![Power Is Not Leadership: 4 Lessons From Orangutans]()
Leadership
Danum Valley is an ancient tropical forest on the northeastern tip of Borneo with an outstanding complement of flora and fauna. It is the largest remaining area of virgin undisturbed lowland rainforest on the island spanning 170 square miles. Recognized as one of the world’s most complex ecosystems, Danum Valley lies along the upper reaches of the Segama River and is flanked by vast timber concession acreage. The valley is home to rare and endangered species like the Sumatran rhino, the Asian elephant, the clouded leopard, and the orangutan.
The Borneon orangutan, or Pongo pygmaeus, can trace its ancestral line for 9 million years to Sivapithecus, a Miocene hominoid from Turkey. At one time the world’s wild orangutan population climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Today, Pongo pygmaeus has been reduced to less than 20,000 individuals. Poaching, illegal logging, mining, and the conversion of forests to agriculture have played a role in the rapidly changing environment of the great ape.
It is under these threatening conditions that the male orangutans pursue the coveted position of alpha. They assert their dominance by doing three things: First, they pound their chests. Not in discrete bouts of rapidly delivered beats, but for prolonged periods of time. So much time, in fact, that they cause themselves physical harm. The desire to be alpha overrides their sensory for pain. Next, they screech and grunt until the oxygen to their brain is restricted and they become delusional. Finally, they excrete enormous amounts of poop and toss it at the other apes. This is how the alpha male is decided. Self-inflicted pain, histrionics, and dung throwing.
In the world of orangutans, the alpha holds the position of endurance and power, but is not to be mistaken as leader. He is not designed to lead. The alpha’s job is to protect territory and fight or frighten off invaders. With the alpha in place, the apes co-exist in a state of harmony. The troop works together to find and harvest food. They live like families and treat extended family members with courtesy. They even create pathways to food sources knowing these pathways will be used by other apes in the territory.
It is not a stretch to recognize their similarities to man. In fact, the word “orangutan” comes from the Malay words “orang” (man) and “(h)utan” (forest). Hence, “man of the forest.” Neither is it a stretch to draw leadership lessons from this primate community:
1. The alpha position is a responsibility, not a rank. Being the leader means to be in a position to help others achieve their goals — employees, customers, investors, and community. As Ken Blanchard says, “Leadership is not something you do to It is something you do with people.”
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2. Power is used to protect the troops, not impose burden. It’s the leaders’ job to set the vision and direction, then inspire and equip the team to achieve results. Used to maximum effect, leadership power will empower the organization and its employees. Used carelessly, it will disempower them, and can lead to a culture of fear.
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3. Delusional, dung-slinging behavior denotes endurance and power, not leadership. Part of a leader’s role is to solve problems, and problems can lead to stress. But yelling at people, demeaning them, and using profanity are not signs of leadership. (See Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice.) They are signs of fear, insecurity, and distrust.
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4. Power is not leadership. Hoarding power can lead to disengaged, clock-punching employees who leave their hearts and imaginations at the door. Sharing the power to give input takes true strength, from a true leader, and allows everyone in the organization to engage and grow.
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Like the orangutans, today’s organizations face threat by competitors, territory fragmentation, and resource depletion. Leaders who understand the true value of their position can create a culture of teamwork, respect, and sustainability.
Question: How does the way you use your power impact your organization’s culture?
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CEE News is designed to help you with the challenges you face every day by sharing infographics, white papers, best practices, and spotlighting businesses that are getting it right. I hope you’ll subscribe to CEE News and it becomes a resource that continually adds value to your walk as a leader. If I can be of assistance in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
![Power Is Not Leadership: 4 Lessons From Orangutans]()
Leadership
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at an event hosted by the San Diego Employers Association. I talked about the research I’ve been doing on a book I’m co-writing with Dr. Tony Baron about power and leadership.
CEE Founder Sheri Nasim and Danielle Aguas with SDEA Team!
Dr. Baron and I flew to U.C. Berkeley last year to visit Professor and social psychologist Dacher Keltner. Professor Keltner had just published a book called The Power Paradox. Using MRIs to study the brain, Keltner and his students found that when a person experiences power, the brain gets a little surge of dopamine – the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, love, addiction, and psychotic behavior.
