By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
Leadership is hard. Really hard. It is very easy to be a bad leader, hence the common perception of bad managers. Everyone can identify bad leadership, but ask someone what makes a good leader. It is hard to define and hard to do.
Leadership also requires taking responsibility for others. Many people do everything they can to avoid responsibility.
Put these two factors together and it becomes pretty obvious why most people shy away from leadership. It is hard and when something goes wrong it is your fault.
Everyone can identify bad leadership
Even this I think is a little questionable. People frequently mistake their failures as failure of leadership.
You’re absolutely right. That’s a third point that I could have mentioned. Very good point.
Word. I think you’re correct and I think a big part of things is that leadership truly requires taking responsibility. So they often mistake their own failures as bad leadership because people have a much easier time blaming the problem on anyone but themselves. Talk to just about anyone about why they didn’t get a good review or got fired or got passed by for a promotion, and very rarely do they take ownership of the problem and instead blame just about anything else.
This is also I think tying into your idea that it’s easy to be a bad leader and the common conception of bad managers (especially middle managers.) Bad leaders blame the team or the market or the next level up in management, and rarely take ownership for the failures of the team because again, people just aren’t wired to do that very well.
These sound sort of contradictory, but I think that the ideas can coexist. A person might fail that has a good leader, but if they really are a good leader, they’re going to be asking themselves if they could have done something differently to help that person under them succeed. And if they are a good leader, that person’s failure won’t be allowed to become the team’s failure.
they’re going to be asking themselves if they’re going to be asking themselves if they could have done something differently
Parents used to read a quick story out of Guideposts every morning at breakfast. Think of it as a nondenominational, “I believe in god” sort of publication. Extraordinarily useful stories, didn’t require much, if any, religion.
One story about a pilot stuck with me then, and has for 40-years. Pilot’s telling his buddy how he’s responsible for everything on his aircraft.
“Yeah, but what if the ground crew gives you bad fuel.”
“I should have checked that.”
“Fine. But what if an engine fails?”
“That’s on me. I should have checked maintenance records.”
“FINE. What if terrorists hijack the plane?” (This was the 80’s when such events were hilariously common.)
“All me. The safety of my plane, my crew and my passengers is my responsibility alone.”
I’m doing an awful job retelling the story, but you get the gist. No matter what his friend threw at him, the answer was, “I could have done $X.”
Imagine the world we could live in if everyone thought, “I could have done something differently”, instead of whining. I’d be hard pressed to describe a bad spot in my life where I could not have made a different decision.
Related:
President at my last job came to my office and said, “Look. You’re going to fuck up at some point. All I ask is that you don’t lie, deflect responsibility or try to hide it. Just come to me, tell me about it and we’ll figure out how to fix it and make it not happen again.” Good as his word.
One time our biggest client’s managers figured a way to see each other’s salary in the new system. My fault? Meh, I could have blamed the software, it really was their oversight. OTOH, I could have found the bug myself with a little more diligence.
Pulled him out of a meeting, shaking in my boots, explained the issue. He just chuckled and said, “Don’t worry about it. Let’s go look.”
That’s the kind of attitude that makes you a trusted leader, on both our parts.
(Someone who had abusive parents is going to object to all this. I can’t help that. Taking responsibility, no matter what, has worked quite well for me in life.)
This is pretty much what I was getting at. There are always circumstances and things that hold you back, but foregoing your own agency is the one that will hold you back the most.
Yep, well said. For OP’s question… It’s pretty common to see a leader bring his whole group with him/her wherever they go and people follow because having a good leader is pretty tough to come by. I know a lot more people loyal to a particular person than a particular company.
Got my first taste as a kid leading the pack, alpha nerd.
Summer mornings I’d pick up the phone and school phone book and start dialing, or I’d get called first. It was on me to decide what we would do that day and get it together. Herding nerds is a hella chore. If we had fun, great! If the day didn’t work out? All on me. And guess who was the default dungeon master?
It quickly got to the point where I was responsible for our fun. Now translate that into leading a company’s success.
Lemmy: “CEOs are useless and should die in a fire!”
Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.
CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.
Yep people complain about CEO salary when they don’t realize that is how much it cost to pay them to leave their current (successful) situation in order to take on that role elsewhere. Not always the case, some come from within and get paid well to stay, too.
Salaries are definitely too high in a lot of cases, but you’re paid based on what you can command on the market and not a penny less. But yeah it fucking sucks haha.
For sure, and I failed to really get at this more in the OP, but it’s because of those difficulties that in part made me wonder, “Well, what’s an alternative look like?”
Individual leadership in particular seems primed for either abuse from above or below (i.e. a scapegoat for people’s avoidance of responsibility).
I agree with another commenter that this not something that people consciously think about when they do it. I think the main thing you’re touching on is groupthink. This is the reason that groups of people behave differently than you’d expect individual people to.
Positions of leadership (and therefore power) as an institution are traits passed down to us from Feudalists who organized society in hierarchies. I would say groupthink allows these kinds of social structure to continue long past the point that people realize there a better ways because they assume other members of the group are okay with them.
