Understanding Leadership: Power, Influence, and Effective Qualities

so all right cool we'll get started so today is gonna be kind of an interesting mismatch or kind of mashup of these last

couple that we did so if we think about it we went through influence right it's kind of this

potential to get people to do what you want them to do to get people to act in a certain way but we also talked about

power which is more of kind of a heavy-handed like getting people to do what you want them to do and so you

really got to think like where does actual leadership fit into all of that is leadership a form of power is

leadership a form of influence does it depend on how you conceptualize it and how you view yourself as a leader so

we'll go through a lot of kind of the the qualities that make leadership a good thing but we'll talk about how it

can kind of be pushed into a negative direction if you start viewing it more as a power Dynamic than really is as a

way of inspiring and leading people in the way that people want to be led because I think that's a human nature

that we have is that we tend to want people to lead especially in situations where we don't want to take the

responsibility where we don't really have the info Nation stuff like that so uh this will be a cool one there's quite

a bit of information there's some stuff at the end that's kind of theory driven we'll see kind of where everybody's at

if they're asleep by then how deep we go into that stuff So today we're going to talk first about

kind of what leadership is and like what's expected of leaders what do leaders actually do in the real world uh

and then we'll talk about the this emergence property which for those that stay for the group activities this is

something I I kind of mention a lot but it's something that's really Salient when you think about any type of group

activity that you've ever done is that there tends to be this emergence property like someone just kind of like

takes charge or takes responsibility and so what are the the components that kind of make that possible and then at the

end so this is the stuff that I'm talking about some of this is a little text heavy there's some really cool

ideas in a lot of this but we'll talk about how the the research field has kind of moved in a certain direction to

train people to be good leaders and how like what are the individual like factors that that play into people being

a good leader or not so this is your kind of textbook

dictionary definition of what leadership actually is right so guiding other people

being in charge of the organizing principles and coordinating and supporting everybody a huge part of

leadership though is this kind of motivation role that you have of being able to really get people on the same

page and get them to work towards a common goal and that that motivation what we'll kind

of get into later in the lecture is really the identity principles that we've talked about good leaders the ones

that can really get you to buy into like what the group is about what the values of the group are what the goals and the

aspirations of the group are and they're what really start to shed those personal identity type things of like I want to

give up some of my values because I believe in you I believe in this group right and this is something that's kind

of inherent in our nature as a social species and this isn't just I mean this is kind of a little anecdote about

Egyptian hieroglyphs 5000 years ago but you see this in troops of chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas like all of the

higher Apes have these these hierarchies and these these leadership qualities that someone in the group kind of takes

the role so it's something that when we get later into the lecture we'll talk about how

leadership has emerged in Western cultures and how certain types of people have been left out like women and

minorities and things like that but it's really important to remember that this is something that's inherent in all of

the cultures that have existed across thousands of years and so when you have these kind of structures in society that

are primarily made up of white men it's really more about that culture and who's considered a minority who's kind of

accepted into the leadership positions and so this was kind of what I was getting at the very beginning of the

lecture so is leadership power right like what do you guys think

it's a it's a form of power do you like the type of leaders that just tell you what to do that hold some

type of punishment or some type of reward over your head

so this is something that's pretty like fraught throughout all of political philosophy is that lots of people that

have ended up in these really high level leadership leadership positions really see it as a form of power like Hitler

and Ho Chi Minh so you have this quote or this kind of belief of Hitler that it was the ability to move the masses and

used kind of was saying like I can use persuasion I can use influence but I can also use like sheer power right it's in

my purview as a leader to decide whether I want to go the power route or the influence route and that it's really

about that power that I have that makes me the leader that I am and then you have Ho Chi Minh

was kind of in a very similar situation he thought that it was his job as a leader to to change people to mold them

into whatever it is that he saw their purpose being right I don't care about your individual Pursuits you are going

to fit this mold this society that I create and I'm going to use my power to get you to do that

but what really has come out of a lot of the studies around leadership around kind of the word like what it actually

colloquially colloquially means in our language is that it's it is a type of power but it's with the people and not

over the people it's something that the people actually want you to have that power they want to be led so leadership

is kind of this reciprocal relationship that people are actually saying like yes I believe in you I trust you I want you

to lead me rather than just doing what you told them to do because you have some kind of power over them

and so this is where kind of in the language when you're talking about leadership versus kind of management uh

leaders are the ones that actually see people as people the ones that see people as being kind of a group that

wants to be led that wants to be inspired and motivated rather than just numbers on a spreadsheet

and so we have uh this I remember I think I put this together when my son was like super young I was like all baby

crazy uh right so this is your your typical nature nurture idea that you see in almost every type of class biology

psychology whatever it is it's like is it something about the person or is it something about the environment and so

you have as early as Aristotle these philosophical talks that were happening around leadership was this idea that the

people that are ruling are the people that were meant to rule right this is something that comes out of

