The Traditional Mindset
The goal of being a bottomup leader is to learn self-leadership and thus take control of your life in ways that meet your expectations and provide the life you want for yourself and those you care for. Raising your awareness of what and who could interfere with your journey to self-leadership is a critical part of the learning process. Developing a bottomup leaders mindset will help you to make a real and constructive difference to those you interact with. This blog gives a brief description of the traditional mindset about the concept of “boss” and how thinking this way can potentially reduce your confidence and personal power.
I therefore want to explore in this blog the less positive consequences of the ‘Top Down’ type of organisation before turning to focus on the benefits of ‘Bottom up’ leadership. Although there are truly good and effective things happening in hierarchical organisations this is countered by the many less effective consequences of hierarchical leadership.
How often have you heard the following comments?
v “I will need to take it to a higher level”
v “I’ll go down to the shop floor to tell the troops…”
v “THEY just don’t care about us”
v “Keep that to yourself, don’t let the boss know”
v “Don’t let the ‘troops’ know about that issue”
v “THEY don’t like to hear any critical feedback however accurate it may be”
v “The boss just won’t agree with that!!!”
v “We never get real information on what is going on until after the event, for example we don’t know the organisation is in trouble until redundancies are announced thus failing to give us the opportunity to do something constructive to avoid the outcome””
People who are in a variety of relationships in organisations of all types are lulled into a Superior/Inferior mindset by the language used to describe their relationships. The term ‘boss’ is generally employed to describe the role of the person who is in ‘charge’ of one or more ‘subordinates’. This language is intended to communicate superiority and power due to the perceived ‘control’ that ‘managers’ can exercise over others. In most organisational cases the ‘boss’ has in fact to report to another person who is his/her ‘boss’ who is perceived to have more power than they have. Therefore as you move up or down the hierarchy the power invested in each position is perceived to be greater or less than the person above or below them.
The Hierarchy – learned power position
This power structure is an interesting notion perpetuated by organisations as an effective way to control the actions and behaviour of most people in the organisation. However, the cost of this perceived level of control is the diminishing of the capability of many of the people involved to be truly effective. It also sets up unrealistic expectations of those appointed as leaders or managers in that they are somehow expected to be exceptional performers in their new roles without or with minimal real and effective training. This tends to push them in applying the skills and approaches they learned from their ‘bosses’ with often disastrous results. This can be evidenced by the number of articles and books written about office abuse including, bullying, harassment, intimidation, excessive workload, inappropriate work assignments, long hours, all leading to increasing negative stress levels..
The Struggle for Power
Most leaders are aware of the less effective outcomes from a ‘command – control’ type of organisation yet continue to subscribe to it in the way they behave. This may be due to the ‘master/servant’ relationship being ingrained in our DNA. Therefore, we ‘naturally’ fall into one or other of the roles depending on where we are in the organisations ‘pecking order’ or those we relate to who are perceived to have less or more power than we have.
From early life right through our schooling to the time we get involved in paid employment we have encountered the influence of the ‘parent/child’ relationship. We always appear to be in a situation in which we are seeking to be more empowered than others, or they are attempting to be more empowered than we are. Thus the struggle for power tends to often be centre stage in either an overt or covert manner.
The ‘defence cycle’ in operation
Irrespective of whether the power struggle is in the open or hidden it takes place all the time and the less secure you are the greater the potential impact can be. Being uncertain and feeling insecure is often a signal that we send to others that gives them perceived ‘permission’ to act more powerfully and in ways that diminish our power. This is often called the Defence Cycle in that we go round and round attempting to deal with the inappropriate behaviour from others whilst feeling increasingly inadequate and powerless. We become pessimistic in ways that influence out mind to see only the negative in situations that may in fact be less so. However, we have trained ourselves to only see/hear the negative and thus to interpret all interactions as threats and in turn we respond in a defensive manner with fight or flight behaviour. This is why many people in organisations are less productive than they could be as there is limited motivation to seek ways to improve.
I will describe in future blogs how bottomupleadership offers a constructive process that can enrol people in an effective manner to make the changes that have the potential to help the organisation more easily achieve its goals with significantly fewer people being stressed and demotivated. I will start describing how this can be achieved in my next post.
Tom Jaap