Part IV - Leadership Processes

PART IV – THE LEADER

Are good leaders made or born? Both. People are born with different capacities for developing artistic skills. Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock without privilege and was largely self-educated as an scientist, architect and engineer; Vincent van Gogh was a totally self-taught painter; Prince Rogers Nelson (Prince) was a high school graduate with no formal musical training who taught himself to play over 25 instruments and started his own recording studio; the Beatles were all self-taught, none ever learning to read or write music; George Washington completed his formal education at 15 years old and worked as a surveyor despite his learning disabilities before entering military service during the French and Indian War; Geno Auriemma came with his parents to America from Italy at 7 years old and his only sports experience was playing basketball at a public high school in Pennsylvania before becoming the greatest college coach of any sport in US History; and MG Harry W. Brooks, Jr. went to a totally segregated pubic high school for black students in Indianapolis and enlisted in the Army as a private before making sergeant and being sent to officer candidate school. These singularly great geniuses were each a savant in their own artistic specialty. Even if it is not possible to replicate their particular artistic talent, others engaged in the same disciplines can study their techniques and distill some of the processes that led to their success, as we have been doing with the legacy of MG Harry W. Brooks, Jr. The goal of an artistic education is to study the processes present in the success of others and then create one’s own unique content accordingly.

In this section, we transition from an analysis of groups and the members that comprise them to the single function that is common to them all—leadership. The concept requires a little whittling before we begin because it can be understood in a variety of ways. Some think of leadership as modeling desired behaviors by setting an example, as parents do for their children or philanthropists do by making a “lead” donation to kick off a fundraising campaign. Others understand it as the exercise of power through promising rewards and threating sanctions, a transactional “carrot and stick model.” Some think of leadership as a skill that can only be acquired by practice, like learning how to safely pilot a drift boat of dude clients from New Jersey fishing for chinook salmon on the Kenai River in Alaska.

Each of these examples might be an appropriate model in certain contexts, and developing the ability to choose the right method in the right circumstances for the right group of followers is what makes leadership an art. All human actions, conscious or not, include both a “what” and a “why”. We have been referring to these as content and process. Fishing for native brook trout with a bamboo fly rod and dragging a trawler net for herring are different techniques for the same function of catching fish, but each activity is done for a different purpose. The reason one fishes for native trout with a dry fly on a bamboo rod is for the process—the challenge. The purpose of catching herring with a purse net is for the content—the outcome. And different purposes require different virtues. Leaders improve their chance of success if they first determine if the purpose of their group is in its content (outcome), or the activity itself (the process), before they worry about which method will catch the most fish.

Organizational processes are conceptual and therefore transcendental. The content by which processes are realized is always tied to temporal specificity. A mistake that many leaders make is to jump into content solutions before clearly identifying relevant processes. Leaders must understand this distinction to consistently be effective in changing scenarios. One of the main differences between the analysis of groups and group members is that groups with which members identify are metaphysical and do not necessarily have a determinate temporal or local, spatial existence, unlike individual group members whose existence is local, linear and finite. As we noted earlier, one way to think about the relationship between process and content is to compare it metaphorically to the quantum relationship between waves and particles, where processes are potentialities until they become content. Similarly with other human metaphysical processes such as emotions, feelings and time, for example. They have no specificity until they are instantiated as content. We will see how this is an important distinction for leaders to recognize when working with each other, as there are different techniques involved.

The common objective in all leadership examples we discuss will be the same: to motivate others to want to behave in desired ways. Effective leadership processes are universal, even though the content used to implement them differs dramatically depending on circumstances. Compounding this complexity, effective leadership methods evolve over time, commensurate both with changes in technology and in the education and emotional maturity of followers, similar to the ways that the content of other social practices we have discussed has evolved (e.g., justice and virtue). This evolutionary flux makes the study of past successes in terms of their content less relevant than an underlying awareness of the processes, as the latter do not change regardless of major technological and social progress, and can be applied widely. Obviously, there were enormous differences in the leadership practices of Alexander the Great and George Washington, but both brilliant leaders used the same leadership processes to motivate and inspire their followers, despite their different purposes, methods and separation of over two thousand years.

Groups themselves mirror the psychological structure of the individuals that comprise them. Each group has its own proto-consciousness embodied in its culture, the strength of which is determined by the group’s coherence, and each has its own sense of significance vis-à-vis other groups with which it interacts. A group’s sentience is reflected in the degree to which members share common beliefs. As Aristotle put it in a previously quoted passage: “The mind is nothing until it has thought, and then it becomes what it is thinking” (De Anima, 429b25-430a9). When group members are of like mind, they become a single entity with different, independent parts. In other words, they not only share the same content objectives, but they also share the same process motivations that support the content. This is the key transformative step that turns obedience into quantum coherence. 

Leaders can increase their group’s health by fostering its coherence and removing malignant bodies, or the opposite, causing decoherence by creating divisiveness or putting their personal interests ahead of those of the group they lead. Leaders don’t create the quantum group ex nihilo, but they do create the conditions for it to form on its own based on natural human dispositions, and they implement policies that strengthen it and remove factors that are disruptive.