Plato too and the whole idea of the Republic that the people who become the leaders were kind of destined from birth

to be the leaders and they have the personalities they have the qualities that make them rulers

but what really is coming out of the research is that yes there is something that

might kind of push someone in the direction of leadership there are certain personality

traits there are certain things and qualities the way that you have relationships with other people that

lead to leadership but that doesn't mean that someone can't actually learn those things so these are things I was talking

about so temperaments and intelligence skill is a big one so people like to be led by people that actually know what

they're doing right and this idea of kind of managing relationships between people so if you have these types of

kind of agreeable temperaments and high IQs being really good at what the people around you want you to be good in then

you kind of will naturally fall into that role but this is something that can be learned and that's what's kind of the

models and the theories at the end of the lecture get into is that there's tons of workshops now I mean people make

thousands and thousands of dollars like running these these online uh become a leader in 10 hours right and it's based

on all of this research right it's saying like what are these things that make people a good leader and how do we

actually teach people to to start embracing that to start practicing those types of skills right

and so is this something that has to be there do leaders actually need to be there for

a group to even be kind of considered a group and so there are these kind of common rules that that appear that

um usually a leader will kind of appear and emerge when there's kind of success within the reach so you're all kind of

working towards something but you kind of have to get past that last hurdle someone usually steps up to kind of help

motivate and Inspire the group a lot of this the rewards have to be valued right so if everyone's working towards

something and nobody really cares about what the reward is at the end then nobody's going to want to be told what

to do nobody's going to want to be led hi this is a big one right so leadership is a group activity it's something about

leading multiple people and so if everybody's kind of doing their own thing then a leader is actually going to

be more of a hindrance than a help let's get to that idea of skill that I talked about right so

this is something that's really helpful when you guys are all working towards some common goals some common purpose if

someone has experience as a leader then they usually pop up but this is uh this is a big one um that we've talked a

lot about in this class is that small groups are groups that don't have a lot of structure to them influence is really

equal through the group it's when things start to become large when there's a lot of moving pieces that there needs to be

someone to kind of hold all of those pieces together to really see the whole forest for the trees and that's usually

when kind of leadership emerges and so uh and this is this is a big one too if you've ever watched any show

about some plane crashing in the wilderness or like there's always these scenes about like who's gonna make the

decision for all of us and then there's always conflict about whether or not that person's actually making the good

decisions and leading us away from the zombies in the right way like so stressful situation is usually kind

of promote leadership but this is a really interesting point here I do do followers

kind of hate being led and I think this is something that's come up quite a bit in this class is that

a lot of us don't really want to be the leader most of the time the leader position kind of sucks a lot of the time

you're the one that everybody is usually pissed at because you're the one making the decision you're the one taking all

of the responsibility so a lot of the time we want to be led right we don't want to be in groups that are

leaderless because it puts more responsibility on us as individuals especially if it's something we don't

necessarily care about and they've shown a lot of the research has shown that the groups that do have

leaders are usually a lot more productive a lot more efficient but this is that interesting caveat

right where if you go into it into a work situation and you tell them like identify your worst thing about working

here what do you hate most about working at Starbucks right why do you want to stand on the the corner with your signs

and create a picket line a lot of them talk about the leadership right I mean this whole thing that's going on with

Starbucks right now is about the leadership not recognizing that they should have these uni unionized type of

benefits and all of these kind of things so usually people are really quick to say like it's all this person's fault

it's all the leader's fault it's all the leadership's fault but at the same time it's not that they don't want a leader

they just want a better one right Grass Is Always Greener and that's usually the case with all of this stuff

is that we're constantly it's really easy to say that you don't like something and to just kind of believe

that something better exists than thinking that there might be some way of changing the one that you have and so

the whole idea here is that we don't resist having a leader um and usually there's a whole process

where we're trying to come together to to figure out who is the best person to lead right

who's the person with the best skills who's the person that's that knows most about what we're trying to do who's the

one that knows the most about managing all these interpersonal interactions between us and so we're constantly

trying to create leaders but then we also hate them it's a interesting dynamic

and so I I kind of hinted a couple slides ago that a lot of the research shows that leadership kind of does make

a lot of positive differences and so these are just some of the kind of textbook examples there's a lot more

here that you could list but um this was a really interesting one we've

talked about the bystander effect in here before uh in and they've shown this really interesting effect that if a

group comes across someone that needs a lot of help that if there is a leader present in that group they usually take

that moment to like make a point of like that person needs help let's come together as a group and let's help this

person and it's because the leaders usually have more of a sense of responsibility the bystander effect is

about diffusion of responsibility it's like oh someone will take care of that but the whole thing about being a leader

is that you are the one that's supposed to take care of that right and so that's there's something about that that causes

them to to take action uh I mean this is a big one structure is what really falls on the leader's

shoulders are the ones that that really need to kind of put all of the pieces together they need to make sure that

everybody's communicating well and they need to be the one that's really kind of bringing the discussion

forward about how to solve all of these problems that we face and especially early on and the good

leaders the ones that we'll talk about at the end of the lecture are the transformational ones the ones that can

really Inspire the group of people that can get them really excited and so this talks about that being something that's

that's really common early on because like when you get in you have this new leader you're like we're going to make

all of these changes it's going to be great and then like the excitement dies off and like none of that actually

happens um the good leaders are the ones that can keep that going right that are like

this is a great group to be a part of like this is what we're doing this is how we're changing the world I'm taking

stances on all these things that I believe in and I think that you all should too this is this is who we should

be but a lot of the conflict that comes out of leadership comes from all of this negative stuff that can happen right so