That’s all not to mention the fact that some people are genuinely skilled leaders or that people in positions of leadership are going to have a bigger influence in what is accepted in the group.
Monkey brain strong
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perhaps, somewhat related, a place to point out the example of tge republic of San Marino. They have, and have had, since an horn’t times: a system of co leadership at the highest national level of government.:+. Two people, elected, jointly holding the position, no singular figure, (and even those two, are changed, at most, every six months on a regular basis, and I belive they can’t serve more than one term consecutively, if at all).
Theyve had, San Marino, a long and sucequite sucessfully history. Perhaps the only country then known to survive the the conquest of many surrounding regions on the peninsula. No civil wars, and no transitions of power of changes of government in wchich anybody seems to have been so much as killed or seriously injured. And the system hof co government, and rotation aahs lasted a long time, the longest lasting continuous republic to exist today, I think it’s supposed to be. San Marino.
Because it’s easier than going on your own
For sure. Humans are super social and our big brains enable so much verbal, nonverbal, and written communication that we became more efficient as a group. All the greatest things out there, bridges and sky scrapers and roads were built by teams, not an individual, because of our strong communication skills.
I’ve always wondered this and wish I had an answer. But then again the answer is just that most people are followers. There’s way more copy cats and followers because it’s the easy thing to do. Having original thoughts, ideas, and following through takes actual work.
There‘s nothing more annoying than a group of „individuals“ on a night tour. Each move, either in this or that club, to the right or to the left, stay or lesve this place, as to be discussed in deep detail and from every micro perspective. Until a shared view emerges.
It’s simply a better way to be a group of people to have a leader who hs a say. Good leaders care about the group members and might even have more experience than the groups individuals. I‘m quite happy to have a guide in a museum who can tell stories about the images. I‘m happy to have a leader to follow in the mountains. And I‘m happy to have someone leading a group through new fields of anything, so I learn from an experienced and might do my own steps in this s field alone.
In those situations of course a leader is needed. I wasn’t even thinking of those types when reading ops post.
Because it’s easy. You don’t have to think for yourself if you let someone else do it.
Equally important is that, depending on context, leading or forging your own path is hard.
A lot of people don’t really understand how things work. Rather than try to understand, they latch on to someone who does understand. In return for their loyalty, they get a path up where they won’t threaten the boss in charge.
This is the best answer so far in my opinion
A lot of people don’t really understand how things work. Rather than try to understand, they latch on to someone who does understand.
Wouldn’t it be more apt to say that a lot of people latch on to someone who appears or acts as if they understand how things work, given the thinking that a lot of people simply don’t understand to begin with?
Yeah, it would be.
A perfect example is this guy from my last job. Thought himself a leader. Thought himself knowledgeable. Always had an answer, regardless of actual facts. Alternated between barking out orders and lamenting on how he had to do everything himself. Constantly getting schooled by people who actually knew the subject matter. Those who had been around just kinda put up with his BS because he filled a position that nobody else wanted.
Enter new management, who was very impressed with his authoritative tone, apparent breadth of knowledge, and willingness to lick boot. Suddenly management is bypassing dude’s bosses to go straight to the horse’s mouth and get the straight dope (which often involved taking credit for other people’s work and bus-chucking whoever was handy). All because someone who barely knew what he was talking about spoke confidently to people that had no idea what was going on.
Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.
A great example is when you’re in elementary school and you get that one really athletic kid on your team for some team sport in gym class. You know you’re not on that level and never will be, so you tie yourself to them, knowing that them succeeding is good for you.
Likewise, we like to attach our fortunes to a designated person, and they become greater than just a person in our mind. Like, that athletic kid is not longer simply a kid who’s good at sports; they’re the athletic kid. Our favored 19th-century political thought leader is no longer just some person who had opinions on society and wrote them down; they’re a political messiah.
Thinking for yourself is difficult. Turning off your brain and doing what you’re told is much easier than forging your own path.
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Ignorance is bliss, why do the thinking yourself?
This is such a deliberately charged question with so much inherent bias. Please don’t let this place become r/nostupidquestions
How might you put the question otherwise?
Human civilization has tended to always have a hierarchy with a leader at the top. Is this a natural phenomenon or a learned one?
Thanks, that does read as more balanced, I agree. I opted for what I felt more fitting for a casual community (which is how I see this community), but you’re right that in turn it’s more charged.
I think I would have been more inclined to write it your way if I were posing the question to a more academically inclined community like askscience or more specifically asksociologists. At the same time, though, I think the nature/nurture framing would lend itself to its own problems as one can readily find across various papers that brush against that sharp splitting vs. a more interwoven assessment (i.e. mixture of the two).
It’s called sheep behavior for a reason. Most people are hard wired to be followers. It’s why your best leader will always apply servent leadership. A servant leader shares power, puts the needs of the followers first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. Instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the people.
Because people are herd animals. It’s literally just biology.
