CHAPTER 2

The Dynamics in a Group

THE SENSE OF belonging and differentiating is the driver in every group, from the family unit to a major multinational corporation. Companies rise or fall on the ability to exploit that fact, as do governments, churches, and other organizations, whether the interactions are face-to-face or virtual. At the heart of when and how that sense of belonging occurs, or when and how that differentiation occurs, are the nature and style of a group's leadership.

Marketers: Masters of Belonging and Differentiating Others

Greg once had a student whose ex-wife purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of costume jewelry from QVC—a fact he knew because they split up and had to declare their property. She used her own money to make the purchases, so his concern wasn't that she had abused the joint accounts. His focus was on the weird attachment she had to the QVC experience. “Why would she do that?” he asked Greg.

The reason is an essential factor in getting people to do what you want: the need to belong. Due to the ability of QVC employees to track customer purchases, when Sally called to order, the people would talk to her as if they knew her. They were more like gals from the club than salespeople: “Good to talk to you! Where have you been? We missed you!” All true statements, but for dubious reasons. Sally was home a lot because she suffered from a debilitating disease, so these sales pros were a main connection for conversation and caring. They gave her a genuine sense of belonging by knowing her, and they engendered her differentiation as she purchased more and more jewelry. When her name popped up on the TV screen after she made a purchase, she would be acclaimed as “Sally, one of our favorite customers!”

We are not accusing QVC of predatory practices; we want to make that perfectly clear. These people simply do a good job of establishing a bond, a factor by which they can measure success. Once bonded, QVC employees help their best customers to feel differentiated. In part, eBay thrives because of the same psychology. You can quickly become a minor celebrity in the trading game, and you gain acknowledgment as such. You also get rah-rah emails that pronounce you a “winner” after making a successful purchase.

You're a winner because you competed against another person who had money to spend and you were able to spend more. Do you feel great about that? Sure you do. You belong to an “exclusive” club of savvy bidders. You have what it takes to make eBay work for you.

BMW's longtime successful marketing strategy links BMW ownership with identification to a particular social group. Aside from a brief foray into nonpremium territory, BMW has focused consistently on current customers who see themselves as privileged and selecting new customers who want to belong to that group. In a manner that bears similarities to QVC, BMW went about forging an emotional bond with customers that relates to how they belong to the BMW family—a fact that automatically differentiates them from the unwashed masses. By the way, when we hear the term “family” used in relation to a product or group with whom there is no blood connection and only cursory ties, the Manson (that is, “lure of the cult”) radar goes up.

A totally digital version of what QVC and BMW have done with bonding and differentiating expertise belongs to online content providers. Their knowledge, which emanates from centers like Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab (is this reminding you of Zimbardo in terms of locale?) is the height of science-based manipulation.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, calls the effort of media companies to get people to flock to their content a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”⁶ First of all, let's give Google some credit for realizing there is an ethics issue related to manipulating users.

In the quote, Harris is referring to the reptilian brain—the oldest part of the brain in terms of evolution, and therefore, the most primitive. What he talks about in relation to technology is fundamentally no different from what we might say about the success of people like Jim Jones and David Koresh in regards to luring followers.

The phenomenon of luring young minds (particularly) to certain online content is not associated with thinking, but rather with autonomic functions that we associate with survival. Tapping into this part of the brain has created phenomena such as Snapstreaks, which shows how many days in a row two people on Snapchat have communicated with each other. It's a kind of digital cult.

Snapchat gives participants something they do not want to lose: a sense of reward for “achieving” a number of consecutive days of communicating. That “achievement” becomes part of some teenagers' identity; going on Snapchat becomes embedded in their value system as well as their behavior. For some, the necessity of sustaining their streak might be so psychologically entrenched that it might even be linked to survival—not in the physical sense, but the social sense. They keep the streak going and are both bonding and differentiating; they break it and they are fractured from their group.

Harris maintains that this kind of manipulation is dangerous. Being on Snapchat or hanging out on a Facebook page or sequence of YouTube videos—or any other attention-capturing success of digital media companies—quickly evolves into an action that does not involve choice. In other words, companies don't want the attention to content to be a decision made by the cognitive brain, the most evolved part of what humans have upstairs. Attention-sucking phenomena like Snapstreaks is the reflection of successful manipulation: a deliberate, neuroscience-based effort to remove thinking from the act of being on Snapchat.