uh it's it's not easy to make decisions for big groups of people and to kind of expect that everybody is going to be

okay with it I mean we live in a democratic country where it's usually what a 49 51 split whenever there's an

election it means half of the people in the country hate what's going on I used to remember in like undergrad I was like

we just need to have like a six-party system but then I talked to someone from Italy that was like we have a six-party

system whenever someone wins it's like 25 of the population that voted for him and 75 percent of the population hates

them so like there's not an easy solution here someone's always going to be pissed off about it

um this is a big one right is that this is kind of that negative image that you have in your head when you think about

bad leaders is that they're kind of taking advantage of their position they're exploiting the group they're

taking a bunch of personal stuff and so and that's kind of this one too is that the leaders are enjoying all of

these kind of rewards and outcomes that come with this position that they've risen to and that's when it starts to

look more like power right those some of the negative things that we talked about with power in the last lecture was when

you get to that position and you use it in kind of an exploitative manipulative way instead of being with the people

this is a really common I think it says it on here yeah really common in Western cultures if you've ever watched like

college football and you see that like as soon as a team loses it's like fire the coach there's like this this

Merry-Go-Round of coaches just like from group to group and there's this idea that like the leader is the only reason

why you're why you're failing right it's bad leadership that's the only reason even though you're on a team of

how many dozen people that each have their own individual roles their responsibilities I mean this is not just

like the coach but all of the the responsibility and and weight that's put on like quarterbacks in football it's

like oh yeah we're losing because we have a bad quarterback not because we have a bad front line bad defensive ends

bad wide receivers whatever it may be it's always this this Romance of leadership that you have to be the hero

you have to rescue everybody it's your role your responsibility to kind of come to the aid of everyone and you usually

get all of the credit um I mean I'm using football as a big example here but you think about when

trophies are given at the end of the year who do they hand it to they usually hand it to the coach and the quarterback

they're like you did it all good job right um and it's what is kind of coming out

of this is that it's completely kind of invalidating all of these other people how many times

have you ever heard about how successful the person that snaps the ball is right like that person never gets credit but

all the time when when something fails it's the team that fails right and so it very much overlooks all of

these different contributions that everybody is putting in and there could be a huge component of

leadership that's kind of leading things in the wrong direction because you are making decisions for a big group of

people but it's it's this whole idea do they make all the difference that is a really

easy trap to fall into and it's something that's very much romanticized so then what what is it right what does

it take to actually be a leader and so a big part of it I mean we we're thinking about how to differentiate this

from just having power over someone right having the ability to make someone do what you want them to do this is

reciprocal right this is not you do what I tell you to do or else and it's this ultimatum it's really like look this is

how we're working together to come to this solution I'm here to help you you're here to help me and that's what

creates this kind of leadership environment but it's also transactional right uh

what we saw in the last lecture and what's very true about power and Leadership is that the people that are

in these positions put a ton more work in than a lot of the other people do because of all the responsibility that's

on them and so you have this constant like working together of like okay I'm gonna put in all of this work but I kind

of expect the same thing from you I want I want to see the same kind of energy from all the people

and a lot of it is because of these joint rewards that come from coming together as a team right

um and this is a big one this is one that we'll talk about at the end of like what it means to be a good leader uh is

usually a lot of the research is kind of falling on this idea of transformational processes

of the ability to really kind of get the group to to buy into like who and what you are to really tap into these

identity processes of like like become one of us because we are so good we're the best group around whatever it is

right and it it gets people motivated if people care about the group if they care about what the group is doing what it's

trying to achieve they're going to be a lot more motivated they're going to feel more satisfied and so it's being able to

tap into those processes that really allow you to get the kind of respect and loyalty that you get from people on a

leader leadership position um and so this is the big big Point here uh

is that we're trying to kind of differentiate this from power but the real where it fits in the best in

comparison with power is what we talked about in terms of legitimate power in the last one and legitimate power is

where everybody kind of agrees that you should be in power like I'm giving you all of these responsibilities because I

trust you because I believe that you should be making those decisions you have the skill you have the expertise

you have my best interests at heart and so I'm going to be okay with you telling me what to do that's where legitimacy

really comes in but it's everybody working together that's why it's a goal seeking process

and so when you're really thinking about becoming a leader what does it take to be a good leader it's really trying to

tap into all of these these different processes right making sure that there's reciprocation in the group and making

sure that everybody's putting in the same amount of work right yeah you're inspiring people that you're

creating a Cooperative creative environment that everybody's working towards the same goals in

and so this is going to be just some examples um but this is something that I

mentioned very early on in the course that comes up a lot is this division between task and relationship type

duties that's what groups are split on like the groups are always trying to accomplish something but they're also

trying to create Unity they're trying to create relationships and that's where cohesion comes from is this relationship

side but so much of especially the corporate world is very much focused on these types of things right of creating

a structure so that we can get the product out on time so that we can meet our quotas and and sell as much as we

possibly can right identifying who fits those roles in those positions and what are the standards and what are all of

these rules that we need to put in place so we can dictate how everybody is going to work towards these common tasks

together but what good leaders do is they're able to do all of this stuff but they're also able to kind of take care

of this relationship stuff as well right there able to to really see the people that they're leading as people

