leftovers - tribe (extensions on leadership)

I heard some of you didn’t have time to read this post about leadership so I wrote a quick summary for you.

1. We glorify visible and easily understood leadership styles ahead of the less visible and difficult to understand styles.

2. The way we define leadership rewards leaders who prefer competition ahead of those who exemplify cooperation.

3. The collective understanding of what makes a leader biases us toward largely physical features – height, voice, presence – and this in turn means we dismiss potential leaders who do not possess these characteristics.

So that’s what happened in this post. You might be thinking, reader – that’s great, Tim, and thanks for the summary, but what does this mean for my weekend?

Reader, my response is – nothing. Go enjoy your weekend! You’ve earned it…

I do want to remind you, though, that just a couple of years ago half the country felt it had no better option than to vote for a guy who was most well known until then for yelling “YOU’RE FIRED” at his employees on national television. A lot of people back then, regardless of who they voted for a decade later, thought this was a fine example of the kind of confidence and assertion required in any great leader, and I suspect a lot of people today, regardless of who they voted for two years ago, still think this is what a leader should do on a daily basis.

But that’s not important, reader, neither here nor there, so go enjoy the weekend. Yup, well deserved, the weekend…

I do ask, though, for one last thing, which is to remember that when society makes a bad decision, it doesn't matter if a certain subset of the society would have made a better decision. It doesn't matter because in the end a society bears only the fruits of what it collectively sows. In the context of finding leaders, a seed is planted anytime we collectively decide what is or is not good leadership. We have a chance to plant a seed, for example, when we watch a head chef dump a plate of food before berating the cook. We have a chance to plant a seed when a helmet football coach blames a player for performing poorly. We have a chance to plant a seed when your manager disseminates what your teammate told him or her in confidence.

In these moments, our reactions can make all the difference. If we dumbly nod along, acknowledging these moments as good leadership, then we simply replant the same fields from which we've just harvested the newest crop of poor leadership. If we take a moment instead to ask difficult questions of our leaders, however, and maybe challenge our own perceptions of what truly defines great leadership, then maybe things can start to change.

reading review - tribe (extensions on leadership)

Hi folks,

I thought my most recent post about Sebastian Junger’s Tribe was all I required to wrap up my thoughts about his work. As I reviewed my notes, however, I realized that I'd left a lot out about Junger's views on leadership. In particular, I thought there was a lot to learn from how Junger described the two types of leaders that emerge in the aftermath of a disaster. These different models of leadership have importance consequences for the way we collectively define leadership and help shed light on the way I hope this definition changes in the future.

The first type of leaders Junger describes are those who takes urgent and immediate action whenever it is required to achieve a goal. They tend to dismiss the opinions of others if it interferes with the goal and often seem to lack empathy as a result. Their singular focus often proves essential when the situation demands a group pool its collective resources to bring a dangerous or volatile situation under control.

As the crisis passes, a second type of leader emerges. This type is better suited for longer-term challenges that do not benefit from urgency or a bias for action. These leaders consider factors such as morale and understand how to maintain a group’s positive mood. Whereas the first type excels at harnessing a group’s collective resources to meet urgent needs, the second type thrives at cultivating the cooperative ethos required to conserve resources in preparation for meeting long-term challenges.

Junger notes that leaders tend to be one type or the other (1). I agreed with this comment based on my own experiences with leaders and my own attempts at leadership. At the risk of oversimplifying this complicated topic, it seems to me that leaders who thrive in competitive situations struggle in cooperative environments while those who excel at fostering togetherness are not as effective when the situation demands a full commitment to defeat a clear opponent.

One thing I hope changes in the future is the way we glorify the first type of leadership at the expense of acknowledging the importance of the second type. I think this is a natural result of our collective bias for action and also speaks to how we elevate the importance of the direct impact we can observe over the indirect influence that is never obvious on the surface. When most people think about leadership, I suspect they are envisioning a commander, someone who is seen and heard organizing and dictating the action in fast-paced environments. They think of leaders who announce decisions with certainty and authority. If these leaders are uncertain, their outward confidence obscures the fact. They think, in short, of the first type described by Junger, and I think they do so because the characteristics these leaders demonstrate is the highly visible and easily understood form of leadership.

This working model of leadership dismisses the contributions of the second type and puts us at risk of devaluing the importance of long-term thinking and planning. By collectively agreeing that easily observed leadership styles are the only true form of leadership, we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to develop a deep understanding of the role leadership plays in confronting and resolving the chronic problems in our communities. This lack of understanding leads directly to our repeated failures to identify the right characteristics required in the leaders we appoint to address these problems.