Differentiating by Choice

To belong is animal, to differentiate is human. You can be differentiated from others in your group or society because you have talent, wealth, athleticism, and attractive features. Or you can have the ability to know how to manage your virtual image, or the virtual image of someone else. All of those carry a positive connotation. But to be differentiated because you are weird is not a good thing unless you belong to a group of weirdos. (Being eccentric among a group of eccentrics can make you supertypical, as Maryann saw in her years in professional theater.) People look at the lone oddball and wonder what else in going on in his head besides the bizarre stuff that just came out of his mouth.

Nevertheless, the need to differentiate is so strong that some people would rather go for the “crazy” label than the “ordinary” label. Many people also differentiate just by following their bliss, which may make them seem odd in most contexts, but it happens to give them a distinction they cherish. For example, Greg once worked with the director of operations for a construction company whose ability with needlepoint made him akin to daVinci with a bunch of thread. In fact, he had created a three-foot by four-foot needlepoint of daVinci's Mona Lisa that hung on the wall of his office. This fifty-year-old family man by night, who controlled millions of dollars worth of construction projects by day, found needlepoint a relaxing, creative outlet. And it certainly made him different.

So where does normal stop and weird begin? It depends on what is normal for the group. Don't project your own values onto the group as you attempt to draw a member of the group closer to you.

The bottom line on differentiating might be summarized by an old phrase: You don't have to outrun the bear; you just have to outrun your friend. In your group, you will likely have people who are smarter and faster than you. You just need to be smarter and faster than some, though smarter and faster are also relative terms. Those in your group may be the slowest and stupidest humans on the planet, so that allows you to be smarter and faster in the cloistered group. Even if everyone in the group is smarter and faster than you are, you still have areas in which you outstrip their performances. Most people are good at finding that on their own.

This model can play out in unexpected ways. A person can be very sophisticated in an area that has no value to the new group. That lack of value means the skill set does not differentiate the individual immediately. For example, Greg has moved from the US Army to Trane to American Standards to Ingersoll Rand to Hussman and other companies, that is, one large company to another with the consistent mandate of driving change to the corporate culture. With a good deal of knowledge about people, productivity, and process improvement, he brings something different to many companies. Imagine on day one he talks about all the complexities of that knowledge to a group of people who are being introduced to the concepts for the first time. That quickly becomes a situation comedy about misunderstanding and lack of alignment of thought. After all, he is the “Army guy” or the “Ingersoll Rand guy,” so he is an alien trying to “infect” their culture. Instead of creating differentiation, he could develop isolation and distance. The audience needs to perceive the value of the message or the message doesn't have any value to them. However, when he does establish the value of the message, then he has achieved buy-in on what he is saying, yet he still maintains his distance as the “Army guy” or the “Ingersoll Rand guy.”

Mechanics of Manipulation

Bonding and fracturing are the operative concepts in making sure that the needs to belong and differentiate are met.

We should clarify concepts here. The drivers are belonging and differentiating. The tools you use to prey on these most natural of human drives are bonding and fracturing. Think of it this way: Both of them function like a double-edged sword—cutting in both directions. This means each can potentially function in a positive or negative manner for positive or negative results. Fracturing can make someone stand out from the group when she is just a plain Jane, or to drive a wedge between her and the group and create a need to draw closer to the group or someone else. Bonding can be used to bring the isolated person into a group, or to take the alpha down a notch to a plain old monkey.

Let's look at one scenario of how someone can manage another person's journey along Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We will use a Charles Manson–like example because his story is so well known.

Our leader finds a young woman who is different from those around her, someone who feels like an outsider. He establishes a place of belonging so that she feels nurtured, safe, and protected. The insulation allows him to drive new “family” ideas into her head and to show her “the way”—the way to belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. This act of bonding her more closely to the family's ideals and making her feel as though she has a place in the group is a fracturing action that takes her away from mainstream connections. As she begins to understand how she fits and she adopts the family rules, she wants to be more like the leader (the supertypical). The leader sets the rules. Using his own leadership style, he informs everyone else how they measure up. When our subject starts to emulate the leader, she is attempting to differentiate just like a Boy Scout earning merit badges; she is living up to the standards that her group espouses. If she gets to a point where the leader fears he will lose control of her, he simply overdifferentiates and she starts to fracture from the group. Then the need to belong creeps back in. In effect, he drops her back to the “belonging” tier of Maslow's hierarchy.

Before you can say “Tate-LaBianca murders,” our subject is so bonded to the groupthink that she does not remember how the outside world functions. She, like the young soldier described in Chapter 1, is getting all the self-image input she needs from those who understand “the way.” Only when she breaks from the group and starts to get new inputs and new standards by which to live does she consider that there was a problem. She may even say things such as, “He was perfect. Divine.” In fact, it was more than a description of exaggerated praise. The filter embedded in her by the group gave her a distorted self-image that made her believe he was divine and perfect—the light and the way. The result was a person who would do anything to achieve this perfection.