and recognize that these people that they're leading have recognition needs they have acceptance needs they want to

feel like they're a part of something and that they have relationships with the people that they're working for

that's how you boost morale that's how you make people feel supported and encouraged right

but it's really hard to balance these as a manager right like it's the the cliche of like you can't tell someone what to

do and be their best friend at the same time that's why you don't mix business and pleasure right these are really hard

things to balance and so a lot of the times when you have a really hard time handling some of this relationship stuff

because you're like being their friend and you're getting really talkative or whatever and none of nothing's getting

done then all of a sudden you have to become the hard ass and you have to be this person that no one likes there's a

slide near the end that gets hit like there was a this like survey that they gave people that was like what are the

qualities that you dislike most about the people you work for and or work with and the people that had like the lowest

like likable qualities were the ones that were the best doing task leadership stuff

which says something about like what it takes to get people motivated to do things that they don't really want to do

right because at the end of the day we want to like socialize we want to have fun with people that we're around but we

also have to get done so uh there have been this is kind of a

kind of a bird's eye view when you're talking about emergence uh these kind of big thinkers throughout time of like

what is it about like these situations or these people that like someone great like Alexander the Great Rises to the

occasion right and there's some people that believe that this is kind of something we talked about with Aristotle

earlier that there's these qualities that people have these characteristics that just make them a great leader he

was marked from birth to just be that person um but there's this other side of it

that is really interesting to think about that if the time if the timing hadn't been right if the kind of

temperament in the society hadn't been right if there hadn't been kind of the proclivity for war all of these things

would Alexander have ever been the leader that he was right so much depends on what's going on at the time I

guarantee you that Winston Churchill would not be the person that he is today if it wasn't for World War II A lot of

people hated that man before World War II happened and because of the spirit of the times

he was the person that they needed at that time and so he might not have been a great leader in another time but in

that moment his characteristics in that time were what really kind of made the difference

and so this is your your like thing that comes up in every single

situation like this is it this is it that well it's got a both right so

because you can't have a situation that Demands a certain type of person without a person that has the traits that fit

that situation right so it is kind of a nature nurture type interaction and so if we're thinking about kind of

the the nature side of things like what what is it about someone's personality what

is it about the proclivities like what they do that kind of translates into good good leadership and these are some

things that have that have kind of stood out so they've done these these longitudinal studies again I I mentioned

this every time 20 years to publish this paper uh that is dedication that's someone with tenure like I'm going to

propose this study and like if it doesn't work you can't fire me um but they showed that these were some

of the traits that really stood out so how assertive someone is so how much they kind of advocate for themselves and

go out and try to get things themselves how authentic they are so this would be kind of the opposite of agreeableness

agreeable is kind of just like kind of chameleon kind of molding into what everybody wants this is like no this is

who I am right strength of character self-efficacy this idea of like being self-motivated self-monitoring these are

the people that are really self-aware that really know kind of who they are and what they want

and when you look at it from the personality Dimension from Big Five you're looking at really high levels of

extroversion and really high levels of conscientiousness

and if you remember conscientiousness is a lot about kind of organization being someone that's very kind of Tidy and

organized has their life together goes to the dentist when they're supposed to

like not conscientious uh I am sometimes but uh this one was an interesting one here so this kind of I

just mentioned that agreeableness and authenticity are kind of at odds with each other and so it's not something

that is a predictor of whether or not a leader gets selected if someone is just kind of trying to go with what everybody

wants that's not what people want in a leader but it does predict Effectiveness which is really interesting to think

about right it's like we don't want to elect a leader that's just going to tell us what

we want to hear but if we have a leader that's just telling us what we want to hear then we think that he's effective

because he's doing what we want them to do I the idea here like

is it that the the leader is actually effective in this situation could be but

it's perceived Effectiveness right this whole idea of agreeableness is really just like like okay that's what

everybody wants and sometimes it is good to give in to what everybody wants I mean you're leading a group of people

that all have specific needs right um but it could be that you're just kind of mob ruling and you're not actually

taking your responsibility as a leader seriously right you're not actually leading them in the direction that you

should be leading them in authenticity you're just kind of going with the flow we see this a lot in modern politics

intelligence is a big one and so this is something that very much predicts emergence and Effectiveness and that's

something intuitively kind of makes sense that these are usually the people IQ is

is an interesting thing to think about uh there's the Albert Einstein quote you can't judge a efficient fish on his

ability to climb a tree that IQ is usually something that like there is a general IQ a general ability

to be good at thinking of having cognitive skills being able to learn really well but there's also I think

this really Taps into skill in general because the leaders that you want are the ones that are really good at what

you want them to be good at and intelligence is probably something that gets them there

so these are from standard intelligence tests though a lot of the studies show that the people that end up being

selected the people that ended up being really good and being viewed is really good are usually ones that scored pretty

high on this especially on verbal skills which you can really think about in terms of like convincing people to

select you as a leader relies a lot on how well you can persuade other people we talked about minority influence right

you as that person wanting to be the leader you are technically the minority at that point but if you're very kind of

good at crafting an argument being persuasive then you can get people on your side

but this I this is a really interesting point here um is that people do want intelligent

people to be in charge but if the intelligence is too much above what people consider themselves to be uh it

produces mistrust and so there's this common thing that comes out in the literature about people actually

preferring to be ill-governed by people that can actually understand which uh I mean it's there's a lot of examples in

today's world that kind of fits into that mold from every angle you look at it

and it's I don't know it always blows my mind that we're in a country of 330 million people and I'm like really those

are the two that we narrowed it down to so 80 years old

yeah and emotional intelligence I'm like yeah I'd love to see I mean we're out of time in history where like things are

moving rapidly the generational divides are in terms of 15 years not in terms of 150 years right so like the older

