Helpfulness is leadership

So, you’ve made your way onto a team. A board, a panel, a committee. You bustle with ideas, and can’t wait to contribute.

Now what do you do?

Others in the group have been in the company longer, are more senior, and hold more authority than you. You wait your turn and you contribute to the leader, and one day perhaps you’ll be that leader, and you’ll do the same as before. I mean, that’s the way it has always been, so it must work, right?

Right?

Well… not so much. It turns out that this structure, the leader-plus-support-team model, is counterproductive. It doesn’t get the best out of anyone, including the leader. While everyone else is made to feel like a ‘beta’, a less contributive person than the leader, it turns out not to be the case.It turns out that a boss-leader merely suppresses everyone else’s productivity, which gives the illusion of superiority, but really cripples everyone, including the boss.

Try it! See if you can make a super-team out of your high performers, and see what happens.

Well, they did try this experiment, with chickens.

Evolutionary biologist William Muir put together a super-coup of chickens, reasoning that all the most productive chickens together would achieve dramatically increased output as a team, much better than a control group.Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Instead, after six generations, the control group was full of plump, healthy chickens whose egg-laying productivity had increased dramatically, while the super-coop… All but three were dead, and they weren't so very productive as they had spent most of their energy dominating others.

The ‘ambitious’ chickens had only achieved the appearance of success by suppressing the productivity of other members of the flock, which is exactly what happens in human groups.

Barbara Heffernan points out that this model of competitiveness, which has been taken as the ‘common sense’ approach for 50 years of modern business, and gives all the resources to the few who seem to produce, has produced little more than “aggression, dysfunction, and waste”.

Heffernan refers to a study by MIT, where they found that the best performing groups were not particularly gifted nor ambitious, but they had three qualities of note: social empathy, equal opportunity to speak, and more women.

Which is particularly encouraging if you are a not-particularly-competitive female with good social skills. Sociability and benevolence – the willingness to help people, the degree to which they can see an idea from someone else’s point of view, and honest yet considerate communication are the makings of a team with good leadership.

To change the culture, there are measures you can take: encourage ideas out of others, encourage helpfulness, and create a safe culture where more people can pitch ideas back and forth without fear of repercussions.

To get them to spend social time together, you could co-ordinate breaks together in a communal area to socialise. This fosters familiarity and trust, giving each other social incentive to get tasks done.

Even beyond your own team, beyond your own company, you can apply this culture of collaboration. If you think your people can help someone in another firm, and they may help you, then meet, socialise, network and collaborate rather than each wasting resources doing it themselves.

And at the end of the day, we’ll all be a lot more productive, a lot more social, less anxious about our work and more satisfied with our contribution, just for being a bit more human to each other.