I hope this collective view to leadership changes for a couple of reasons. First, I think the USA is at a crucial point in its history where the problems facing the country are the same problems our allies and neighbors are facing. We cannot defeat shared global problems with our favorite tactic - going at it alone. Whether the specific issue is climate change, human rights, or curtailing the actions of destructive dictators, the solutions require less and less of the competitive style of leadership Junger describes as the first type and instead demands the cooperative mentality demonstrated by the second type. If the USA is to remain the global leader it has always been, it must do so not by racing others to the top of the mountain but by instead becoming the trusted Sherpa that other nations rely on so that all of humanity can one day share space together at the summit.

The second reason is more of a grassroots idea but one that I think is far more important. The glorification of Junger’s first type leads us to think of leaders as having certain characteristics – presence, confidence, and assertiveness. These are characteristics that link closely to physical features and this results in the exclusion of many types of people from meeting a definition of leadership. When we systemically reject candidates for a position based on characteristics that are unrelated to success in the position, we systemically lower the chances that we find the best person for the job. I think for us to meet the challenge of finding today's leaders that can solve tomorrow’s problems, we must first closely examine our definitions of leadership and decide if we feel that these definitions position our society for bigger and better things in the days ahead.

Footnotes / previously on TOA…

1. I suppose all truths can be contorted into a false duality…

Longtime readers may recall similar thoughts from other books I’ve highlighted in this space. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz notes that CEOs tend to be Type One or Type Two – a ‘One’ is better suited to run an organization mired in a fight for its corporate life while a ‘Two’ is able to maximize an organization’s opportunities during periods of stability. And in Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, the chess grandmaster commented that players tend to be better suited to be challengers or champions – a challenger must focus on dethroning an opponent and learn to compete against a specific set of strengths and weaknesses while a champion must find ways to maximize his or her own skills in order to be best prepared for a fight against any future opponent.

reading tribe (work)

Tribe included a number of thoughts about our working world that I want to highlight today. These insights initially took me by surprise because I wasn’t expecting Junger to discuss work in a book I understood to be more about communities, unity, and togetherness. However, as I reflect on it now I realize that my surprise was misplaced because for many people work represents a significant opportunity to establish the closely-knit tribes Junger’s book is about.

There is an importance to work outside of any additional context for community or unity. Self-determination theory suggests that human happiness is closely linked to three things – being competent at work, living an authentic life, and remaining connected to others. Holding a job where your contributions are valued and respected is a direct way to address one of those three concerns while likely also indirectly improving happiness via the other two measures.

Junger took these thoughts about work and made an important suggestion about how society can do a better job (!) of bringing veterans back into society – give them jobs. It seems to me like we collectively do well to valorize veterans but we often come up short in terms of how we integrate them into the existing institutions and organizations that define civilian life. Bringing veterans directly into the workforce – or providing all the resources needed to prepare a veteran for the workforce – is the critical yet often missing manifestation of the ethos we all speak to when we announce our support for the troops.

Footnotes / correlation isn’t causation

0. Just a coincidence…

Historically, the unemployment rate and the suicide rate have shown a strong correlation. For example, the 2008 financial collapse and its ensuing effect on employment was followed by an increase of almost 5% in the suicide rate. As causation and correlation are two different topics, I thought it best to leave this thought in a footnote, but I do see why someone might look at these figures – as Junger did – and consider it another negative contribution to society by the financial industry.

reading review - tribe (the opposite suggestion)

One challenge Sebastian Junger faced as he wrote Tribe was how to use observation, intuition, or indirect evidence to prove a point. A common tactic he used in such situations was to note the absence of an expected observation and use this absence as a compelling starting point for answering a difficult question or making a challenging point.

A good example was how he approached the question – what is missing in life? Junger thought a good way to find possible answers was to observe what spontaneously arose when life was disrupted. Another example was how he studied emigration patterns for hints about what people value when they make major changes. The most startling such example was his note that on the American frontier, settlers often joined Indians yet Indians never joined settlers.

