Power is not a possession but a relationship. And you don’t build relationships the same way you build things. The first step in keeping power is to stop trying so hard to hang onto it. The desire for power is not a desire for a thing but for a relationship.
Three Models of Leadership
Threat/reward: people see power as existing in the role rather than the relationship. When things get tough, they invoke authority or yield to someone else’s. They try to assure security by keeping people forever the same, and when they need change, they direct it at others — usually by trying to remove “bad” behaviors. Characterized by force and judge.
Linear: assumes observers have a perfect understanding of the task. Filters out innovations the observer hasn’t seen or doesn’t understand. If people differ from the ideal, they are “treated” — cut down to size or stretched to fit.
Seed (organic): sees people as sharing the same life force, not compared to some standard. The job of a leader is getting people in touch with their own inner harmony. Characterized by choose and discover. Leadership is the process of creating an environment where people become empowered.
The seed model is Rogers’ three conditions applied to organizations: congruence, unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding. how-to-talk-to-kids is the seed model for parents: acknowledge feelings, give information, let the person figure it out.
The People ARE the Work
If you are a leader, then the people are your work. There is no other work worth doing.
The belief that there is a task/people dichotomy is the second greatest obstacle to motivation — because it pretends that tasks are as real as people, rather than deriving from people. When we begin to realize we cannot do everything for others, we are ashamed. By pretending work is abstracted from people, we transform interpersonal failure into mechanical failure. It’s easier to say “we couldn’t get the program working” than “I wasn’t skilled enough to help Jack become better.”
This is the enough-people insight made operational: the mission and the social satisfaction must be solved together. Very little work justifies sacrificing the future possibilities of the people doing it. If you can’t do a task without exploiting people, perhaps you shouldn’t do it at all.
Willing to Be a Public Fool
If you can’t tolerate being a public fool, you’re not going to succeed in a role where all your actions are studied by everyone else.
The greatest obstacle to motivation is not self-blindness but the inability to see yourself as others see you. Since you can’t reliably know your effect on people, the best strategy is to accept you’ll sometimes be a laughing stock. This is courage-to-be-disliked applied to leadership and the-will-to-think applied to managing: the willingness to look stupid is the precondition for genuine learning.
“I feel ashamed about acting like a dictator and not trusting you, yet I don’t know how else to deal with my anxiety.” — radical-honesty in a leadership context. The vulnerability is the power.
School Teaches the Wrong Things
A lifetime of schooling teaches error avoidance. School taught the author a litany of wicked things: error, theft, and working together — the very things that generate ideas.
The emphasis on not making errors creates self-blindness as self-protection. Competition where cooperation is labeled “cheating” creates individuals who believe being smartest is desirable. Tests inculcate the idea there is one right answer. Johnstone saw the same: education kills spontaneity by teaching that the first thought must be rejected.
“Knowing” that there is only one right solution makes combining ideas seem foolish. Most prolonged arguments are not over relative value of solutions but over different understandings of the problem. Complex problems are never understood from the beginning, but we often think they are.
Helping and Being Helped
The only way to learn to be helpful is by learning to be helped.
Almost every offer to help is intended to do something for the helper. Attempts to help are often interpreted as attempts to interfere. Always check if people want your help. People don’t become leaders because they never fail — they become leaders because of how they react to failure.
Everyone is always doing the best they can. If you don’t think they are, you don’t understand the circumstances. This is no-bad-parts applied to organizations: every behavior is a protector serving a function. The leader who sees incompetence where there is actually a misunderstood constraint will make the constraint worse by adding blame.
The Big Game
“Who’s got the right to tell whom what to do?” — played without rules except “do whatever you can get away with.” Some play guilt, some play helplessness, some play expertise. The fascist pattern at the team level: power congealing while people are divided against each other, with the game hidden behind a professional facade.
Players respond to frustration by making decisions more rigid and precise — ever-expanding standards and procedures that nobody reads. The leader who organizes through written procedures soon loses touch with the people. Systems develop goals of their own, and the procedure manual becomes the system’s self-preservation mechanism.
The Plateau and the Crack
The typical feeling in the middle of the plateau: smug satisfaction. You survived the ascent, you’re still learning, nobody can tell you you’re stagnant. That’s locally-optimal: the strategy that worked well enough that every direction looks like descent.
The plateau starts to crumble with the introduction of a foreign element — which is identity-through-displacement applied to professional growth. Suppose you never encounter rude strangers or problems you can’t solve perfectly. More likely than being fully developed, it means someone is protecting you from growth. Perhaps it’s you.
Main Payoff
“I want you to make me a manager because I lack all the essential qualities of leadership.” — the moment the obsession cracked. If you can’t manage your own affairs, what makes you think you can manage others?
Illusions about leadership can be devastating, but illusions about yourself are the worst form of addiction. As a writer, I can expose some of your illusions about leadership — but only you can dissolve your illusions about yourself.
Becoming a leader means shifting the focus from your ideas to the ideas of other people.
References:
- Gerald M. Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach