The explanation for this divide is provided by an experiment which has a biscuit as the protagonist … Three people are selected to participate as “guinea pigs”. Two of them are told to draw up a document, working on their own, while the third one is instructed to assess the work of the other two, and to decide how much each of them should be paid for their efforts; in other words, the third person takes on the role of the boss. Half an hour into the exercise, the researchers leave a plate with four tasty-looking biscuits behind the three participants. Each person eats one biscuit, but there’s still one left which all three of them want. Invariably, the person who is playing the role of the boss not only eats the remaining prized biscuit; he, or she, also makes a great show of doing so. The researchers reached several conclusions based on the experiment: having power is not just a pleasant sensation (this in itself is no great revelation); it can also insulate us from the needs of others and, in certain circumstances, can lead us to make a great show of ignoring their needs.

I’m sorry to say that the biscuit experiment’s ripple effects can be felt right through all areas of most companies. And the toxic tandem which it leaves in its wake become even more severe in times of crisis. Fortunately, Sutton provides a useful framework which allows bosses to focus on what their people most need from them: in situations where employees feel threatened, a good boss finds ways to provide more predictability, helps his/her staff understand the company’s decisions, empowers his staff to feel in control, and shows compassion. In his article “How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy”, published in the Harvard Business Review, he explains how to do this:

• Predictability. Give people as much information as you can about what will happen to them and when. Preparation will reduce their suffering, and they can relax in the meantime.
• Understanding. Accompany any major change with an explanation of why it’s necessary and how it will affect routines. Internal communication should be simple, concrete, and repetitive.
• Control. Don’t frame an obstacle as too big, too complex, or too difficult to overcome; people will be overwhelmed and freeze in their tracks. When it’s broken down into less-daunting components, they can tackle it with confidence.
• Compassion. Tend to the emotional needs of people who are let go, and help them preserve their dignity. This is essential both for them and for their colleagues who survive the cuts.

In short, a manager who can provide predictability, understanding, control and compassion will avoid the toxic tandem and the biscuit’s possible ripple effects.

How do we choose our leaders? The Spanish broadcaster Eduardo Punset tackled this question with the evolutionary social psychologist Mark van Vugt of the University of Kent in his programme Redes (“Networks”). (For those of you who understand Spanish, I’ve inserted the video of the interview. If you want to read the interview in Spanish, the transcript is here). Among the many ideas discussed, I found the following especially interesting:

• Who comes first, the leader or the followers? In the animal kingdom, it’s the followers who come first. To increase their chances of survival, animals stick together in a group. When the strongest animal goes in search of water or food, the rest follow it. According to van Vugt, leadership among humans developed in a similar way: first came the followers, then the leader.

• We can identify three types of leadership on the evolutionary ladder. First we have “democratic leadership” which existed in hunter-gatherer societies around 2.5 million years ago. In this type of society there was no overall leader. Instead, there were different leaders according to the “area of expertise”: war, hunting, etc. Next appeared the phenomenon of hereditary leadership, around 10,000 years ago. Hereditary leadership was typical in societies based on farming, and led to the creation of a monarchy and aristocracy which passed from one generation to the next. Finally we come to the concept of leadership prevalent in more “developed” countries today, where followers have much more freedom than before and demand leaders who are closer to them. This type of leadership shares certain characteristics with leadership in hunter-gatherer societies.

• In the opinion of van Vugt, we choose female leaders when we want someone to smooth over conflicts, and male leaders when we are more interested in protection and defence from outside threats. This paradigm makes it difficult for women to become leaders of countries (as was the case with Hilary Clinton, according to van Vugt). This male/female dichotomy is based on attitudes we had in the past but, unfortunately, it still influences our way of thinking today. (As an aside, we usually choose older politicians in times of stability and younger politicians in times of change, so Obama got the slogan of his campaign right!)

• Finally, studies in companies have shown that leaders who are chosen by their colleagues demonstrate the same qualities as the leaders of our distant ancestors: they are reliable, trustworthy, not overly ambitious, and, interestingly, taller. I will elaborate on these ideas in another post.