The paradox, Keltner found, is that dopamine can also suppress our ability to empathize. That’s not good news for the people we’re supposed to be leading. (Read more about Professor Keltner’s findings here.)
Dr. Baron and I also reviewed what Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, refers to as the “amygdala hijack”. If you’ve ever experience road rage, you’re familiar with this phenomenon. Here’s a breakdown of why it happens.
Our brains are made up of three parts. The first and oldest is the brain stem. It’s responsible for the body’s basic operating functions like breathing and heartbeat. Next, comes the limbic system where the amygdalae are located. The amygdalae activate during times of stress. They are responsible for “fight or flight” responses that have kept us alive as since the days that cave men crossed paths with sabre-toothed tigers. Over the limbic system is the neocortex, which is responsible for logic and reason.
When the amygdalae are triggered by stress, they race into action. First, they signal the brain stem to release adrenaline and cortisol through the body. The heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and breathing accelerates. Next, the amygdalae shut down the flow of blood to the neocortex, because using logic and reasoning could cause you to delay jumping into immediate action.
That’s the amygdala hijack. And though we’ve evolved from living in caves to condos, our brains don’t know the difference between a sabre tooth and a distracted driver. When someone cuts us off in traffic, we can lose the ability to reason. Our focus narrows, and all we can think is “I’m right and he’s wrong!”
We get triggered the same way when we are in a stressful meeting, or even when we replay memories of stressful events. Adrenaline and cortisol flood the body. What’s worse is that these stress hormones can stay in the body for up to 4 hours, which is why we may stay amped up long after the stressful situation has passed. There’s a term for that effect too – the amygdala hangover.
So, is there anything that we can do to avoid an amygdala hijack? Fortunately, yes.
1. Recognize when you are triggered. If you get easily triggered at work, especially when you’re in meetings with the same people each week, this is an excellent opportunity to practice. You might start by going to the meeting, getting upset, staying upset for a day or two before you realize that you were triggered. The next week, you go to the meeting, get upset, and stay that way until you get home that evening before you recognize that you’ve been triggered. The next week, you’re in the meeting and you start to feel your chest tighten and your blood pressure rise just before you get upset. You still get upset, but you notice what’s happening in your body in the moment. Progress!
2. Fire up your neocortex. Once you can recognize that you are being triggered in the moment, you can move to Step 2. Thomas Jefferson once said that if you get mad, count to 10. If you get really mad, count to 100. This sounds simplistic, but it actually has the effect that you need to counter an amygdala hijack. When you count, you re-engage the neocortex that was shut off just seconds ago. Counting will give you the ability to re-access logic and will build the distance you need to see things more clearly.
3. Switch your attention. Take long, intentional breaths. Again, this sounds simplistic, but when you bring your attention repeatedly to each breath as you have it, you activate the parasympathetic system. That’s the part of your nervous system responsible for “rest and digest.” Taking deep, mindful breaths will have the net result of bringing you back into a calm state.
Recognize when you are triggered, reconnect with your neocortex, and take slow, deep breaths to find the path back to a calm state. Doing so over time, will form new neural pathways to re-take control of your brain.
Question: When was the last time you got upset? Did you blame others for your response, or did you recognize that you were triggered?
Interested in learning more about how to rewire your brain to excel at leadership? Summer special: Get 15% off our executive coaching services when you book between now and August 1, 2017. Learn more about our process by emailing me directly at snasim@executiveexcellence.com. [Read more about our Executive Coaching services.]
Interested in getting more content like this? Subscribe to CEE News!
CEE News is designed to help you with the challenges you face every day by sharing infographics, white papers, best practices, and spotlighting businesses that are getting it right. I hope you’ll subscribe to CEE News and it becomes a resource that continually adds value to your walk as a leader. If I can be of assistance in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Leadership
One of the most challenging yet satisfying roles we play at Center for Executive Excellence is helping teams through culture transformations. These are heavy lift, long-term projects that require us to embed ourselves with our clients to execute the transformation roadmap.
The mechanics of the process are tailored from client to client, depending on things like size, business case, and readiness for change. The emotional cycle, however, is a consistent 5-stage process.
Stage 1 is uninformed optimism.
Stage 2 is informed pessimism.
Stage 3 is the “Oh S*&t! What have we gotten ourselves into?” phase, also known as the “Valley of Despair.”