Generation Now is so out of touch with like you all and with my generation so emotional intelligence is the other side

of this right so when we're thinking about IQ versus EQ is what it's often referred to as you can think about it in

terms of task versus relationship leadership right where intelligence is more about the task side of things about

the skill emotional intelligence is more about your interpersonal skills it's how well you can empathize with other people

you can perceive your emotions in yourself so this is a lot of like self-reflection type abilities that

people have and your ability to then see that in other people as well um and this is this is a big one I mean

this is all about kind of emotion regulation understanding how your emotions unfold being able to control

your anger being able to control um how you react in certain situations this is what stoicism is all about it's

kind of gaining that control but um but this is something that you're not

just thinking constantly on a factual basis you're actually thinking about how these people around you are influenced

by a lot of these emotional qualities in the workspace that you're in from what comes out of these conflicts and how you

manage those emotions right A lot of these conflicts that usually start out as a conflict about some type of task

about some type of kind of miscommunication usually spiral into these emotional battles that are just

these anger clouds that have nothing to do with logic or reason or anything and so leaders that are really good at

seeing that are really good at like getting people to regulate that are the ones that that really have a lot of

Effectiveness in this Arena especially on the relationship side of things so

um and it's something I kind of hinted at it makes for really good communication and conflict resolution

type attributes right and if you think back to like group

development like this is what gets you out of the storming phase this is what gets you closer to cohesion is being

able to actually approach these conflict situations in a way that you can handle them that you can kind of keep all of

these emotions at Bay and build structure around what happens so that it doesn't happen again

so EQ in general associated with emergence of leadership kind of qualities but all

of these other things that we talked about empathy taking other people's perspectives uh so what we just talked

about in terms of IQ and EQ is not saying that every leader has both but that perceptions of these leaders tend

to be really high when someone is able to do this kind of stuff because I think that you can absolutely get to

leadership without having any of this right and I think that the world is full of leaders that don't have any of this

and that's really I think something I've been trying to get to a lot through this whole idea of task relationship stuff is

that in the Western World we're very focused on task stuff and we're very kind of unfocused on this stuff I think

that this is very much on the rise there's a good reason why like therapy is very highly in demand and has a

different stigma associated with it than it used to because now it's actually about getting in touch with this kind of

stuff it's not this touchy feely like oh they're gonna go like shrink my mind or whatever it's like no they're gonna

they're gonna teach me how to regulate my emotions they're going to teach me how to get out of my own head and like

how to handle my anxiety how to handle my stress how to de-catastrophize that I'm not in these situations where I

think everything's gonna just like fall apart right it's like no there's You're Just In conflict and it's conflict that

can be handled it's conflict that can be structured so and this is this is a big one that

kind of goes with IQ but people want people that are skilled that have some type of

um expertise in the field that they're in when you ask Navy Seals what kind of

leaders they want they want someone that knows what they're doing and someone that they can trust which is exactly

what kind of the task and relationship stuff is is they want someone that going in is going to have their back is going

to know exactly what to do but is going to be there for every single one of their men

or women so um

this is this is kind of interesting here is that I don't know that's kind of what you're pointing out I don't know if

that's really true the interpersonal skills are more important in Upper Echelon leadership I I don't really see

that I see it more as like oh yeah you got good numbers awesome right uh and so and so it talks about

these task things being more important especially in the emergence arena for areas that are performance oriented so

this would be sales type positions Logistics type positions and things like that service and delivery type stuff

and this is something that was very similar to what we talked about with power so the people in these leadership

leadership positions are ones that are constantly engaged in the group they're usually the ones that want to be in the

group the most and that's why like good leadership good transformational leadership that we'll talk about in a

bit is one in which you can take all of that kind of love and loyalty that you have for the group and you can use it to

inspire other people to get them on the same page like yeah I love this group like I do love these goals like I do

take on these values take on these beliefs and I think that's you're starting to

see a shift especially in some of these like newer like tech companies and things are really trying to kind of take

a stand in this Direction having leaders that take positions on big issues and try to inspire the people below them get

them to buy into we're doing things for a good reason so this is uh kind of from the research

really high correlations I mean and these are these are really high when you're talking psychology a high

correlation in Psychology I surprised the hell out of me when I started doing research I like showed my my mentor I

was like ah man there's there's not really anything here he's like 0.3 that's really high I was just like okay

yeah so this is this is really high so these leaders are ones that are constantly participating in the groups

that they're a part of and that's something that if you notice that there's a leader that's never there

probably not really a leader right there's this huge kind of misconception between management and Leadership and

that like managers or people that usually see you as a number and like oh yeah whatever I I'm still getting paid