Before approaching such a broad subject, we need to state a basic premise: we would do better to speak of leaders rather than leadership in the abstract. Now, the necessary but not sufficient condition of being a leader is to have followers. Let us be clear, being recognized as a leader does not mean that we have to become a combination of John Wayne and Albert Einstein, in the words of Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström, the authors of Karaoke Capitalism. The essence of being a leader is much simpler than that, although no easier. Whereas managers are in charge of teams who follow their orders, leaders have people who want to follow them. This fundamental difference has two implications. First, we all have been, or may in the future be, leaders in a particular situation. Secondly, leadership is above all a question of the emotions. In point of fact, the best leaders I have known all have one thing in common, judging from what people who work with them have told me: the utmost understanding of each person they work with, the utmost awareness of their colleagues’ strong and weak points, and the ability to inspire the utmost trust. Their colleagues want to follow them not only for rational considerations but also for emotional ones. One last point on the subject of leaders. There are as many types of leaders as teams to lead. There are leaders whose strong point is their expert knowledge (like Gil Grissom in CSI Las Vegas, to take an example from TV), leaders who base their success on their ability to influence people while yet others who are very charismatic (such as Jack Welch, ex-Chairman and CEO of General Electric). Leaders of all types share common characteristics, one of the most important being the ability to communicate.

All organizations need to have efficient channels of communication if they want to avoid becoming a parody of the game of Chinese whispers, where a message is passed along a chain of people only to emerge completely distorted when it reaches the last person. To avoid a company falling into this trap, leaders have to communicate clearly, to communicate frequently and to check that their staff really understand what they’re trying to get across. If they don’t do this, they can suffer the same fate as Captain James Cook, the Englishman who discovered Australia in 1770. On disembarking to explore the newly-discovered continent, he saw a strange animal jumping around. He asked the Aborigines what it was called. “Kan-ga-roo” they replied. And so he called it a kangaroo. Years later, philologists began to study the Aborigines’ language. They discovered that “kan-ga-roo” actually means “I don’t understand”.  I wonder how many kangaroos are jumping round your office…

On-going communication can be extremely tiring but it is very productive. It helps to transmit emotions, values and the company culture and it also stops people wasting time trying to find out what’s going on in the corridors. Let us not forget that humans, according to psychologists, are informavores (consumers of information). If leaders do not provide all the necessary information, their staff will go and look for it in rumours, the number of which is always in direct proportion to the opaqueness of the organization.

To sum up, if we want to become good team leaders we need to develop excellent communication skills, regardless of what type of leader we strive to be. We need to communicate what we want, what we think and, of course, check that our message has been received loud and clear.

When management studies began to focus on leadership, the “development looking out” model was the order of the day. Writers analyzed great leaders from history or in business, such as Jack Welch, Napoleon or Churchill. They looked at how these figures acted to try to extract patterns of behaviour to hold up as a model. This approach is interesting. It gives us clues as to how we can improve, and it also provides a wealth of famous quotes to try out on friends and clients.  However, when we read biographies of famous people or heroes, we are often drawn into thinking how short we fall of their standards. And this is indeed the case. It’s as if being a leader meant becoming a combination of John Wayne and Albert Einstein, as the authors of Karaoke Capitalism, Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström, say.

The essence of being a leader is much simpler than that, although no easier. The necessary, but not sufficient, condition of being a leader is to have followers. Whereas managers are in charge of teams who follow their orders, leaders have people who want to follow them. This fundamental difference has many implications. First, we all have been, or may in the future be, leaders in a particular situation. This may come as something of a relief. Secondly, leadership is a question of emotions. For this reason, any effort directed at developing our potential as leaders has to be based on “looking in”.

We all know that we have to delegate. We don’t need a consultant or a book to tell us that. What we have to find out, and afterwards deal with, is what makes it difficult for us to delegate in the people we manage or to spend more time with them. At root, the answer is always a silent but important emotion: fear. As a corollary, the development of leadership skills is bound up with dealing with our fear, since it is fear which stops us using all of our potential and making the most of our talents. I don’t think that we can become better leaders without becoming better people; and that takes a lot of courage. Looking in is not always a pleasant task, and I know too many people who find  thousands of excuses not to do it.