Stage 4 is informed optimism.
Stage 5 is success and fulfillment.
Change of every type – both good and bad – can be stressful. Change takes us out of autopilot and forces us to lay down new neural pathways. Change makes us slow down and re-think what we’re thinking about.
I overheard another metaphor for change last week attributed to a leader at Chuao Chocolatier that helped explain cultural resistance to change. If you think of yourself as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, you can imagine that your shape impacts the shape of those in your immediate surroundings. In turn, their shapes impact the shapes of those surrounding them, and so on throughout the entire organization.
If you try to change, you will meet resistance from those around you, because it will force them to change their shape. But, if enough of your team succeeds in changing together, it can be the catalyst for organizational change.
If you’re stuck in Stages 1 – 3 of your change project, try identifying a team that shows the highest proclivity to make the change you want to see in the rest of the organization. They will be most likely to find ways around resistance and influence those in their immediate surroundings to climb out of the Valley of Despair.
Question: Are you in the middle of a culture transformation? What stage do you find yourself in?
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Leadership
Looking for some titles to add to your reading list this summer? Pull out your tote and pick up some of our top picks.
From recent bestsellers to old-school business parables, here’s a list of books that we think are well worth the read:
1. Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others by Cheryl Bachelder
What it’s about: An engaging case study of the turnaround of Popeyes, proving that servant leadership is challenging, tough minded, and gets results.
Why pick it up: Bachelder takes you first-hand through the transformation of Popeyes to show that leaders at any level can become a dare to serve leader.
2. The Employee Experience Advantage: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces they Want, the Tools they Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate by Jacob Morgan
What it’s about: A new type of organization is emerging, one that focuses on employee experiences as a way to drive innovation, increase customer satisfaction, find and hire the best people, make work more engaging, and improve overall performance.
Why pick it up: Backed by extensive research, futurist Jacob Morgan breaks down the three environments that make up employee experience at every organization around the world.
3. Option B: How To Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant
What it’s about: Following the sudden death of her husband, Silicon Valley executive Dave Goldberg, Sandberg described widowhood at a young age as “a club that no one wants to belong to.” Co-authored with Wharton professor Adam Grant, the book is focused on recovering from adversity.
Why pick it up: Though not strictly a business book, it includes stories of people who recovered from a variety of hardships. It contains lessons for leaders who want to build their own resilience, too.
4. Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture by Mark Miller
What it’s about: A scarcity of leaders today means a shortfall in performance tomorrow. Bestselling author and Chick-fil-A executive Mark Miller describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization — from the front lines to the executive ranks.
Why pick it up: Learn to build an organizational culture that will ensure your leadership pipeline is full and flowing.
5. Animal Farm by George Orwell
What it’s about: A dramatic takeover; disengaged, top-down management; besieged, under-appreciated workers — this Orwell parable on totalitarianism serves as a reverberating lesson in organizational behavior.
Why pick it up: If you haven’t picked this one up since ninth grade, it’s truly worth another read.
6. Sprint: Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz
What it’s about: These Google Ventures partners give us a practical guide to answering critical business questions, whether you’re a small startup, part of the Fortune 100, a solopreneur, or a nonprofit.
Why pick it up: This book is for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.
7. Own It: The Power of Women at Work by Sally Krawcheck
What it’s about: Success for professional women is no longer about trying to compete at the men’s version of the game. And it will no longer be about contorting themselves to men’s expectations of how powerful people behave.
Why pick it up: Learn how women can embrace and invest in their innate strengths — and bring them proudly and unapologetically, to work.
8. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull
What it’s about: A manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation — into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made.
Why pick it up: To learn leadership and management philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention.
Some of the principles shared in these books you may already know but need reminding of. Others can give you the insight you need to tackle your greatest challenges of 2017.
Question: What books have helped you along your leadership journey?
![Power Is Not Leadership: 4 Lessons From Orangutans]()
Leadership
We’ve all come across them. Those leaders who people naturally gravitate toward. Though it seems counterintuitive, the magnetic effect these leaders have on people is not because of how people feel about the leader. It’s because of how the leader makes people feel about themselves.
These leaders have mastered the embodiment of two basic facts about people:
Fact 1: Every person matters.
Fact 2: Every person wants to feel valued.
