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.
