to act as peer versus leader, they are leaving a leadership vacuum.
Yet there are also certain obligations that come with the team leader role. If the leader doesn’t fill those obligations then there can be only one result for human groups—without a leader the group will become dysfunctional. The same thing happens to chimpanzees in the absence of a single leader. Dr Goodall witnessed a two-year period amongst the Gombe chimps when there was no single leader of the community. There were two males competing for the top position, so during those two years the community was in chaos. One of the measures of dysfunction, she says, was that the other males used the opportunity to try to improve their social position and mating success. Only when one of the males achieved dominance did the community return to normal and harmony was restored.
So on the one hand people are fine about having a person fill the role of leader. But the leader also needs to sign up for the obligations that come with the leader role. The leader must:
set the vision and direction for the team so people have context for their role
connect the group to the rest of the organisation so they can see the value they provide
be an advocate for the team
provide appropriate resources so people can succeed
defend the team against unreasonable demands of others
set goals so people have clarity in their role
give feedback to help people learn and grow
value people’s contributions
provide an environment where people can progress to enhance their social standing
take care in bringing new members into the team
set the standards of behaviour and performance
hold to account those people who don’t work to those standards
minimise rivalries, address any conflict within the team and ensure harmony.
If the leader doesn’t deliver on these dimensions the group will be weakened, will be dysfunctional, performance will suffer, the leader will be considered inadequate and members of the team will want out to go join a functional team that acts as if it’s a family.
Implication 3. Gaining loyalty as though people elected the leader
Repeatedly, we are reminded of the impact managers have on staff engagement and retention. The Corporate Leadership Council conducted a study on the work attribute that most causes people to stay with their current organisation. The study explored 23 job attributes to find what people are least likely to trade off to leave one organisation to join another. It might surprise that the one attribute least likely to be traded wasn’t work challenge or location or company reputation or base salary. The attribute least likely to be traded off was manager quality. That is, if a person works for a good boss then they are not likely to change jobs, and as the study showed, if a person works for a good manager then any next employer has to offer so much more to attract that person away from their current job.
It’s clear that bosses are important and have a significant impact on people’s morale and output. Leaders should maintain a focus on serving their team. While it’s most likely that the team leader was appointed to their role by their own boss, a guiding principle should be that if the team was asked, they would elect their boss to indeed be their leader and along the way would re-elect them to remain in office.
Implication 4. Protection of the family unit
An extension of our mental framework of belonging to a small intimate work group as if we are family is that we expect the leader to protect members of the team. We expect a manager not to compromise the interests of the group in favour of their own. We expect a manager to protect us from criticism, to protect our resources and keep us from being overloaded and under-appreciated.
Of course, we shouldn’t expect managers to fight for us as much as they would their real family. For primates, protection of family is also primal. Close family genetic ties can sometimes lead to dark behaviour. Taronga chimps Koko and her daughter Kamili on one occasion attacked Shabani when he was an infant. Shabani’s mother, Shiba, came to her son’s rescue. A year later Kamili had her first offspring. Shiba, presumably holding a grudge that had festered over the year, attacked and killed Kamili’s newborn. Perhaps the score was settled, or perhaps the family feud was consolidated.
Implication 5. integrating new members
Like the gorilla Mbeli joining the group, the dynamics of a newcomer to a team can be delicate and the leader plays a key role in effectively integrating new members to the team.
Primates have a cute way of signalling that a youngster needs to be given time to learn the society’s ways. Chimps and gorillas are born with a tuft of white hair around their bottom. The infant will have this white tuft until around the age of four or five. The keepers call this tuft a ‘learner’s plate’. While they have this tuft of hair they are given great latitude by the adults. They are allowed to take food, to jump on the adults, punch the alpha and generally run amuck. After all, the little chimp doesn’t know any better. It’s like the latitude we give to a toddler. But when the young chimp starts losing its tuft of white hair, then it’s welcome to the adult world! As the youngster starts to be disciplined and first incurs the wrath of an adult, this can be quite a shock.
New members need to be integrated into the work group. In instincts terms the challenge is to quickly move new members from stranger status to in-group status. Through the lens of human instincts, leaders need to look after the basics of integration: of having equipment and space ready for the person on their first day, of informal introductions to break the ice, of providing clarity of the group’s purpose and values and to facilitate the new person becoming an immediate contributor to the group’s purpose. The lens also explains why the team leader should take the lead in the integration and not be too quick to pass the person to others, a theme we return to at various places in this book.
Implication 6. Freeloaders and social rejection
For a social animal, rejection from the group is of ultimate significance. On the savannah plains to be stranded alone or with just your family without group support would most likely be catastrophic. No wonder managing poor performers to the point of dismissal is one of the hardest things a manager gets to do. A social animal would not take such a situation lightly.
Yet as long as we have been around human societies have needed to respond when it has a freeloader in its ranks, when someone is flouting group culture or harming group success. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, anthropologist Christopher Boehm outlines the four levels of increasing sanction that human groups traditionally deploy to discipline a difficult member. First the person might be treated as a nonperson (ignored). If that didn’t do the trick, then the person might be shunned (ostracised so nobody cooperates with them) after which they might be expelled from the group and the ‘ultimate distancing is execution’. As we might talk about at work that the objective of attending to a poor performer is to try to correct their behaviour rather than result in termination, Boehm points out that, ‘Social control … is often about pro-socially oriented manipulation of deviants so that they can once more contribute usefully to group life.’
Instincts helps explain a leader’s discomfort in confronting and perhaps threatening termination of employment of a team member, yet also provides a message to leaders that every so often a
