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Management, Command and Leadership…

Most business professionals are familiar with the terms ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ and some even understand the difference. You know the old adages, ‘leaders do the right things – managers do things right’ and ‘we lead people and manage things’. Robert Sutton’s 2010 HBR article describes the distinction between leadership and management and proposes that leaders who distance themselves from management, as though it’s beneath them are out of touch. To use a popular project management saying, they’re ‘throwing dead cats over the fence’.

In my view, I believe we need to dive a little deeper. When I look at the iconic leaders of the past, I see an obvious distinction that I don’t see today. There’s a glaring difference between great leaders of the past such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela compared with Winston Churchill, Napoleon, or Genghis khan. The difference is that Dr. King, Gandhi, and Mandela led with the absence of authority and had to rely on their ability to influence their followers. When your followers have no choice but to follow your directions or suffer consequences, you are not leading per se. Rather, you are exercising your authority through command.

Unless you’ve served time in the military or similar emergency services, you probably wouldn’t think you’ve worked for a commander. In fact, you’ve probably never contemplated the differences between a leader and a commander, which is ironic as ‘command’ is what most people in “leadership positions” actually exercise – not leadership.

For true leadership to occur, there needs to be an absence of ‘authority’. An example of this is Dr. Martin Luther King, who was able to lead a generation of African Americans, of whom he had absolutely no authority over. He achieved this through his vision for equality and his ability to effectively articulate that vision.

So, if you have authority over the people you lead, that is, there are consequences for them not following your directions, you are a commander, not a leader! Maybe not in the military sense where insubordination and failure to comply with a lawful order is a summary offence and deserters can be shot. Rather, failing to follow your direction could result in the ‘offender’ being reprimanded or potentially fired.

In today’s world of Millennials and political correctness (PC), exercising command is seen as inappropriate; however, command is exactly what is needed. This doesn’t mean a dictatorial form of command such as Directive Control, where it’s “do as I say”, although the reality of business is that this type of command certainly still has a place. What it means in the business sense, is the employment of Mission Command, also known as “workplace empowerment”.

Mission Command provides direction by setting objectives (the Mission) and providing a set of parameters or ‘freedoms and constraints’ and a limit of exploitation known in business as delegation.

So are you a manager, a leader, or a commander? Now that you know the difference, I hope this will help you to ‘lead’ your followers better?

Incompetent Male Leaders

On the surface, this is a very polished presentation, but scratch that surface and you reveal a message that is condescending to women and misandry by a male promoting what he’s selling to an audience wanting to buy-in. It’s quite despicable really.

This video implies that incompetent male leadership is an epidemic, and it’s not! It also implies that males are viewed as competent based on them being ‘aggressive, assertive, bold, abrasive and over-confident’, but this is absurd and stereotypes all confident male leaders as incompetent, linking this to what the ‘Left’ has characterised as ‘Toxic Masculinity’. It’s unlikely that Human Resources departments the world over have included these characteristics as mandatory selection criteria for hiring senior executives.

We’ve all seen our fair share of incompetent male and female leaders. Incompetence is gender-neutral. The masculine traits describe in the video are not in themselves the problem, at least no more a problem than the over-emphasis placed on feminine traits being better for leading. They’re not.

This is unfortunately a weak argument and typical of the current, popular assault on men, especially in positions of power. On the surface the premise of this argument seems completely plausible; however, in the context of this argument, competence is much more a function of management than leadership. True leadership has little to do with technical ability, which seems to be what is being equated to competence or gender, although males tend to want to lead more because anthropologically they are more dominant than females. There are also a vast array of psychological, social, and personal reasons why females are less interested in rising to the top of organisations and into senior leadership roles, and that’s ok.

The quantity of male leaders has its roots in biology, not gender, and technical ability is a poor measure of one’s competence as a leader. It’s important not to confuse technical ability, being termed here as competence, with pure leadership. It’s also important to understand that gender is a factor in the male to female leadership ratio due to males being predisposed to being dominant.

A much more concerning fact is that many leaders are psychopaths. They exude charisma and win leadership positions but have no empathy, are toxic, and ruin organisations.

Imagine for a second that we flipped this video to be about incompetent female leaders. It would break the internet! 

