How leaders can dismantle the ‘status barrier’ at work

Anyone can lead.

In high-performing organizations this is exactly what happens: leadership flows around and throughout.

Everybody is motivated and guided by that magical clear and compelling purpose, and the result is a creative and exciting culture, where leadership is encouraged and team members feel free to harness the energy of others to generate useful activity. I call this ‘asymmetric leadership’.

However, high-performing organizations are rare. Very often process becomes more important than purpose, and organizations tie themselves up with bureaucracy and status that actually discourages initiative and leadership.

Position and status are barriers to building strong connections, and effective leaders work hard to make others feel comfortable. When Field Marshall Lord William Slim told cadets in Sandhurst in the 60s that ‘leadership is just plain you’, he meant that their personality was a far more useful leadership tool than the rank they would hold.

When senior members of the organization control everything, energy is stifled.

This means that there is a very traditional view of leadership, where leadership is linked to position, grade and status. Decisions flow downhill, and nothing happens without the right level or authority signing up to it.

There is an implicit (and nonsensical) assumption that with position comes immense wisdom and infallibility. You might like to see if you can list a few infallible leaders from history and think about how well things worked out for the people they led.

Normally the result of this style of one-directional leadership is that decision-making is slow, and thinking is limited to only a very few authorized senior staff.

It’s always about engagement

Prioritizing position and status is a form of ‘Red Zone leadership‘. This takes many forms but is characterized by any form of leadership behavior that has a detrimental effect on the people within the team.

Arrogance, rudeness or dismissiveness of others diminishes people and reduces their self-worth and willingness to engage. It undermines trust and mutual understanding in the team and makes people more status conscious.

A leader with a tendency to attach blame to mistakes will stifle initiative. People will avoid responsibility and will refer trivial decisions to their boss rather than risk being blamed for potential failure. The result is that nothing happens without the leader’s involvement.

The blame culture might also make team members turn on each other to find other scapegoats for perceived failure. The end result is that internal friction interferes with performance.

Connecting with your people is essential for dismantling this type of status barrier at work. Effective leaders need to be good at connecting with people.

Why is it so important? Leaders achieve things far beyond what they could do alone, by engaging others intellectually and emotionally in pursuit of a clear and compelling purpose. Engaging others is a core leadership activity, an effective use of your time, which can also be interesting and enjoyable.

By engaging with people, I mean really connect. The aim is to get to know people: to break down the hierarchy, bureaucracy and status consciousness around you in order to form really meaningful connections. Connect with the people in your team and the people who interact with your team.

A good way to build connections is to visit your team where they work and spend some time with them. This way you are meeting on their territory, where they feel most comfortable.

This takes a lot of the friction and interference out of the process and allows a more relaxed and honest level of connection. Walking around is always good as you meet people and see things that are not obvious from your desk.

Diversity of thought

If you work in a dispersed team, the same principle applies: meet with people often and in a way that removes status from the engagement.

Connecting through video conferencing or on the phone is a little bit harder, so to compensate for that, you must try a little bit harder. Be a little more animated and work hard to invite people’s opinions and to encourage them to speak.

If you want to build an excellent team, it will be diverse. Diversity of background, education, race, social connections, gender, sexuality, outside interests and almost any other way you can think of brings a richness of experience.

There is no correlation between talent or potential on one hand, and race, sexuality, religion, or professional ability on the other. High IQs, emotional intelligence, great work ethics, creativity and commitment can be found in all quarters of society.

Teams where people are too similar limit their own potential. It is a form of organizational in-breeding.

In teams like this thinking will be less radical because it will be based on a narrower breadth of experience. Similar educations, lifestyles and hobbies limit the gene pool of creativity. Inherited social conventions encourage status, hierarchy, and a tendency to conform. Too many people have ideas that overlap. A team of similar people won’t know what they don’t know.

In high performing teams, positive difference is encouraged. Diverse backgrounds and beliefs can provide the backdrop for a creative and vibrant culture. Different experiences, upbringing, perspectives and beliefs within a team can provide a rich environment for creativity and thinking. However, cognitive biases, which are ideas imprinted on us from an early age, usually make us prefer people who remind us of ourselves.

Wrapping up

It is human nature to form groups – tribes if you like – in which we feel safe, and to be suspicious or fearful of people who are not members of our tribe. The tendency to trust people like ourselves whilst rejecting those who are different is very deeply rooted.

In pre-historic times, this behavior was a useful programming, as anybody that was not part of our own tribe was, potentially, a threat. But in the multicultural times we live and work in, this programming is unhelpful and irrelevant; good leaders work hard to create inclusive organizational cultures, built on trust and mutual understanding.

However, to build high-performing diverse and inclusive teams that will succeed in future, we need to overcome our own unconscious bias.