Frank Long was elected president of his service club. At about the same time, Stacy Lathrop was appointed supervisor of all the tellers at her bank. Elizabeth Hall finally achieved her lifelong ambition of becoming vice-president in charge of sales in her company. After six years as a first-line supervisor in a manufacturing company, Bill Morrison was moved up to plant manager.
Louise Lindley, by a large margin, was voted student body president at a midwestern college. Their friends congratulated them and told them how much they deserved the new position. One phoned her husband and excitedly announced the good news. Another took his family out for dinner to celebrate. All felt proud of what they had achieved. Secretly, they all felt they had “arrived,” “made it up the ladder,” “got to the top.”
These are the universal reactions of people who get appointed to positions of leadership. They feel, “I’ve made it.” But in actuality, anyone who gets a leadership position has not made it. It is only the beginning.
Being the leader doesn’t make you one. For after you get to be the leader of a group, you’re going to have to do a lot to earn the acceptance of the group members and have an influence on their behavior. Even more important, the acquisition of a leadership title—supervisor, department head, president, manager, or just plain boss—soon brings unexpected disappointments and uninvited problems. Undoubtedly you’ll see evidence of jealousy on the part of some of your group members. Others may show resentment because they didn’t get your job; in their eyes you didn’t deserve the position, they did.
Also, you are likely to observe some subtle (and some not so subtle) changes in the way the group members relate to you. Some who only weeks ago were your friends now appear to avoid you and exclude you from their lunch groups. Others may start showing signs of being afraid of you; they act defensively, more guarded in their conversations, less frank in sharing their problems. You may even begin to detect some outright “buttering up” from certain members, or hypercritical behavior from others. And it won’t be unusual to encounter negativism—unusually stubborn resistance to your new plans or helpful suggestions.
Becoming a group’s leader almost inevitably brings about significant changes in your relationships with group members. People who previously reacted to you as a peer or friend suddenly have altered their posture toward you. You’re “up there” and they’re now “below” you; they “report to you;” you’re “in charge.”
Even if you were brought in from the outside to be made the leader of your group, be prepared to encounter a wide range of unfavorable responses—suspicion, distrust, hostility, subservience, passive resistance, insecurity. And don’t overlook the possibility that someone might even like to see you fall flat on your face in your new job!
People come naturally to these built-in patterns of negative responses; they learned them when they were children. The leader inherits each group member’s “inner child of the past.” For each of us has a past history of being a child, intimately involved in multiple relationships with a variety of adults: parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, coaches, scout leaders, piano teachers, school principals, and of course the infamous assistant principal. All these adults had power and authority over us when we were youngsters, and most of them used it frequently. All children try out different behaviors to cope with these “authority figures.” Some of their coping mechanisms prove effective, some ineffective. Those that work get used again and again, and so become habitual responses to all other adults who try to control and dominate them.
These coping mechanisms are seldom discarded when children pass into adolescence, or when they enter adulthood. They remain an integral part of the adult personality, to be called upon or unconsciously triggered whenever she enters a relationship with someone holding power or authority. So all adults in a very real sense harbor an “inner child of the past” that will strongly influence how they react to leaders.
When thrust into each new relationship with an authority figure, people naturally employ those same coping mechanisms that were built in by habitual use throughout their lifetime. This is why a new leader inherits the inner child of the past of each of her group members. Their particular coping mechanisms are already present, ready to be used—the leader didn’t cause them to be there. Nevertheless, because group members at first perceive most leaders as probable controllers and dominators, that’s the way they will respond to her, even though the leader may have no intention of using power and authority.
Undoubtedly you will recognize most of the coping mechanisms in the following list, and you’ll be tempted to identify the particular ones you most often employed as a child, as well as those you find yourself still using as an adult:
1. Resistance, defiance, rebellion, negativism
2. Resentment, anger, hostility
3. Aggression, retaliation, striking back, ridiculing the authority figure
4. Lying, hiding feelings
5. Blaming others, tattling, cheating
6. Dominating, bossing, or bullying those with less power
7. Needing to win, hating to lose, perfectionism
8. Forming alliances, organizing against the authority figure
9. Submission, obedience, compliance, subservience
10. Buttering up the authority figure, currying favor
11. Conformity, fear of trying something new or creative, requiring prior assurance of success, dependence on authority figure
12. Withdrawing, escaping, fantasizing, regressing
13. Getting sick
14. Crying
Is it now more clear why, when you become a leader, you haven’t made it? In fact, it might be said that you’ve had it! Even before you get much of a chance to earn the leadership of your group, in the eyes of the members you have a new identity—a potential controller and dominator. And even before you make any actual use of your authority or power, group members are already programmed and ready to cope with it, using some combination of these coping mechanisms.
Certainly I don’t intend to discourage anyone from aspiring to become a leader. Rather, I want to be quite realistic about the unique dynamics that govern the relationship between leaders and group members. And principally I want to underscore the thesis of the L.E.T. book: being the leader does not make you one, because leaders don’t automatically get the respect and acceptance of their group members; so in order to earn the leadership of their group and have a positive influence on the group members, leaders must learn some specific skills and methods.