Unfortunately, it is entirely probable that the quest for equality, especially the push for equal quantities (quotas) of females in leadership positions, CEO roles, and on Boards will lead to females being promoted too quickly or beyond their capability. This problem is statistically exacerbated due to the pool of suitable females being low, compared with their male counterparts. The only way to prevent incompetent females from being over-promoted is to allow their rise to be organic and at the ‘right pace’. 

Political Correctness (PC) Gone Mad

Are organisations today acting as good corporate citizen or a “social justice warrior”? When most of us think about Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) we think about gender, race, disability, and LGBTQI+… We don’t tend to think about diversity of views or freedom of expression. But is this PC world we live in suppressing innovation and preventing necessary dialogue, in fear of offending individuals or minority groups; and is this good for business? Is ‘left’ the only direction we can drive business today? Is it only ‘ok’ to have your own views so long as they fully align with those of the organistion and are leaders leading, or following current trends? The Diversity Council Australia used the term “PC Gone Mad” in their 2019-2020 Inclusion@Work Index Report but did they go far enough?

Dr Kevin Donnelly AM, wrote ‘How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia’ released in January 2018, where he discusses the threat posed by the cultural-left to Australia and Western civilisation and explores the rise of political correctness in Australia including: the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism; Safe Schools, same-sex marriage and the LGBTQI sexuality and gender agenda; and what it means to be Australian.

Is it no longer safe to have your own thoughts or speak your mind, or do our current cohort of leaders need to stand up, apply commonsense and demonstrate genuine leadership!

Is Compassionate Leadership Weak Leadership?

The land of the brave and the home of the free is on fire and the inmates are in charge of the asylum!

Law and order are under attack with calls to ‘de-fund’ the police, and Seattle now has a newly formed nation downtown. Peaceful protests have morphed into riots and looting with the destruction of property and even the death of a black Police Officer exercising his duty to serve and protect the people who killed him. In some parts of the country, the urban landscape scape more resembles the streets of an active war zone than the peaceful suburbs that 6 months ago where the peaceful residence of the world’s leading economy.

So what, or who has allowed the “greatest country in the world’ to implode on itself?

I think the answer is obvious. Weak leadership by weak leaders!

Love him or loath him, President Donald Trump is one of the world’s most powerful and often most controversial leaders. Whether or not you agree with his politics or his leadership style, there’s no denying President Trump was elected over other leaders because the people of America believed his policies. Or maybe he was just the least bad option available at the polling booth on the day. I believe the manner in which President Trump addresses the current turmoil gripping his country will define his Presidency.

There is a famous quote by Edmund Burke in a letter he addressed to Thomas Mercer where he wrote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The world is watching and wondering, what will President Trump do…

In a recent interview with Fox News Reporter Harris Faulkner, President Trump talks about how weak leadership is not compassionate.

Not all Change is Good!

From an early age, we are taught to believe that change is good. In fact, you could argue that we are conditioned to believe that all change is good. We are constantly told that ‘things need to change’; that the past is bad and we can build a brighter future. These are easy ideas to support as they seem logical and make good sense. After all what could be bad about a brighter future?

We are now at a point in time where if you don’t support a change, if you question or challenge it, you are viewed as a ‘dinosaur’ or ‘set in your ways’. You know, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks…

We also live in a time where technological change is happening at a rate never seen in history, although that is not really a good premise for an argument. It might be more accurate to say that there is a lot more change happening now, but this change is not as transformational as, say moving from a time when we didn’t have the ability to make fire, to a time when we can make it on command.

We hear leaders make statements like ‘get on the bus, or get hit by it’ and ‘if we aren’t changing we are dying’.

There are a number of well-documented reasons why many normal, intelligent, and even progressive people are uncomfortable with change and even ‘resist change’.

In researching for this article I found many posts and articles about why people resist change and what leaders should do to help them overcome their fear and resistance and eventually accept the change. The ‘new normal’. What I didn’t find was any articles about leaders making sure the changes they are implementing are the right changes.

It is human nature to resist change. We tend to adopt what works and discard what doesn’t and we develop routines that become habits. Habits are hard to break so make sure you develop good ones. When leaders try to force their followers to adopt new habits, especially habits that don’t make sense to them, it can be like forcing someone into rehab who’s not ready to quit their addiction.

But teaching the masses how to overcome their resistance to change or leaders how to better implement change is not the purpose of this article.