I'll go home you guys do all the work but leaders are the ones that are there um there's a whole book Leaders Eat Last

that's that's fantastic I think it's a Simon sinek book but I'm not sure um but it's fantastic because it talks

about leadership as being something where like you're in it with them like you're not just kind of on the sidelines

watching Everybody do everything like you're making sure that everyone is fed before you and go go and feed yourself

right um and this is this is a big Point here it's not just about quantity it's about

quality I'm doing a lot of work in this addictions course that I'm putting together uh looking at like

workaholicism that's a word Workaholics uh people that are addicted to work there's actually

kind of a negative correlation between quantity and quality these people that are addicted to work just work a lot but

they actually don't have very good quality of work but these are ones leadership positions usually kind of

produce both and this is your this is your awesome awesome Western culture slide uh and not

even just Western culture I think this is something that's kind of prevalent in all cultures I mean even the studies

that show that you learn more from attractive teachers than you do from unattractive ones we tend to just kind

of gravitate towards charismatic Attractive people and leaders we have perceptions of what kind of things lead

to leadership a lot of this I think is evolutionary evolutionary um in that the people the kind of

bipedal humans that were the strongest the most in Power were usually the ones that were older taller and heavier the

ones that were able to exert some type of power over the group and that kind of maintained as a perception of what it

meant to be a leader a lot of those perceptions are being kind of challenged today that's the whole kind of point of

this kind of postmodern form of looking at how our society works but um

you look at these statistics of Fortune 700 Fortune 500 companies and 81 percent of them are 50 or older right very out

of touch with what's going on currently and a lot of it's just this revolving door it's the CEO here now I'm the CEO

there it's like what president good old president chill uh is now going to go be the president at Northwestern it's just

like you couldn't find like someone else like it's just this revolving door you have all of these people that have

gotten to those positions and so they're like oh well if you've done it before you could probably do it here

um but there's a lot of factors that go into whether you're actually good at that

um but there's this kind of perception in in our society that age is an indicator

of experience and that's true like uh you tend to see a lot more and experience a lot more as you get older

so you have more perspective on a lot of things what you're seeing and what you have perspective on might be what needs

to be thought about this was a nice little statistic so 500 CEOs only two were women and they both had brown hair

yep I remember my uh my wife actually dyed her hair brown when she applied to grad school yeah and then went back

blonde after she got in yeah it's uh it's it's a bias that exists don't hate the player hate the game like

so and if we're thinking about diversity this is something that I brought up kind of at the beginning of the lecture is

that it's not that leadership is something that's that's just a western thing and that's why there's not a lot

of minorities or women or whatever in these high positions um it's just the fact that our structure

has been built up around majority influence right so this is this idea it's not this kind of limited thing to

any of these cultures it's been something that's seen in all of them but if you're in a minority position you

don't have a lot of influence and you have to gain a lot of status you have to gain a lot of respect you have to craft

really persuasive arguments to be able to climb that ladder in the structures that exist

right 2007 nine African-Americans leaders of Fortune 500 companies in the United States

and this is uh a lot of these statistics are kind of old I think that a lot of this stuff is changing which is kind of

nice I have a whole slide at the end about the future of leadership that hopefully some of these things are

kind of breaking down that we're starting to really question whether these perceptions of leadership are the

ones that should be the ones that we kind of roll with and I have an interesting slide coming up that kind of

gets into that perceptual stuff but um this gets into the gender stuff uh you have the good old glass ceiling over

here right 2008 only 12 women we're CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and a lot of this is because of these

perceptual things that it's easy in I think today's culture to say like what's the big deal like this really isn't a

thing anymore but we really have to think about the fact that we're not very far removed from when this was a really

bad thing and that type of generational kind of cycle is still there these perceptions

even if they're not kind of insidiously passed down they're still very subtle about what it is what what it means to

be a woman what it means to be a man I think there are different skills there are different qualities that are

inherent but it does doesn't mean that they're not good enough right and this is a very interesting point down here so

it says men are five times more likely to kind of enact the behaviors because it's expected of them that's the kind of

perception that Society has created and they're more likely to emerge As Leaders but there was this really

interesting caveat and I know it's really text heavy but I like I liked how it was worded so I kept it all on there

but it was this idea that a lot of these things that we've been talking about as being really good predictors of good

leaders are qualities that are just seen in women in general uh and so it's kind of sad that that

stuff has not kind of broken that perceptual barrier yet and that we're not in a society that's really embraced

a lot of this stuff right um extroversion and conscientiousness were big predictors of both emergence

and Effectiveness right and a lot of what we talked about earlier in this class in terms of like different

personality traits across genders was about to the relationship qualities that are really kind of Highly valued with

women so I think it's we need a little feminine

touch in the world uh so this is the slide I was I was hinting at so this one is uh is about

these unconscious perceptions that we have about what it means to actually be a good leader these are these kind of uh

you've heard the term heuristics probably or schemas uh it's this kind of stereotypical model that we have in our

heads where um I want to challenge all of you well I kind of just posed it as a challenge

that probably won't work but picture a neurosurgeon what did you just picture in your head

probably like if you didn't picture if you didn't picture a white man I congratulate you but I but that is

something that's kind of built in to how our society is structure how our media is structured a lot of the the shows

that we watch or ones that reinforce these perceptions about what it means to be a leader what it means to be

successful and so because of those perceptions those are the things that we expect to see in a leader even if they

might not be what actually determines whether or not someone's a good leader at all I mean these are some common ones

these aren't necessarily bad ones I think these are the ones where like if you had these perceptions it might be a

good thing what actually ends up being kind of detrimental is that if you have this idea that leadership is about being

white being masculine being tall being more vocal than everybody around you right they're the ones that just speak

all the time they are going to rise to the authority positions even though they're not qualified I mean this is I

think one of the things that has bugged me the most I mean I spent a lot of time in kind of the industry world before I

came back to Academia and I was always just like shocked at some of the people that filled these