Junger also does very well throughout Tribe in sifting through observational data to make comparisons across groups that are nearly identical save for one attribute that is obviously different. I liked his comment that Northern European societies (and the USA) are among the first in human history to force small children to sleep by themselves and that they are also the only societies where small children bond intensely with stuffed animals. He uses a related technique when he notes that veterans report similar trauma rates irrespective of whether they actively participated in combat, an observation that suggests reentry to society is a much more significant issue for veterans than is commonly acknowledged.

Footnotes / leftover thoughts

0. Two more…

Another thought from Tribe that follows the theme of this post was how the way people miss aspects of a war suggests there is an underlying problem with the way we experience peace.

I also referenced in my original reading review that people who do not sacrifice for the group are unlikely to receive full acceptance from the group. To add to that thought, it is possible that if many or most people who are allegedly in the group do not sacrifice for it, then it is likely the case that the group in question does not actually exist.

reading review - tribe (the divisive weight of modern society)

Sebastian Junger points out in Tribe that the sheer size of our modern societies poses a significant challenge to our ingrained instinct for unity and connection. It is, after all, the first sustained period in human history when a person can go an entire day surrounded by people who are complete strangers. This lack of familiarity with others means the checks and balances a smaller group imposes on its members to discourage cheating, dishonesty, and fraud no longer function effectively.

In theory, we rely on our institutions to reign in this behavior and make up for what we’ve lost as we’ve scaled. However, a cursory glance at the newspaper tells a different story. We’ve become so accustomed to contempt as a substitute for criticism that public conversations take on the tone of a morality contest rather than serve as a means for cooperative problem solving. The stage is set by our so-called leaders who accuse rivals of trying to harm the country (a stance Junger notes was once referred to as treason) rather than accepting an opponent’s divergent views as a starting point for working together to solve difficult problems.

The biggest threat that modern society poses to our natural inclination for solidarity is its emphasis on underscoring differences. We talk of diversity as a means to embrace differences but I agree with Junger that societies can only focus so much on differences before it stops functioning. I feel the best approach is to acknowledge differences as preparation for eventually relating across those differences. As Junger points out, there is no better way to move toward this ideal than focusing on how someone contributes to the collective effort.

reading review - tribe

Tribe by Sebastian Junger (August 2018)

Sebastian Junger’s Tribe is a short but powerful examination of how we collectively experience unity. His main idea is that although we seem to have lost our collective ethos in the process of creating modern society, the example of groups coming together in difficult times suggests that there is significant potential if we can find a way to maintain the same solidarity with our neighbors when life returns to normal.

The way communities respond in the aftermath of a disaster is a classic example. These situations call for everyone to help their neighbor survive and the stakes are too high for chaos or pettiness. People in these situations quickly learn to assess each other based on what a person brings to the group and worry about nothing else.

The most important characteristic in this situation is the willingness to sacrifice. A person who is willing to make sacrifices for the group can be counted on to stand tall in the face of any upcoming threat. This type of person will be viewed by others as a reliable source of help and support in the rebuilding effort. Those unwilling to make sacrifices for the group are unlikely to be accepted by the group. This attitude suggests that the willingness to share whatever you have with everyone all around is perhaps the most important quality for someone who wishes to be part of a strong community.

One up: Junger points out that people who face an existential threat assess each other based solely on what someone brings to the group effort. I liked this thought and it made me think back to the time when I realized that not everyone naturally develops this skill. The moment came during a conversation I had in college with many of my teammates on the basketball team. The discussion was about how playing basketball taught us the importance of looking at other players based solely on how well they played the game. It was, we reflected, valuable preparation that allowed us to notice whenever someone was being treated unfairly based on a factor unrelated to performance, merit, or contribution. Through our experiences in basketball, we had arrived at school with a different view of the world than our fellow students who had grown up without similar experiences of competition or cooperation with peers.

One down: One of Junger’s ideas is that solidarity tends to emerge in response to an outside or unusual event. This is one of the big challenges that face suburbs because nothing ever seems to happen there. If citizens of these towns do not make a consistent and proactive effort to share with each other, the likely result is the decay of relationships and the loss of community.

Just saying: Junger mentions that ‘What would you risk dying for?’ is perhaps the most profound question anyone can answer. It’s no doubt an important question and I’m not here to make any suggestions for alternate questions.

However, I do feel like people probably don’t ask themselves this question very often, if ever. I seem to notice someone risking death every day for a reason I would categorize as ‘silly’ – swimming to a buoy, crossing a busy street, skiing down a mountain, whatever. These observations suggest to me that a lot of people don’t really consider this question at all (or perhaps just confirms how poorly we understand risk).