Change can be very disruptive and can cause significant damage to organisations and society if it’s the wrong change. It is absolutely critical that change is evolutionary and truly does create a better set of circumstances in the future, than what existed in the past. Change for the sake of change is a very bad idea and change to appease minority groups is a worse idea.

The world is in turmoil as I type. We are still suffering the effects of the worst pandemic in recent history which has devastated the world economy and created even more hostility with China. The death of George Floyd has sparked mass protests crying out that “black lives matter” and activists are now calling for the removal of monuments of great leaders because our current views disagree with those of the past, and social media is constantly reporting on all the negative aspects of society that ‘need to change’. It’s easy to get swept up in all the hype and become a ‘head nodder’ and simply agree that the superficial and often biased arguments for change are valid and therefore should be supported.

Thanks to social media the call to action is fast, if not immediate, and the response that follows is also fast, loud, and unwavering. Unfortunately, this tends to mean that the critical thinking that should be undertaken to validate the change and ensure it won’t result in unintended consequences, doesn’t occur. Worse, there are those in society that realise this and use it to agitate and progress their cause.

One of the main reasons that change is so difficult to implement within organisations, is that it is not seen as necessary or desirable and the masses don’t trust their leaders or their leader’s intentions. There is no ’cause’ to get behind.

This is why left-wing social activists are able to generate mass gatherings, rallies, and protests. They motivate their supporters through lighting fast social media campaigns and their message is one of saving the world and who doesn’t want to save the world – right!

They are able to quickly press emotional buttons that motivate people to act without questioning the validity of the cause and without taking time to think critically. The activists know that politicians need votes to be re-elected so their ability to promote their cause as one supported by the masses is a powerful strategy. The problem is, that it can result in changes that are not best for all. I’m not suggesting a pro-right-wing view or that the causes I’ve mentioned don’t deserve due consideration. I’m just stating that not all change is actually good. 

There is a word to describe a world in constant change and that word is anarchy.

The Big Five Personality Traits

The initial model was advanced by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal in 1961 but failed to reach an academic audience until the 1980s. In 1990, J.M. Digman advanced his five-factor model of personality, which Lewis Goldberg further extended.

What is the best predictor of a person’s likelihood to succeed in just about any endeavour? Is it their confidence, their competence, their grit and determination, or is it their desire, self-belief, or sense of destiny? The answer is, all these factors are important, but the single most significant determinant of their success might just be their personality. 

Personality is defined as:

“The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character”.

Your personality reflects who you are. It also determines how you act and react to stimuli and different situations. Some people are open to new ideas and experiences and may readily move away from their existing beliefs or form new beliefs easily when provided with a convincing argument. Others may remain steadfast in their long-held beliefs despite being provided with irrefutable empirical evidence that their presupposition is no longer valid.

While it is impossible to know for sure, anecdotally, most people seem to believe that we all have a mix of traits that are inherent in us and some traits that are more or less prominent based on the situation.

For individuals to be considered to possess specific personality traits, three criteria need to be satisfied. The individual needs to exhibit the specific trait in a consistent manner across different situations and circumstances. This means, for example, that an anxious person will not only respond with trepidation towards a challenging deadline but will respond in a similar way towards a difficult task.

The trait needs to be stable over a long period of time, for example, if the person cries when yelled at in class at school or at home they also cry when they are yelled at elsewhere such as in the workplace.

The individual must also demonstrate unique applications of the trait and not just be following normal behaviour such as responding to aggression with violence or by running away (fight or flight).

Humans have a highly tuned ability to rapidly determine if they ‘like’ or can trust another person based on what is commonly referred to as their ‘first impression’. It is astounding to discover that these first impressions can be formed in 100th of a second and it’s believed that we developed this ability based on our anthropological need to quickly determine if someone is a friend or foe and if they are likely to help or harm us. Each time we observe a person’s behaviour and determine that they’re “talkative,” “quiet,” “active,” or “anxious,” what we are observing is the individual’s personality, the characteristic ways in which the individual differs from other people. Personality and trait psychologists try to describe and understand these differences.

According to trait psychologists, there are a limited number of these dimensions (dimensions like Extraversion, Conscientiousness, or Agreeableness), and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning that they could be low, medium, or high on any specific trait.