By keeping these facts in mind, you can master the skills necessary to achieve leadership excellence. Here are three skills that will have the highest impact:
1. Help People Connect the Dots. In my post, “A Pharaoh Walks Into a Bar,” I illustrate why team members need to understand how their daily jobs fit into the big picture. It is your responsibility as a leader to help your team connect the dots. You may use formal tools like strategy maps, or pull up to your nearest whiteboard. Regardless of your delivery method, take the time to sit with your team members to help them visualize their role in the success of the organization.
2. Help People Grow. I know a CEO who likes to joke that, “The only thing worse than training your people and then they leave is not training your people and they stay!” All joking aside, one of the main reasons people give for leaving companies is that they stop growing. Growth brings energy, vitality, life, and challenge. Without growth, we’re just going through the motions. Create a culture of learning and growth to maximize the collective talent of your team.
3. Give People Sincere Appreciation. People who don’t feel appreciated are often the first to burn out or jump ship. It only takes a minute to recognize a team member for making a positive contribution. But, doing it right requires more than the occasional “Attagirl!” Give timely and specific praise to show your team members how you value their contribution. Here’s a quick demo to show you how.
One final secret to mastering leadership excellence – you can’t fake it. Leaders who genuinely care about their team members will invest the time to help each one feel valued. Be committed to helping them connect the dots, helping them grow, and giving them sincere appreciation. Every day is an opportunity to help people see the best in themselves and achieve their highest potential.
Leadership
Someone used a 4-letter word at our April 27th Re:Imagine Leadership Summit that made a few audience members squirm in their seats. The word slipped out during the panel discussion when Joe Lara, a former Naval Special Warfare Command Officer, was asked, “What is the ingredient that holds service members together during the chaos of battle?”
“Love,” was his answer. “When someone cares enough for you to give their life to protect yours, that’s love in action,” Lara said.
Our panel moderator, Dr. Tony Baron, noted that love is not a word that’s often brought up at leadership conferences. But, when he asked other members of the panel about love in action at their organizations, they quickly agreed.
Rachelle Snook, Global Talent Manager of WD-40, said that the employees at WD-40 think of themselves as members of a tribe. “Tribal love,” said Snook, “is what keeps our culture strong. One of our mantras is ‘we’ve got your back.’” Damian McKinney, Founder of McKinney Advisory Group agreed. “When you think about the commercial real estate industry,” McKinney said, “love isn’t the first word that comes to mind, but it’s what we practice to ensure that we are truly serving our clients and that we have faith that we’re in this together.”
Dean Carter, VP of Shared Services at Patagonia, told the audience that employees at Patagonia think of one another as family. With a child care center located on Patagonia’s Ventura, CA, campus, the lines between employee and family are blurred. “Some of the children whose parents worked at Patagonia 30 years ago are now employees,” Carter said. “We are much more than co-workers. We are family members who look after one another. We know each other’s children by name and we’re there for each other through all stages of each other’s lives.”
In her 2015 leadership book, Dare To Serve, former Popeye’s CEO, Cheryl Bachelder, writes that turning around the flagging company in 2007 required a decision to serve its franchise owners. The problem was, Bachelder writes, “This decision [to serve] is not typical in our industry. Franchisors and franchisees are constantly in conflict – arguing about the contract, the business strategy, the restaurant design, the promotion pricing, or the cost of food.”
Bachelder continues, “Here’s a tough question. Do you love the people you’ve decided to serve? It helps. One Popeye’s leader says it this way: ‘If you’re in the franchising business, you should love the franchisees.’ To love franchisees, you have to love entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are passionate. They take risks. They invest for the future. They are ambitious. They are definitely not corporate bureaucrats. They do not have much patience with people holding MBA degrees or offering up expensive harebrained ideas. What if the most important people in your business are entrepreneurs? You must decide to love them.”
What Joe Lara, Rachelle Snook, Damian McKinney, Dean Carter, and Cheryl Bachelder have in common is that in order to truly serve the people you work with and are in the business to serve, you must set aside your differences, and look for ways to develop a love for who they are. Doing so requires you to set aside your ego, be aware of your biases, and have the courage to make love part of your organizational culture.
Question: Is there someone that you are in conflict with at work now? What would happen if you dared to love them?
