“In this moment, are you managing or leading people?
A premise of Loving Diverse Minds, Leading Diverse Hearts: the Way to a Humanistic Future is that leadership helps us meet our needs and the needs of our communities. Management, on the other hand, meets the needs of the extractive systems in our lives: corporate, educational, health/sick, housing, law enforcement and punishment, religion, transportation and others. Management extracts resources, until depletion of those resources or until the extraction is disrupted.
One source of power for extractive systems is their agents’ manipulation of symbols to give the appearance and feeling of leadership. However, neither smoother processes, work climate surveys, community surveys nor job perks change the extractive goals of management.
A management system co-opts terms (think self-care), concepts and paradigms that give off the leadership vibe. We are then left with symbols of leadership, for example, a charismatic personality, in the place of actual leadership - guidance to actually meet our needs. Our acceptance of these symbols as leadership becomes another way to extract from us. We invest our affection in the hollowness of these symbols. In the presence of symbolic leadership, we trust ourselves less. We feel we must be managed.
Regulation of self in extractive systems is through behavior management. First, people tell us we must be managed and then set us up to manage ourselves; to evaluate ourselves according to some elusive measure of productivity. This is taught early. For example and speaking as a person who used to educate K-12 teachers, K-12 school curricula are based on behavior management. I encourage you to peruse a course catalog of any traditional teacher education program to see this for yourself. In general, we design systems to regulate children's behavior through adult authority - external authority. We guide children (and adults) away from critical thinking/problem solving opportunities.
Even inside our extractive systems, there are communities that promote children’s self-regulation, with support from adult leadership. We can see examples of this in truly student-led educational environments (see The Pearl Remote Democratic High School), which go beyond using the rhetoric of student-led. In these types of spaces, opportunities for self-regulation are built on trust of self, of others and of the environment. This trust requires relationship building - in the example above, between teacher and student. Focusing intensely on behavior (and output) to the exclusion of personal and inter-personal needs, assures no meaningful relationships can form.
Your leadership capacity will expand or contract, based on your willingness to form meaningful relationships with people, at various depths and to hear their needs. This does not mean you need to try to meet all their needs, but ask yourself a few questions. If you believe you want to invite new people into your community, ask yourself: "am I more concerned about their needs or their behavior”? [Btw: I do not mean people who may pose physical or other threats to you.] “Do they have to behave for me”? “What am I seeking to extract from them”? At first, try to ask yourself these questions in a morally neutral way - to separate how you really feel from how you think you should feel about them entering your community.
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Before you answer, let's talk about how people show up in spaces. People can occupy a space five different ways - through:
Absence - mental or physical
Presence - mental or physical
Participation - at least going through the motions mentally or physically, does not require emotional attachment
Involvement - at least going through the motions mentally or physically, interested in what’s happening, does not require emotional attachment
Engagement - emotionally, mentally and physically doing an activity; interested in what’s happening; personally invested in the outcomes
One can be mentally or emotionally absent from an environment - while still being physically present, while participating and while involving themselves. Words can come from their mouths, ideas can come from their heads, even as they are checked out. They can be present, participate and be involved and yet be in fight, flight, freeze, feign or flop mode the whole time. People will engage when they feel safe to do so.
If your inclusion of certain people is an afterthought, the most they will emotionally commit to is being involved - regardless of what they say to you. Those "included" know at best, they will be blown off because decisions have already been made and, at worst, they will be punished for trying to engage authentically. They may not be demoted or lose a job, but they may have to endure microaggressions, for example, being questioned about why they are there in the first place. So, they know they have to behave - perform. To make sure they are safe (enough) around you, they have to give you just enough, but not too much. Too much is the amount of input that interferes with your agenda and that questions your forgone conclusions.
Looking at people only through the managing lens of behavior (compliance really), confirms your bias that you are a good person who includes everyone who deserves to be included. But, people who feel unsafe will LET you see what they think you want to see... for them to stay safe enough. This is why you have to look past behavior and provide ways to understand what the people whom you invite into your space need. What are their hopes? What are their expectations? What supports do they need before they show up in a big group, especially around people you know will show their a$$ when given the chance? What are their skills? What are their preferences? What helps them function best? What are their agendas? How do they see themselves in what you are trying to accomplish?
One thing people absolutely need is your honesty about the roles you want them to play in spaces where you invite them. Do you want them to be absent, be present, participate, be involved or be engaged?
Can they rely on you to lead or is the set up for you to manage them?
If your planned actions will lead to extraction, but you don’t want to extract, what can disrupt that process”?
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Image from Getty Images
The idea of behavior control makes me think about performance reinforcement. A certain performance was reinforced for me so much growing up, and was so ‘safe’ that I spent most of my school aged life, and most of my life, iibh, in that performance. As I deconstruct, that fear of misbehaving and the trauma there continues to surge forward. The idea of performance seems superficial at first, behavior change or management has a superficial ring to it. But if we think about how we shape around our trauma, then if we have early childhood trauma as I do, those behavior/performance pressures, even if met, are laden with shame and founded upon repressed fears and terrors.