Voluntary and Involuntary Bonding

The only truly natural bond you have in life is blood. When you are born into a line of people, like it or not, you have a bond you cannot sever. You can choose never to speak, to see, or to think about that group again, but that very group will influence your thoughts, actions, and responses, regardless of whether you leave before you can crawl. That is, because you have the same DNA, you share the same operating system as your blood relatives. You can reprogram and fine-tune, but your new upgrades are still running on, and on top of, the same hardware and operating system as the rest of your family. It is easy (and convenient) to reject this assertion when we are kids, but we can't do it credibly when we're older because, as we age, we see more and more of our birth parents in the mirror. Many mannerisms, and even many thoughts, may be rooted in the biology, rather than the nurturing, we receive. We can walk away from all other organizations and erase all memory of the association.

If this assertion sounds too extreme, consider this story of Maryann's friend. “Charly” grew up in a very happy, conventional family in the Pittsburgh area. Her little sisters were cheerleaders who married right out of high school. She was the studious one. Mom and Dad doted on their firstborn but never connected with her academic aspirations all that well. Charly got her PhD in English literature and taught at a major university, and she spent the next twenty years developing her career. One day, she got the call that her father had died. At the wake, she sat at a table with her parents' longtime neighbor, and she thought she was looking in the mirror. Her sisters never needed glasses, but Charly had thick ones—like the neighbor. Her sisters were blonde. She was brunette—like the neighbor. Her sisters didn't like school. But Charly, like the neighbor, had pursued a PhD in spite of the family's obvious disinterest. They were both lefties, too. According to Charly, she said something like, “My father didn't die, did he?” And the answer was, “No. I'm still here.”

So when we say that the family is the only natural, or involuntary, group that occurs, we're referring to a genetic link. For some, that surviving, natural group comprises only two people who are blood relatives, such as siblings, mom and child, and father and child. We contrast that unit with artificial organizations—and use the word artificial without prejudice to refer to businesses, churches, clubs, or groups not composed strictly of blood relatives—in which people come together for common purposes and interests, rather than just because they share DNA.

Think about the concept of artificial organizations as you wind your way through life. Look at how much you try to be like the groups you voluntarily join. Do you post on social media for adulation? Acceptance? Something else? More importantly, look in the mirror and consider how much effort you put into differentiating yourself from the group to which you cannot help but belong—your family.

In some cases, we want our family to be more, so we try to differentiate the whole family. As we amass a fortune, distinguish ourselves academically, win a gold medal, or otherwise pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, we try to become a surrogate for the entire family as we differentiate our way through society. What Tom Cruise did for his mom is one example. In several ways, his early life was difficult both financially and emotionally, with a mom who was a special education teacher and a father who was abusive, luring him closer (bonding) and then literally kicking him away (fracturing).⁷ Cruise stayed close to his mother as he climbed to and achieved fame, and sustained a level of comfort and security she had missed for years while she was raising him. In a way, Cruise did the same thing as Joe Kennedy: He achieved such a high level of success that he could bring his entire family toward the status of royalty. He could walk the red carpet with his mom or his children and they would, at least for a moment, be seen as stars.

The dynamic of family is hard to overstate. When people think of ties that cannot be broken, these ties often prey on the model of family. Charles Manson took people who had fled their families for one reason or another and created a nucleus to which each felt drawn at a primal level. He called this group “the family.” Manson used his personality (quirky as it was), age differential, and prior run-ins with “the man” to show his value and establish himself as leader of this group.

Each group, whether family or other, will establish leadership in a distinctive way, which is often determined by the dynamic that causes the core group to come into existence in the first place. For example, if a charismatic individual magnetically draws needy people to him, the dynamic takes shape from the moment of recruitment. Different organizational dynamics related to bonding and fragmenting emerge depending on the group's leadership factors: selection method, strength of the leader, the leader's style of influence, and the impact of isolation—whether real or virtual.

Natural Versus Imposed Leaders

All groups have a leader, whether that person is sanctioned by a formal process or simply emerges in a position of authority.

The simplest kind of leader is the guy in the office who steps up to solve a problem; he is a natural or informal leader. He may invite himself to seize power or simply respond to cries for help. In either case, there is no deliberate, delineated process, and there are no formal trappings of authority. He may get deference from everyone in the office, or be viewed as an oaf who is stuck with the role in the beginning, but will gain real power and deference if given enough time. The key point is: he is there to represent and make decisions, sometimes through openly exercising authority, and other times through less overt wrangling.

