I caught an interesting article recently on LinkedIn, Power Causes Brain Damage. It got me pondering and recalling the impact the Milgram Experiment we watched in a Methods of Organizational Research class had on me where I realized our temptation to abdicate personal responsibility when someone will take that mantle from us. Along with another part of my research on leadership, where I came upon how charismatic leaders can easily take up the responsibility of those in depressed, repressed or oppressed circumstances, it occurs to me that followers have a responsibility in the corruption of power, especially in leadership.
Effective leaders will keep those around them who are able to keep them in check and rooted in reality, even empathy. Unfortunately, we see too many leaders who are not so effective, right? Leadership can be isolating unless precautions are taken and that takes awareness. Awareness takes learning. Too often, those merely vocationally or academically skilled are promoted without learning how to lead others, let alone themselves.
Then there is the Navigating Conflict workshop I developed and facilitated based on the Peter T. Coleman and Robert Ferguson book, Making Conflict Work. It reveals how power, relationship and goal compatibility impact how we navigate conflict. Human sociology is naturally hierarchical, yet as even revealed in the book, we know the effective and compatible use of power when we encounter it. Don’t we? If we delineate power along a continuum of self-serving to common good or socially responsible, when those with power start leaning too far into self-serving, as followers, what do we do? We appease, we submit, we navigate around. It may work, at least in the short term, but how often do we let it become a long term proposition? How often do we let the fear of self-serving power go unchecked? It seems to me that in the face of self-serving power, we reflexively retreat to a follower’s version of it. Do you witness that? We retreat into fear and fall into protecting ourselves. I see this retreat, however naturally human, as abdicating our followers’ version of social responsibility. It creates an ugly cycle, doesn’t it?
I have long advocated and facilitated the idea of self-leadership being a skill for all to develop – those inclined to follow as well as lead. It involves developing self-awareness, effective communication and relationship building capabilities, collaboration and teaming savvy, conflict navigation, emotional intelligence, and other ways of being more socially effective. Anyone can pursue these concepts. They can be naturally derived from effective family leaders, academic experiences that put us in circumstances that can organically nurture our need to be more effective with others. Unfortunately, those same self-protective aspects of human nature can play out within those same circumstances, so we all need exposure to more effective and socially responsible ways of being. This could even be the case for the more vocationally minded, whom we, in the US, have not seen fit to value and support with an educational path.
I see self-leadership as a way to developing better followers, better follower-ship, where we, with care and consideration, keep the powerful, especially those in leadership, in check, even if they haven’t chosen us to do so.
I welcome your thoughts on the matter. Please chime in!
Most kindly,
~ Jacqueline Gargiulo, MSMOB/MA
Nurture the Goose 