Authority roles that just were just completely incompetent and it was just because they were they were more

assertive they were louder they were just a lot of the times honestly the people that end up in these positions

are people that the other people are afraid to question that assertiveness it's just like oh

well I don't want to like rock the boat so let's just like give you that position and and you can you can roll

with it um it's it's very infuriating uh when you get out into the Working World and

you see how rampant that kind of stuff is but when you go through and you just

kind of ask people in these groups um like what a good leader is oftentimes

they're going to describe what they think someone should be rather than actually listing what their leader

actually is like all right so this is where we're going to get into some models we're actually

doing pretty good on time so I think I'll I'll get into these a little bit um

but what we've kind of gotten to up until now uh was kind of this idea of like what it means to be a good leader

but also like what what it means to have a situation that kind of influences whether you're being a good leader uh

there's this person named fielder who has actually created uh or feedler is that

I don't know if I spelled that wrong I think it is feedler um but there's like you can you can look

this person up they make a lot of money training people how to be leaders um and what they've noticed is that like

yes there are these good traits that you should have to be a leader but really what is the most important is how you're

using those traits in the situation that you're in right the situation is is huge and so a lot of what they try to do is

instead of trying to turn this person into a perfect leader they're saying how do we change your environment to better

reflect the qualities that you have as a leader and so it's very much kind of centered

around what your motivational style is so what are the qualities what are the leadership qualities that you do possess

because there's very few unicorns out there that have all of the qualities that we've talked about that are able to

fill and check all of those boxes you're like Brad Pitt of leaders right

so what they're going to really emphasize is that there are different situations that require different types

of control and I think we'll get into that on one of these next ones this one's not my favorite slide but I

mentioned this I mentioned this earlier this least preferred co-worker scale so this is

something that that came out of fiedler's work where they were going around all of these different businesses

and asking like who are the who are the worst people that you don't like working for and what they sound what they found

was that the people that were the kind of people that people really liked working for tended to be very

relationship oriented right they were the kind of people that you come into work and you're like hey how was your

weekend like things are going great like I really enjoy working with you you're really relaxed you're really Pleasant to

be around right the people that scored low on this were the ones that were really good at task

stuff which is kind of like Ah that's it's really hard and I really like I think

the biggest challenge I want to put out to all of you is to whenever you're in that position of just like talking about

how much you hate your boss or how much you hate the the leader of whatever group you're in think about some of this

stuff like put yourself in their shoes like this is not easy because as soon as you start taking a hard line on task

stuff everyone hates you like because your job is to get everybody to do stuff that they don't

want to do and that's that's not easy at all and so what I think a lot of what comes out of

this type of stuff is is how to create environments where you can do a lot of this task oriented stuff but you can

still have an environment that supports a lot of this relationship stuff so that's what this idea of like

situational control comes from but I think the the main points that I did want to get out was that like the people

that people report being the kind of most Pleasant to be around are usually the ones that they enjoy having

relationships with that they feel have some type of emotional intelligence that they can connect with they can kind of

handle conflict really well and the ones that they really don't like being around are the ones that are usually telling

them what to do foreign and so when we think about these

different situations right if you have a situation where the group is super cohesive already like everyone gets

along really really well there's not a lot of conflict right you as a leader should not be concerning yourself with

like having a lot of these relationship qualities of like really putting a lot of emphasis on trying to be everyone's

friends and like that's when you can start kind of taking more of a task oriented leadership motivation Style

foreign too kind of plays into a lot of this uh this these are the types of situations

that you're trying to create right you're trying to create these cohesive environments where you can kind of back

off a little bit on needing to manage a lot of the interpersonal stuff you're trying to create a lot of task structure

right you want you want people to know what they're doing we've talked about roles and the

kind of one of the most stressful things in a situation is to not really know what's expected of you right to have

this kind of ambiguous idea of like I think that I'm supposed to be doing this but I'm not sure that's where task

structure comes in really defining like this is the way that we do things this is how we get to the solution and when

you have that structure when you have really clear rules and there's no ambiguity then you can start kind of

stepping back from the task stuff and you can start maybe focusing more on this relationship stuff

but a lot of this relies on what kind of power you have right and so this is something that we've kind of been

dipping our toes in this whole time is that like leadership is something that ideally shouldn't have to have anything

to do with power but it's something that kind of needs to be there a lot of the times to create the environment for you

to be respected in the first place is that you are in a position where you control salaries you control punishments

and all of these things and it that comes with respect that's where people are like okay I