Informal, or natural, leaders emerge in response to a power vacuum, whether or not the vacuum is evident. An example on the whimsical side is the guy who organizes the annual football pool at the office; a more practical example is the person who speaks up for his coworkers in front of the boss. The social version is the neighbor who arranges the holiday parties and organizes everyone in a protest against a new megastore. The neighborhood or other non-work-related leaders are the kinds of informal leaders who get harder to avoid. You can change jobs, but changing neighborhoods is a bit more traumatic.

Informal leaders have a level of authority as though they were appointed by a king or elected overwhelmingly by the populace. Oprah Winfrey exemplifies this kind of leader; she has the power to command attention whenever she wants it and to influence significant decisions in peoples' lives. If you have someone in the workplace who stands out as this kind of informal leader, the boss knows that deference is in order. In many work environments, it is clear that the man with the title is not the man with the power.

These informal leaders can be virtual as well. Social media crusaders, gurus, malcontents, and any number of other categories find a gap and create the role that allows them power. Whether this power is for perceived good or evil is up to the person. As an example of a bad thing, look at the mess we are in with election interfering. On the contrary, look at the power of GoFundMe and the lives changed by a handful of people emerging as informal leaders. A lot of good came from the initiative of a do-gooder who initiated a GoFundMe campaign to cover medical bills for a hard-working person hit with expensive, life-saving treatments, but without workplace health insurance to cover them. One of Greg's friends was bitten by a copperhead snake—not something a person would expect or anticipate—but it's especially bad if he's between insurance policies. A friend launched a GoFundMe campaign that helped raise the $57,000 needed to pay for the care that saved his life.

The second type of leader is formal, or imposed. The underpinning of formality is a recognized process to select the leader who fills an official slot and carries the crown and scepter of the position. We describe this leader as imposed because, in most cases, not everyone has a say in who gets the role. When the board of directors hires your new boss, you likely have little input in the decision. His leadership is imposed and, although you can opt to leave, that is likely as much power as you can exercise. At the same time, it doesn't mean that simply reminding people of his status will enable him to accomplish anything.

When Greg was a very young soldier, his first job was as a finance clerk—something for which he was not well suited. His boss was a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant with a horrible management style. He would come into the office, cross his arms, walk around, and watch everyone work. It was like a caricature from a Monty Python movie. After one of the guys who worked in the office died in a car crash, people started to bond against the lieutenant. The sense was, “What if this is me tomorrow? I shouldn't have to put up with this crap.” A few days later, in an effort to improve morale, the lieutenant brought himself down to the level of his minions. He closed the door and said, “All rank's off. I want you guys to be point-blank honest with me. How do you feel?” The words were barely out of his mouth when a young woman spat out, “You're an ignorant mother—.”

That was the wrong thing for the young lieutenant to say. He tried to bond, but instead he fractured very quickly. He was put in power because the establishment ordained him, not because he had any competence in the areas of people management or finance. He thought he had power merely because he was in charge. In reality, he had no power to make anyone do what he wanted. He never asked for or earned authority from the people he was governing.

You might conclude that, because this was the military, a certain amount of deference had to be given to someone who outranked you. True, but you can provide formal deference to a formal leader and it rings hollow. This lieutenant, in effect, removed the veil, and saw clearly that he could make people do what he said, but never what he wanted. The young lieutenant asked for a transfer.

The Army learned from this fiasco and replaced the lieutenant with a seasoned sergeant who had done the jobs of the people sitting in the office. He got cooperation and respect as soon as he demonstrated the understanding borne of that experience. His opening remarks communicated the message, “Give me permission to help you,” and that gave people the opening they needed to respect him.

Maryann once experienced a management situation in which the department head was despised by eight of her employees, got along marginally with one, and was friends with another.

The CEO would not get rid of her, however, because she had built strong relationships with some powerful clients. The one person with whom she got along marginally well took charge as the informal leader and served as the go-between for the employees who hated their boss. She carried requests from them to the boss, and transmitted orders and answers back to them from the boss. This is how she kept the department intact—with the loss of only one staff member—for two years. After the boss left of her own accord, the go-between assumed leadership of the department.

Today, Greg leads change for large corporations that, by mandate and edict, he is empowered to change. That power doesn't make change stick, however. He finds that he first needs to go into the organization and listen to the people who carry the loads, the people who execute the work. Only after infecting the people who make a difference with his vision can he do what he calls “overwhelming the immune system of an organization” to make that change stick.

