Leading From Below

“Leadership is a choice” — Simon Sinek

Leading from below is essentially 100% authority-free leadership. It does have particular challenges that “authority” doesn’t have. But there are ways around that, as I will attempt to capture here.

The required range of skills are art forms that justify whole stacks of books by themselves which I’m not qualified to write. I’m not judging if you’re not prepared to do a deep-dive on these topics. What I offer here is food for thought that combines quite well with a glass of wine and pleasant conversation.

Why should you care

For some people, the term “leadership” is a tainted concept. It’s often conflated with management and not in a good way. Also, claiming to be a “leader” is often perceived as arrogant, especially when you’re not in a position of authority. I think this is part of the reason why people don’t take the time to learn about leadership.

I have been a student of leadership for some 20 years, and while I read stacks of books and articles on the subject, most of all I wanted to learn by doing. Learn what it means to be a leader that people want to follow. I made many interesting mistakes along the way, so I have some things to say about it.

Especially to those of us who have ideas to improve things but don’t get to make the decisions required to make them happen.

This is about leadership for the rest of us.

That said, please think critically about everything I’m suggesting here. There are no silver bullets. Things won’t magically work out for you if you follow my advice, but I hope you’ll find it stimulating and helps you look at leadership differently.

Relying on authority is for lazy people

Telling someone what to do is easy. Making them want to do something is harder. It takes time, patience, and paying real attention to people and their perspectives. It’s frustratingly slow sometimes, but it is absolutely worth it.

Influence is convincing people to act on an idea. To spend time, energy and resources pursuing it. Leadership then, is the application of influence to achieve a specific goal.

When you lead without authority, you have to fully rely on influence. You have to sell every idea. Connect with every person. Yes, it may even involve having to stoop down from brilliant rightness to help the proverbial blind see the way forward.

Out with the sticks and carrots

A cheap technique to influence behaviour is figuring out what people want or don’t want, and exploiting that to make them do what they may not want. It is a well-worn tool from authority’s utility belt. Financial incentives like discounts and fines, or salaries and bonuses. Social incentives such as shame or fame. Some incentives may even escape our awareness, when they exploit psychological biases: framing, priming, consistency, safety.

This is manipulation. It is tricking someone, to your (organization’s) advantage, into doing something they would otherwise not likely choose to do.

There are of course culturally accepted forms of manipulation, because we believe they advantage the person or society in some way. We do it to our employees, our students and our children. Social groups for example demand following certain rules, or face rejection. Sometimes I even employ self-manipulation to trick my future-self into something my now-self thinks he should do. Like exercising, or bookkeeping.

But this is not leadership. It’s an effective but temporary trick. Only habituation carries it forward after the incentive has passed.

Let’s explore what it means to be an influencer.

Accept you’re at the bottom

Authority is given to roles, and roles are given to people. Lose the role, lose the authority. As a freelance consultant, I usually have about as much authority as people delivering pizza to an evening corporate meetup; though very much appreciated, I have no business making decisions for anyone. My business is to support the decision makers.

This is where this whole line of thinking about leadership was born. I’m not denying that if you lead well, authority may be entrusted to you. I will get back to that later.

So you’re at the bottom of the power structure, with only your senses and your wits. This is a good place to learn to be a leader, but there are some rules.

Show deference to authority

Natural authority is super useful if you have it, but only gets you so far. Being the Alpha Gorilla tends to earn submission from some people, until you happen to make someone with actual authority feel threatened. Showing deference is an act of respect that will ultimately help you. It is not weakness, but strength when you could respond but choose not to because it would not be the right thing to do.

Even if you’re not part of the power structure, you need to learn the rules and play by them. Just because you also have CEO on your business card doesn’t magically grant you CEO powers in that particular environment. At best, it grants you an audience with the higher-ups as a peer.

Know your place, but also embrace the freedom that is given to you, and grow it from there.

Challenge authoritarians, but do it with compassion

Abusers of power further up the power structure need a talking to, but don’t make the mistake of calling them out too early. So often it is their fear of losing face that keeps them locked in unproductive or unjust behavior.

Expecting people to have a handle on their (inflated) ego is naive; that is actually a fairly advanced life skill. So approach them with compassion and find a way to change their mind in a way that can be framed as a success rather than a failure. Allow them to win, even if that means handing them your brilliant solution. Ego wants accolades, leadership wants results.

Is this manipulation? I’m not entirely sure. This should not be about lying or telling someone what they want to hear, but perhaps it is guarding your tongue from saying what they’re not yet ready to hear (as far as you can judge).

I think it unwise to work on any ego but our own. But you can talk about the problems of ego, and perhaps cultivate a mindset that encourages self-reflection. Don’t come arguing “the problem is you have a huge ego”. You may be right, but you won’t have results.

Don’t be right

Consultants are paid for their ideas and solutions, so being right is sort of our job. The problem with that is that it feeds the ego and causes all kinds of self-perception illusions.

The cold hard fact is that everyone is pretty much wrong about everything all the time. We should aspire to being less wrong, and draw confidence from our ability to find better answers rather than having all the answers. Being right is where questioning stops and confrontations start. It’s OK to be wrong. It’s not OK to stop asking “is this right”.

If someone in our team is “very right”, we like to make fun and bow in deference to his or her Amazing Genius. And when someone realized they were wrong, we celebrate it because that person is now less wrong, in stead of shaming them. This is not to discourage the pursuit of “being right”, but rather to encourage pursuing it with a humble mindset.

Take a stand

The only difference between someone who leads and someone who doesn’t is choice. There are many people who are able to lead but choose not to. Instead they complain, and undermine, and judge.

I know, because I was one of those people.

Since someone was obviously responsible for the mess we were in, I expected them to fix it. And of course nothing changed. Everything was basically broken and it would not be all right. So I would focus on my little corner of the world and make sure at least that was OK.

This changed when I stopped seeing everything as “somebody else’s problem” and decided to assume some responsibility. Not accountability, not yet, but at the very least I would think about the problems we were having and try to come up with solutions.

Seeing a problem and wanting it to be solved is not enough. Sometimes nobody stands up, and it needs to be you.

to be continued…