When we reflect on the social conditions of mankind over the last several millennia, we find that historically, group members made little distinction between self-interest and group-interest, as individual survival was inextricably intertwined with the success of one’s family, clan or tribe. While advances in technology and sustenance efficiency have made day-to-day survival less worrisome, the core evolutionary drives that created success for our ancestors remain part of human nature. Even though we have become more independent and autonomous in many of our daily activities, we are still social animals whose unconscious behaviors are intractably tied to group membership from cradle to grave, and for better or worse, as determined by the context. Innate human drives that evolved for pragmatic reasons provide the group and its members with the survival-driven framework in which leaders carry out their function. As social animals, the disposition to unconsciously link group interest with self-interest is part of our nature, but where one draws the membership boundary for any group is environmentally determined, and can extend from family to religious affiliation, community, nation-state, humanity, and even to all life forms under some doctrines. Metaphysical group boundaries designate a culturally-based moral perimeter for the treatment of others. For example, often when decision-makers disagree about the treatment of immigrants, discussions can become circular because treatment alternatives cannot be decided until policy and boundary ones are settled. For example, who and how many applicants will be admitted, will there be selection criteria for acceptance, will an integration process or fealty oath be required, what agency will manage the program and so on, are all logically prior to determining what happens after each of the above factors is decided. Leaders must determine the desired process outcomes before deciding on the methods and allocating resources to achieve them. Good leaders know how to work with the process issues before tackling content about what should be done.

The best way to begin our intellectual sojourn into the academic maze of leadership theory is to identify existing paths that were created by human evolution and use them as a guide. We have already established that communal association is necessary to create the synergy and safety that humans need to survive, and it follows that any type of useful group activity requires some type of hierarchical structure to function as a unit. The role of a leader is a natural one for all groups, beginning with the family, and adopting it as a convention in modern complex societies is no different than other political adaptations mankind has made to accommodate evolutionary progress, such as developing a political structure and promulgating formal laws. Understanding the natural leader-follower relationship that evolved for survival purposes in this way will give us an outline of the natural processes from which to build a modern leadership structure. The materials leaders use to accomplish group goals are the group members themselves, and their key social attributes are the unconscious dispositions to belong and to seek significance that are inherent in human nature. Our model will be built on this framework. Building upon group processes that have evolved naturally as survival enhancements will also make related content recommendations more naturally acceptable to followers and easier to implement.

The third of four innate human dispositions discussed earlier (besides belonging and significance) is the practice of converting experiences into universals, a learning method common to all animals as an evolutionary process crucial for survival. In the natural world of “eat or be eaten,” learning is often a one-time opportunity, so humans, like all other animals, are “born to learn.” Unlearning, however, is a different story, which leads to the fourth unconscious disposition, which is to assign a cause for all observable events or experiences, a practice characterized by extraordinary creativity, from details about the fateful effects of astrology to narratives about the meddling interference of gods and goddesses in historical events. Recall that Socrates’ unique contribution to wisdom was not about acquiring knowledge, but about the importance of discovering the falsehoods that persist in each of us, and as this unlearning is not a product of human evolution, it generally faces great social and subconscious resistance. Comfortable consistency is of greater value to social comity than disruptive truth. Once a false concept based on a creative narrative gets interwoven into the subconscious cultural tapestry that defines a person, it becomes an integral part of his identity, and removal is tantamount to ripping apart the structural seams of one’s psychological personhood. The solution is for leaders to learn how to master retaining the underlying process while “unlearning” the content, whether it be in justice, politics, or any social convention. This concept can be of importance to leaders when dysfunctional follower prejudices must be “unlearned” to enhance group unity.

The scientific community has learned to resolve disagreements by studying observed phenomena, debating them in the common language of mathematics, and comparing how well different theories correspond to observable events in the physical world. In the social domain, when new evolutionary ideas don’t cohere with earlier information, the result is cognitive dissonance, sometimes leading to denial, depression or hostile opposition in lieu of letting go of embedded beliefs—think of how the establishment treated such monumental and inspirational geniuses as Socrates and Jesus to cite two obvious examples. In this section, we will explore some ways to disentangle cultural webs of incongruities without severing any revered strands.

In the same way that other artists like painters and musicians benefit from learning the scientific structure of their medium—how to convey contours, proportion, perspective, texture and color for the visual artist; and integrating harmony, rhythm, tempo and melody for the musician—leaders have a greater likelihood of success when they understand human nature and social psychology and learn how these fields are full participants in the human evolutionary process. There have been some artistic savants in painting, music and leadership who were born with an innate capacity to develop the relevant visual, auditory and social leadership processes to make them successful without learning the underlying science behind them, and although such individuals were able to refine their innate aptitude through practice and observing the examples of others, for most of us, learning the conceptual architecture that improves the likelihood of doing well is a matter of study and hard work. We can induce key processes from the successes of natural leadership geniuses like MG Brooks, especially since he left a detailed record of his thoughts, ideas and policies in his regular editorials. For most of us, mastering the art of leadership requires both study and practice.

This section is about leadership processes and like all the social processes we have discussed, they are universal, timeless and directed toward specified outcomes. We will occasionally examine some content examples that experience has shown to increase the likelihood of success in common circumstances (just as we have previously with MG Brooks’s policies), or that are particularly explicative of the processes involved, but these will be for illustrative purposes only, as few factual examples have universal relevance. The processes that make leaders effective are the same for all groups, from families to nation-states. The content is more challenging to manage because size and diversity require more experienced leadership. All leadership training begins in the home with learning respect for hierarchy.

Chapter 8 will be about four common mistakes that leaders are heir to and why they are so troublesome. Chapter 9 will address leadership responsibilities in terms of how to create and manage those processes in a group’s culture to develop group coherence and member significance. We will also look briefly at how the authority of formal institutions is limited through the notion of rights, as this is a modern and important component of social justice from the subordinate perspective as restraints on organizational authority, and it is a widely misunderstood concept. We’ll conclude with some examples of using transcendental temporal unity to help group cohere.