Some idealistic people who were born yesterday (not you) would assert that the freely elected presidents of the United States are formal leaders, but not imposed. Think about that idea for a few minutes. The president of the United States is imposed on many who disagree with that person being president. Majority rules, so he is a leader imposed on the minority. Members of Congress serve the same function as the woman who acted as go-between in her department—shuttling demands between their constituents who don't like the current administration, and the current administration who thinks, “I'm in the big house now. You have to do it my way.”

A natural leader can quickly become a formal leader. A historically positive example is George Washington. Through the use of charisma, or just plain people skills, the natural leader can become the obvious selection for the formal leader. Similar to the informal leader who replaced the department manager, sometimes stepping up leads to formal authority.

Throughout history, there are also horrific examples of this, such as Adolph Hitler and Charles Manson. However, these are two very different models for informal leaders seizing power.

In one case, an informal leader used his physical or intellectual appeal and charisma to get others to see things his way. In fact, through demonstrating his sexual prowess and natural hatred for “the man,” Manson established himself as the informal leader of his cult-like group. In a group of anti-establishment malcontents, Manson's past incarceration made him supertypical rather than subtypical. As the group became more and more established as the Manson Family, he became the de facto leader; therefore, he became formally in charge.

In the other case, Hitler forged connections through his natural leadership and rose to power in an insulated group, and then leveraged his power base to national authority. Similar to Manson, Hitler spent time in prison for opposing “the man.” In the end, the leverage and cult of personality gained him a position of authority in the formal and imposed leadership of the country. With a few very Machiavellian moves, Hitler seized power. He then exploited the innate tendency of humans to adopt ritual to reinforce a sense of belonging. He developed powerful rituals and trappings to tap into and hasten the sense of belonging of the German people. The Nazis developed emblems and held huge rallies. They took belonging to a new level and tapped into a homogeneous society who felt underappreciated and created a sense of pride. Step one: belonging.

Hitler and Manson are people who understood the power of informal leadership and influence. They used that voluntary surrendering of authority as a foot in the door to ask for, and get, absolute power over others' lives. In some cases, the request centered on using the absolute authority granted by a small group to enforce authority over a larger group. In either case the informal morphed into formal and imposed.

A leader can also be a formal, imposed leader who has the trust and sway with the people to whom others would listen even if he were not imposed. These personalities come along once in a while in politics, and quickly achieve almost legendary status for their impact. Whether you liked their views or not, few people can argue with the persuasive power that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton held. These two men held the public's attention through two very different styles, but for the same reason: personality. Both had their trials with political opponents and their followers, but both survived and were reelected by electoral majority. They both continued to flourish in arguably the most difficult job in the world. While Reagan and Clinton were certainly imposed on the people who opposed them, they took a gracious approach to win over those voters as well reach higher approval ratings than votes would have suggested. According to Gallup Poll tallies, they both did an exceptional job of maintaining high approval ratings, whereas many other modern presidents had some high points and deep plunges.⁸

People use this same skill set in everyday life. Whether imposed or informal leaders, many people will create a cult of personality and use the seemingly inconspicuous opportunity as a means to gain increasing levels of authority over others. There is an adage that few people ever surrender power, so be very careful to whom you surrender yours.

Strong or Weak

Because assessing the strength or weakness of leadership relies on an analog view and not a binary one, the concept of either/or does not fit perfectly here. A leader's style falls somewhere on a scale between lifeless and Draconian, stern in the style ascribed to Draco, the harsh lawgiver of ancient Athens. Most leaders—at least most who stay around for a while—find a style that occupies the middle ground.

Regardless of how the leader rises to power, strength of leadership plays a role in his success. Although it is difficult for the informal leader to seize all power immediately, it is not impossible. An informal leader can use sleight of hand or overt techniques to capture power from those below and above him in the hierarchy. Depending on personal agenda, the informal leader may truly only want to represent his people, and will rein himself in accordingly, or he may see the opportunity to become a de facto ruler. In the latter case, he leverages the power base he created with those he is “helping” to show that he is a factor that cannot be overlooked. Hitler used this to great effect in his rise to power. Once the informal leader begins to get the power base established with those above him, the power he wields over those he represents becomes more formalized. Regardless of whether the leader is formal or informal, the personality of the leader will affect how he wields this new power. The informal leader has to walk a fine line. Exercise too much authority, and he will be ousted; too little, and he will be ineffective. The skill set needed to be an effective informal leader is so complex that those who master it are often recognized for their prowess and become formal leaders as a matter of natural progression.

