I suppose this touches on the psychology of
leadership too—which is a mess, by the way.
Well, what’s the fundamental characteristic
of a leader?
Here’s one: a leader is someone who knows
where he or she is going.
Well that would be the first thing, is like,
how are you going to lead unless you have
a destination?
Okay.
Well a destination implies an ethic.
And then you need to be able to communicate
that.
And you communicate your destination with
a story.
Now if I want to motivate people—and that’s
not the right way to think about it, because
you shouldn’t want to motivate people.
That’s management idiot speak, that is—What
you should so is figure out something that’s
worth doing, that you really think is worth
doing.
Something that you would actually commit a
substantial proportion of your life to.
And you should have deep reasons for pursuing
it.
And then if you’re a leader, well first
of all you have that established, but the
second is that you can communicate that, okay,
and you communicate that in a manner that
also appeals to other people’s sense of
purpose.
And so you’d say to someone, like if I wanted
to move forward with you on an enterprise
I would have to say, “Well here’s the
purpose of the enterprise and here’s the
reasons that it’s not only eminently justifiable
but more justifiable than anything else we
could be doing at the same time.”
And then I’d have to say, “Well here’s
what’s in it for me, and here’s what’s
in it for you.
And here’s why the two of us together can
further the enterprise and further what’s
in it for you and further what’s in it for
me.”
And then you have a situation there that Piaget,
Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist,
called an equilibrated state.
So an equilibrated state is a situation that’s
set up by two or more people where everyone
is participating in the state voluntarily.
So when he got that, he derived that notion
in part by looking at how children set up
games.
So if children are going to set up a pretend
game, what they do is they negotiate a little
narrative, to begin with.
It’s almost like they generate a little
play and they assign everyone their parts,
and then they manifest the play, and that’s
how they think.
But everyone has to accept their part voluntarily,
right, or the game won’t continue.
Now Piaget’s ethical claim, ethical analytic
claim was that a game everyone plays voluntarily
is more sustainable and productive than one
the people have to be forced to play.
And that was his fundamental distinction between
the utility of freedom versus the utility
of tyranny.
Because you could say, “Well the authoritarians
win.
Do this or else.”
That’s a way of organizing a society.
But Piaget’s claim was the enforcement costs
are so high that the free society will outcompete
the authoritarian society across time.
Now if you’re going to set up an organization
you can set it up on authoritarian lines.
But then you’re basically compelling people
to perform with punishment and fear.
It’s better to motivate them positively.
And the way you do that is say “Look, here’s
the goal, here’s your role.
Here’s what this will add to your life practically
and in terms of, say, significant engagement
and involvement.”
And then if you can do that the people will,
you know, with certain other preconditions
in place – competence, for example, and
a certain amount of conscientiousness – then
people will participate in the game voluntarily.
You don’t have to overlord them.
And so that’s – well, if you have any
experience in the world at all in complex
processes you known that that’s the optimal
circumstances under which to engage with other
people.
It’s like “Hey, we’re all in the same
boat.
We’re going somewhere interesting.
Everyone’s got a role to play.
We’re all in this together and it’s working
out for each of us as well.”
Now, there’s a corollary to that, which
is an interesting one.
So imagine this.
So let’s say you have your organization
and you have your goals and you’re out to
do something worthwhile.
And you can tell a good story about that.
So you’ve got people on board.
Now you really want to get people on board
and so now you’ve got two choices.
You could tell people “Go home and spend
four or five hours and formulate a career
plan about how you’re going to contribute
to this organization,” or you could say,
“No, no, you go home and you formulate a
plan for your life that includes your job
at this organization as a subset.”
And then imagine you do that with 100 people
in each group.
Then you run those people in a head-to-head
competition for a year to see who’s most
productive.
The answer – the people who formulate the
plan for their life.
They’re ten percent more productive.
So you can gain a ten percent increment in
corporate level productivity by having your
people write out a plan for their life.
We have a program like that (called Future
Authoring) online that thousands of people
have done now that increase the probability
that university students would stay in university
by 30 percent.
So and that’s part of the narrative issues.
It’s like what you want from your employees
is, well, you want them to be doing something
useful with their life that they’re engaged
in, because like if they can’t do that for
their life what the hell makes you think they’re
going to do that for your organization?!
And then you want them to see how working
for you serves their higher order purpose.
And if it doesn’t, because maybe they can’t
formulate that integrated hierarchal relationship,
well then they should find another job, because
that isn’t the job for them.
If your job is running at cross purposes with
your life, how the hell are you going to be
motivated?
You’re not.
At least you’re going to be stymied constantly
by the internal contradiction.
So imagine what you’re trying to do is you’re
trying to get everyone pointing in the same
direction.
But I don’t mean by eliminating all diversity
of opinion or anything like that.
It’s like the overall organization has a
point, and then everyone within that organization
has their point but they’re integrated within
that overarching coherent narrative.
That’s the purpose of leadership.
And to make that work at every level of the
organization.
That’s what you want to do.
It’s very difficult, but you build a stellar
organization if you do that.