I'm okay doing what you want me to do because like I know that you're in a position of authority

but it's The Balancing Act between these that you don't want to have a really heavy hand where you're just constantly

using your position power you don't constantly want to be on everyone's back you want to create a well-oiled machine

where everybody knows what they're doing everybody's on task but you also want to create an environment where everyone is

connecting everyone is creating a creative and cohesive environment thank you

and this was something I remember looking into a lot of the the feedler stuff last time I I taught this and

um a lot of what they were talking about was just the failure of so many of these leadership programs that had come out of

just like they're like yeah we're gonna train you in six weeks to be a leader and they come out and it's like nothing

changed that's what kind of pushed them more into this uh this emphasis of having a situation that's

specific for a specific type of person that can lead in a specific type of way and they were suggesting that the

situation should be engineered instead of trying to find this this perfect unicorn leader

this this was another one of those things from the textbook that I I found kind of ambiguous and not super helpful

task oriented leaders are really effective in situations that are highly favorable or highly unfavorable and

relationship ones are the ones that just are good in the middle um I think that there's there's

qualities that are that are good in all of these different ranges if you're in a really highly unfavorable

position it's probably because there's not a lot of structure around the tasks and so nobody really knows what they're

supposed to do there's a lot of conflict around that these highly favorable ones you're kind of everybody's on the right

track you don't really have to focus on relationship stuff but it's this kind of Middle Ground of kind of when things are

highly unfavorable you're in these conflict stages you're in the storming phase that it really takes the

relationship kind of leadership styles to get out of that conflict to move into that cohesive building type environment

um and this is I'm just going to kind of go through this really quick because uh so this was another group that had

proposed a theory that essentially says the exact same thing that we've been talking about a lot is that the really

good leaders are the ones that are able to do task and relationship stuff like that's that's ultimately we came out of

this and that kind of person is really really hard to find they rarely exist so this one though is interesting and I

know there's a lot of this one's kind of heavy on the on the words I'm going to break it down just kind of really simply

in that what we've talked about so far is this idea that leadership is a leader in a group and there's kind of this

separation of like okay I'm the leader and I'm just gonna kind of without having a relationship with any

individual person I'm just going to kind of influence the group as a whole but when you really look at it in reality

the leader has a different relationship with every single person in the group right there's a dyadic relationship and

they may actually take a different approach with different people depending on what that type of person is kind of

reciprocating if that kind of person really needs a lot of relationship support needs a lot of acceptance needs

a lot of recognition then the leader can kind of lean into that for that specific person but if there's another person

that doesn't have really high affiliation needs doesn't need to be accepted doesn't need the recognition

but just needs some guy Cadence then they can kind of lean into that and they can take more of a task-oriented

leadership with that specific person and so this is really about how much you're

zooming in right so kind of when you zoom out it's kind of these broad how do you organize the group but when you zoom

in you see that there are in most cases these these really intimate relationships between each of the people

and the leader but this also leads to um

to these like clicks and I'm sure that a lot of you have probably been in situations where there's a group of

people that gets special attention that gets special rewards and it's because of the individual relationships that they

have with the leader right and so a lot of leadership kind of pitfalls are around how to promote kind of an

environment of equality where you don't have this perception that you favor one group over the other

so this is this is kind of the bread and butter right here is breaking down like what are all of these things

that we've talked about uh what are kind of the the gist ideas of the types of leadership that emerge from all of these

different qualities um one of them is this kind of charismatic type of leadership that's

that's really focused on inspiring others on really kind of motivating this is usually something that appears really

early on in Group formation um these this type of leadership though tends to falter a lot when the task

demands become really high right when there's a lot of emphasis on doing specific things and not just about

coming together and getting excited about what we're doing transactional leadership is usually what

this starts to kind of mold and kind of transform into where it's like okay I got everyone excited but that's kind of

worn off and so now the only way that I have to really kind of motivate people is through the type of kind of personal

reward power that I have of kind of saying like Okay we're gonna make this a transaction you work really hard for me

and I'll give you a paycheck you work even harder I'll give you a bonus right and it becomes this very kind of

artificial thing where like yeah you're doing this because you're getting some type of benefit out of it but it's not

really tapping into like who you are as a person it's not tapping into this identity property of like shedding some

of your personal goals and your personal Ambitions for the Ambitions of the group which is what transformational

leadership really gets into and so this is what kind of the ideal form of leadership is

um is really about kind of maintaining this this Charisma through the whole process but creating an environment

where you've really gotten them to to buy into the beliefs and the values and and the needs of the group like I'm here

for a purpose I'm part of this group for a reason I want to be a part of it it's when I answer the question who am I it's

part of what I list on my piece of paper right and I start giving up some of the

beliefs that I used to have about the world because I I like how they're thinking about the world

this produces an immense amount of loyalty cohesion like efficiency and performance this is

this is what really a lot of the the modern leadership kind of facilities are pushing people towards

it it's absolutely what Google does yeah this is something that a lot of the tech companies are kind of buying into

but it does take a specific kind of person and I mean you can learn some of these skills but you really have to be

kind of self-assured you have to be someone that believes these things if you're trying to convince other people

to buy into this like you are there for a reason like I am leading Apple because I believe in apple right and I want you

all to believe in apple because this is an amazing company that's going to change the world that's going to do

these amazing things that's going to help people in poverty like and I'm a part of this because I want to be a part