Although informal leaders may be in the role for the fun of it, most formal leaders are in it for gain, whether financial or esteem. This means they have more at stake than most informal leaders. People say, “The power has gone to his head,” but the core truth to which that statement points is much more insidious. When a person has more at stake, stress rises. Stress changes the personality style of many people, and they go to what has worked in the past, either for them or for one of their role models. In many cases, the skill set worked for the person in an informal role, or a formal role in a smaller pond, but it is ineffective in the current role. The result is an extreme reaction as the person panics and tries to gain equilibrium. Depending on his personality, the leader may be paralyzed by the options and incapable of flexing any strength, or he may simply panic and respond with overwhelming force.

Often, very weak formal leadership will result in “armed” camps within an organization as factions form along invisible lines and natural leaders stake their claims. Years ago, Maryann interacted with people in the Washington, DC, office of a high-tech company based in Silicon Valley. Theoretically, the office had someone in charge, but the fact that senior leadership was nearly 3,000 miles away created an incentive for him to take long lunches “networking” with other tech executives. The office became bifurcated between people focused on lobbying efforts and the sales team, which was trying to sell into the federal market. Each side held the conviction that their activities sustained the operation more than the other side. Each side also had a natural leader—the person who communicated the needs, interests, and priorities of his group. The two sides were located at different areas of the building, so the split was physical as well as psychological and operational. A tiny third group was composed of a few administrative staff members, a human resources professional, and a couple of technical support people who just wanted to get paid on time and have a functioning microwave oven in the break room.

The HR director at headquarters got wind of the dysfunction and ordered the group to spend a day off-site doing team-building exercises. Almost everyone in the DC office wanted to call in sick, but the exercises were mandatory. They did nothing to help the groups cooperate, but the failure convinced the HR director that the top executive in DC needed a change of scenery; he was yanked back to Silicon Valley and replaced with a seasoned leader whom both lobbyists and the sales found to be overbearing and hard to please.

Fragmentation in the office began to dissolve when the two groups had to confront a common enemy. The new, disliked boss got praise from her superiors at HQ for effecting a turnaround in morale and productivity. Paradoxically, her uninspiring leadership was a big success.

Consider how the fragmentation could occur in a neighborhood without a strong, natural, or imposed leader. Most residents of a neighborhood composed of 1950s style split-level houses are longtime members, and life has worked into a natural rhythm. Although there are natural leaders for things such as standard of living and decoration, the group has no need for a strong leader. A new couple from an artistic community in the mountains moves in and quickly decides to dress up their new place with some color. After a few coats of primary colors on the old house, the new residents are ecstatic. They assume their new neighbors will find the splits of the house—blue, yellow, and red—a fun way to modernize an old design.

While trying to settle in, the new couple passes out flyers inviting their new neighbors to a party. A few people show up, but the majority does not. Among those that show are a couple who think the idea is great but would never do it themselves, a few who are indifferent to the radical change, and one vocal antagonist. Rising up to his role as natural leader, he takes it upon himself to ask what the hell is going on. The neighborhood spins out of control.

Many neighborhood covenants have sprung up to prevent this exact form of chaos. But what happens when a Draconian-style, cult-leader wannabe steps up? A kind of police state for a neighborhood. Tony from the corner lot is informally elected as the neighborhood covenant officer. He makes it his crusade to interpret the rules and ensure everyone in the neighborhood hides the air-conditioning units outside the house with shrubbery, and he harasses neighbors who leave garden hoses out. Tony goes overboard in flexing his muscles and differentiates on his home turf because he is a nobody at work. The level of anxiety and frustration causes the neighbors to unite and remove Tony from his post as the enforcer of neighborhood covenants. Tony is an imposed leader, but only for as long as his constituents are willing to tolerate his zealotry. There is a difference between a strong leader and an obnoxious, pushy one.

Dori is an acclaimed artist who moved to a community with covenants. Although she is focused on adding anything to the world that inspires people and makes them delight in beauty, she also has to adhere to her home owners association policies. One day, a man with a ruler came to her home and measured the length of her grass. By terms of the covenant, it could not exceed two inches. Appreciating what Dori had done to bring a playful and aesthetically pleasing sense of landscaping to her lawn, the man with the ruler was terminated by the HOA.

The best indicator that you have weak leadership is infighting. No one has had the ability or vision to establish a common cause or a common enemy. Chimps in a tribe will beat each other up on a regular basis, but as soon as a chimp from a rival tribe shows up, all the focus is on beating him up. A strong leader finds a way to spotlight the foreign “chimp.” Draconian leaders tend to become a common enemy for the group and drive a more cohesive team. The downside is that the parties at war will only stop fighting for one purpose: to sabotage that enemy.

Neither of these styles is impervious to the cult of personality that can evolve in a vacuum, and both extremes have a tendency to create fractures. The Draconian leaders' fractures just take longer to show up. Either leadership style lends itself to being usurped, as well as informal leaders with Machiavellian intent.

