers of 1,000 free hours per month!
Although they were doing what they were told, they ended up costing the company a lot of money by not taking long-term consequences into account.
Integrity and the ability to bond with others are essential for leadership.
What do you think of when you imagine a good leader? You probably think about their specific skills and expertise that help them excel at what they do. In actuality, it all comes down to integrity and the ability to bond with others.
We all know that leaders are only human, and we therefore don’t expect them to be perfect. What we do expect, however, is that they’re honest and forthcoming about their mistakes and take responsibility for them.
The feeling of safety that is so vital to the group is built slowly over time upon a foundation of honesty and trust. A leader thus has an opportunity to set an example to others with her integrity.
Furthermore, once leaders have earned the trust of their group, they must keep that trust by bonding with others. Whether with their employees, customers, colleagues or rivals, it’s important for a leader to maintain real connections in order to stay honest and focus on the needs of others.
Being a leader means putting others ahead of yourself in order to fulfill a vision.
Essentially, a leader forges a vision for the future that the entire group feels inspired to fulfill. Although every group member has individual goals, the group as a whole needs purpose in order to remain cohesive, and that purpose comes from the leader’s vision.
The true meaning of the term “leader” can be found within the word itself: you must lead people in a certain direction, showing them the path and giving them a purpose to walk on it. And on that path, the leaders need to follow last in line to ensure that every member of the group makes it to the end.