It’s quite common nowadays, that individuals will think of themselves, for example, as either introverts or extroverts in an almost binary way. They believe they are either one or the other all the time, never sway and that these traits are immutable. They think of these traits as precise descriptions of how they behave and that these traits mean the same things for everyone. But research shows that these traits and others are quite variable within individuals and each of us occupy a place on a ‘continuous distribution’ of traits that make us who we are.

In the 1970s two research teams led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon, respectively, discovered that most human character traits can be described using five dimensions. They surveyed thousands of people and independently identified the five broad traits that are common to most people and can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Openness

People who score high for openness tend to appreciate novelty and are generally creative. At the other end of the scale, people who score low are more conventional in their thinking, prefer routines, and have a pronounced sense of right and wrong.

Extraversion

People who are more extroverted tend to display cheerfulness and initiative and seem more communicative. They are also more companionable, sociable and tend to be able to accomplish what they set out to do. Those with low scores are considered to be introverted, reserved, and more submissive to authority.

Agreeableness

Highly agreeable people tend to be friendly, empathetic, and warm to others, while those less agreeable tend to be shy, suspicious, and egocentric. Whilst being agreeable may help you get along with others, being too agreeable may see you being taken advantage of, and you may find it difficult to say no to others resulting in prioritising their needs ahead of your own.

Conscientiousness

Individuals who are high in conscientiousness tend to be well organised, motivated, disciplined, and trustworthy. Those who lack conscientiousness tend to be irresponsible, easily distracted, and unreliable.

Neuroticism

People who score high for neuroticism are often emotionally unstable. They tend to be anxious, inhibited, moody and less self-assured. Those at the lower end of the neuroticism scale are calm, confident, and contented.

Some examples of behaviours for high and low traits are provided in the table below.

Personality Trait

Example behaviours for low scores

Example behaviours for high scores

Openness

Prefers not to be exposed to alternative moral systems; narrow interests; inartistic; not analytical; down-to-earth.

Enjoys seeing people with new types of haircuts and clothing fashions; curious; imaginative; untraditional.

Conscientiousness

Prefers spur-of-the-moment action to planning; unreliable; hedonistic; careless; lax.

Never late for an appointment or a date; organised; hard working; neat; persevering; punctual; self-disciplined.

Extraversion

Preferring a quite evening to a loud party; sober; aloof; unenthusiastic.

Being the life of the party; active; optimistic; fun-loving; affectionate.

Agreeableness

Quickly and confidently asserts own rights; irritable; manipulative; uncooperative; rude.

Agrees with others about political opinions; good-natured; forgiving; gullible; helpful.

Neuroticism

Not getting irritated by small annoyances; secure; self-satisfied.

Constantly worrying about little things; insecure; hypochondriacal; feeling inadequate.

But what if our understanding of personality traits is wrong and if people don’t act consistently from one situation to the next? This was an assertion that shook the foundation of personality psychology in 1968 when Walter Mischel published a book called Personality and Assessment. Mischel’s assertion was that people behave differently in different situations and that the demonstration of particular personality traits isn’t really that consistent.

Mischel cited that children who cheat on tests at school may strictly follow the rules of a game or may never tell a lie to their parents. Thus, Mischel suggested there may not be any general trait of honesty that links these apparently related behaviours. The debate that followed the publication of Mischel’s book was called the person-situation debate because it pitted the power of personality against the power of situational factors as determinants of the behaviour that people exhibit. The reality may be that, for the most part, individuals tend to act according to their inherent personality traits and under ‘standard’ or normal circumstances; however, are able or even likely to stray from these traits under specific, but inconsistent and undetermined circumstances. However, this does not negate the existence of the Big Five Personality Traits or their validity but does suggest caution and that they are not solely relied upon to determine how someone will behave towards a random situation or how they might if they are afflicted by either internal or external factors.

Understanding the degree to which you possess each of the five personality traits and how they might affect your behaviour especially under certain conditions and circumstances, could help you to stop or pause from reacting, think about your response and take appropriate action for the situation. Further, understanding how these traits affect other people might also allow you to anticipate how other individuals or groups may react to stimuli and how this might have a negative impact on you, especially if you’re their leader.

If you would like to take a free personality test created by Dr John A. Johnson, Professor of Psychology at Penn State University, which is based on the Big Five Personality Traits, please click the button below.

IPIP-NEO Personality Test
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