Unless you were a feral child, you have had imposed leaders at least until you were old enough to choose. In two-parent families, one is often the disciplinarian (translate: Draconian leader) while the other is the pushover—or so it appears. The division of authority that goes on between the parents in healthy households is a good example of power-sharing and using the dynamic of each other's strengths.

In some cases, the imposed leader will unwittingly, or even knowingly, give his authority to someone else who is a natural leader and a more forceful personality. This kind of transfer of power goes on in all kinds of organizations from the smallest to the largest.

Even in a family of two, you can have both types of leaders. A smart, rational teenager in a house full of distracted adults and rambling toddlers could emerge as the informal leader. Through inaction due to paralysis that is caused by dealing with other issues, the parent surrenders authority to the adolescent. Or worse, a strong natural leader personality emerges in the child of a parent who finds it amusing but does not know how to handle the precocious little bundle of joy. The next thing you know the parent is in the role of tender to the ego of the child.

In artificial groups such as the workplace, most people have to deal with an alpha whom they did not select and over whom they have no control. These alphas were not elected—the boss, the Pope, or the commanding officer—but each one has an unnatural amount of authority that is hard to supplant. Here, too, the natural leader may usurp authority and hold court by getting the blessing of the appointed alphas and, to use an Army term, “wearing their stripes.”

The United States military offers an undeniable illustration of this kind of behavior. Army wives often assume the rank of their husbands. The wife of an officer, for example, may treat the husband's subordinates as if they were her own. Worse yet, she may try to manage the wives of her husband's subordinates as if they were her subordinates. This creates some unusual and complex dynamics, both in the workplace and in social settings.

When a unit commander is strong in his leadership style at work but not so in charge at home, the dynamic can destroy an otherwise cohesive unit. Morale plummets.

Styles of Influence

There are no simple criteria for what constitutes a good leadership style. We could argue the only criterion is effectiveness. Even in the military, successful leadership styles vary. Some leaders are benignly parental, others manipulative. Yet others distinguish themselves through coalition building.

Authoritarian Versus Democratic

In simple terms, this is telling versus asking. Telling may sound a lot like strength, but it is not necessarily the style of choice for a strong leader. Some Draconian managers routinely ask people to do what they want—“How would you like to take on an extra territory?”—and in the process create a tremendous following by getting positive outcomes. At the same time, they disenfranchise those who do not succeed in that system. The scenario plays out like this: An employee fails to comply with a manager's request. Not only does she express her disappointment in a swift and severe fashion, but she also creates an environment in which the person is ostracized. The effect of asking is that people often feel obligated on a much higher level than when the leader tells them what to do. The leader who asks is tying the outcome of the group to the request and creating a feeling of tribal obligation. That can be one of the strongest leadership tactics anyone can exercise.

Open Versus Maneuvering

Effective leaders can be open and straightforward, or maneuvering like a snake in the grass and difficult to discern. Consider these two styles of leadership influence and think of the variations on them.

• Above-board. Whether authoritarian or democratic, this style of leader asks for what she wants up front. She may be a strong or weak personality, but it is clear in her expectations of others. The benefit to this style is that people know where they stand, and situations rarely explode. The disadvantage is that it creates a lot of hidden intrigue because people under the leader try to find ways to counter her effectiveness. The key to dealing with her is to understand that just because she tells you what she wants tactically does not mean she is divulging what she is trying to accomplish strategically. She is still capable of having a grand scheme that is impossible to discern. She simply does not use subterfuge to get it. She asks openly and receives each step in her master plan.
• Chess-playing. To this kind of leader, whether you are a subordinate or a peer, you are a piece on the board. The wise chess player understands that anyone can serve the function of an ill-placed pawn or have the killing strength of a queen. The chess player may tell some people his plan but use others as a blocking mechanism to set up his next move. The chess player needs to insulate himself with valuable pieces for protection. The danger is that a pawn may catch on, or a valued member of the inner sanctum may be sacrificed. The chess player's approach to the game often fails dramatically. To be effective, chess players need a fair amount of charisma or clout, or both.

A broad band of possibilities exists in addition to these two. Consider the variations with just the chess player: he may be an aggressive leader who takes bold risks, or he will differ from the spineless chess player who sacrifices pieces timidly. The method of his rise to power will also dictate behaviors: Did people around him laud his methods, or did he talk his way into the game?

Liabilities haunt both extremes of the chess player. The aggressive leader who uses his subordinates to lay a minefield for those who oppose him will probably be very effective until those subordinates have a crisis of faith: “Tell me again, why am I doing this?” And the timid leader who arranges to have his subordinates sacrificed will have hell to pay if he doesn't have a moral imperative and a decisive victory. In both cases, the perception of subterfuge can doom them.

The crisis of faith will occur quickly for the above-board leader when those who have come to trust him for his honesty discover he has been hiding his agenda in plain sight. While the leader may not be hiding anything deliberately, his followers may have misunderstood the long-term objective or blinded themselves to the obvious. The most disillusioning turn of events in life can be the discovery that you have voluntarily followed someone to an end you did not predict. This sudden understanding of your own frailty can result in a tremendous backlash to the above-board leader.

Naughty Versus Nice

Chris was a bully in high school, but a popular bully because he picked on people who were mean to the “weak.” He exercised strong informal leadership as a kind of heroic outlaw like Robin Hood. Chris carried that same persona into the Army, where he made his career. He often bucked authority, but commanded fierce loyalty from his men and always performed with distinction. Chris didn't change one bit when he retired from the Army and took a management position with a big construction company. A common description of him was, “He's the nicest SOB in the company.” For Chris, naughty sometimes translated as “nice.”

The dark side of a naughty leader presents itself in the form of a mean streak that can arouse fear in some of the very people he works hard to protect. They are the people with fragile self-esteem and uncertainty about their competence. He keeps them in line because they never know when he might decide he dislikes a situation, response, or individual.

In contrast, the nice leader strives constantly to build bridges, convey accolades, offer a sense of empowerment, and create an atmosphere of inclusion. She practices what workplace diversity consultant Melinda Epler calls allyship.

Allyship is about understanding . . . imbalance in opportunity and working to correct it. Allyship is really seeing the person next to us . . . and first, just knowing what they're going through. And then, helping them succeed and thrive with us.⁹

The problem with nice leaders is that they are people—and no person is always nice. The nice leader knocks everyone off balance when she's having a bad day or is profoundly disappointed about a result or situation. She turns into her naughty counterpart when she leaks sarcasm or criticism.

What is your style, and to what style do you respond? To design a plan to get what you want, you need to understand how leaders motivate you to perform and what range of styles you can use to motivate others. In any case, both formal and informal leadership grant the leader a type of supertypical status if the person is effective in that role.

Isolation as a Tactic of Leadership

A community with no external influences, or communication with the outside world that is funneled through a controlling source in person or through media, will become cloistered. As illustrated by Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment described in Chapter 1, the impact of that cloistering on behavior is potentially shocking. Whether formal or informal, the leader becomes the absolute authority for the group, the members of which seek his approval.

If an informal leader seizes power abruptly, the result is likely displacement; the formal leader will see a mass exodus. Germany's wartime and post-wartime brain drain in the mid-20th century provides an example of the latter. Maryann participated in such an exodus from a theater company for which she worked. The board of directors hastily decided to put salaries for staff and actors on hold until the season subscription money came in. Not only was it an illegal move (“there's always unemployment compensation . . .”), but also disrespectful enough to cause six of ten staff members to leave.

An extremely charismatic leader may be able to fend off the inevitable a bit longer than others, but the issue becomes not if, but when. If he can hold them long enough to initiate a transformation of the standards of the group, fracturing from societal norms is bound to happen. If he cannot, then his attempt fails.

Given enough time, even if the leader is not particularly charismatic, he may be able to effect a turnaround by appealing to collective beliefs and altering them to play on groupthink in creating a cult of personality. In other words, he alters the collective consciousness of the group. This is the kind of phenomenon that has happened in congregations that splinter from the larger church community; as they bind closer to the pastor's pattern of thinking, they grow more critical of the policies and practices of the umbrella organization.

With the needs of belonging and differentiating shaping so many of our decisions as humans, we have a duty to pay attention to the people in our lives who have the potential to satisfy those needs. On a grand scale, they are the imposed leaders of our companies and government. But the people who enforce neighborhood covenants or seize power at the Rotary Club meeting can have just as much impact—or more—on the sense of well-being associated with getting those needs met. Ask yourself: What is the reason she has so much sway over me? Is she exercising authority that has been given to her, or am I surrendering authority? Is she really charismatic, or am I perceiving her as charismatic due to circumstances? If you are the one in power, pay attention to the dynamic and polish your skills. If you are not formally in power, map the dynamic and use it to polish others' perception of you.

A real-world application of this knowledge can help companies that acquire other companies. The balancing act is when to exit key leaders. Do it too early and you create mass exodus and a disengaged workforce; do it too slowly and the culture of the new company never takes hold. It is why companies twenty years after acquisition still refer to themselves as “the old X team.”