The military's early contribution to leadership is hardly surprising. Leading is crucial for goal achievement in battle. This is because of all human endeavors, combat alone involves the simultaneous presence of the most severe of situational variables. These include generous doses of high risk and uncertainty, hard­ship, low compensation, and lack of security. Leadership in business is a new innovation. Sun Tzu wrote on leadership in 400 B.C., but most business writers on leadership are still around today. Until this century, few in business considered leadership very important. Employees did what the boss instructed them to do. If not, they didn't get paid. Scrooge did not have to worry about his leadership techniques to get Bob Crachett to clerk properly. Even early scientific managers like Frederick Taylor focused not on leadership, but on motivation based on an employee's compensated self-interest.

Coming late, business leadership borrows heavily from ideas developed by the military. The search for scientific weapons during World War II led the U.S. Government to sponsor major social science studies. It also formed the Na­tional Research Council made up of leading academics and researchers from major universities around the country.

It's mission was to exploit scientific knowledge for practical application to the war. One committee of the council which focused on psychology succeeded in developing Psychology for the Fight­ing Man.¹ This practical guide included several chapters on leadership derived from the latest research at the time. This work got many scientists interested in the subject and spawned numerous lead­ership studies at various universities after the war. Many theories and tech­niques came from these early leadership institutes. Although their output in­cluded insights and distinctions not previously made, they yielded few, if any, results of a revolutionary nature.

For example, the well known Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid, once consid­ered a breakthrough technique, suggests that more effective managers have high concern for both production and people. Predating the research which led to the development of the grid is the fundamen­tal principle of military leadership. This is that the leader must make the mission (production) his first concern, the welfare of his subordinates next, and himself last. This priority implies high concern for both production and people, since both must be considered before self. It is likely this military model is even more descriptive of the effective leader than the grid, since it introduces the notion of priorities, which the grid does not.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the Managerial Grid, Management by Objectives, Management By Wander­ing Around, Total Quality Management, or other leadership concepts evolving from these postwar research inputs. All make significant contributions to how we understand and practice leadership in business. But again, these works are not revolutionary. The basic techniques for leading remain the same.

 

Changing Leadership Techniques

Now, after thousands of years, leadership is changing. It is changing not because people or the work place are changing, although both are, but because of a fan­tastic explosion in psychological tech­nology. This technology represents the cutting edge—the first real changes in the way leadership may be practiced in several millennia. Let me give you just a few examples of what I am talking about.

Psychologists wondered what caused animal mothers to know to take care of their newborn. No one explains to a mother cat, dog, mouse, or elephant that what comes out of their body isn't dan­gerous. They could just as easy kill their infants as protect them. Yet not only do animal mothers know to feed and care for their young, but they will defend them to the death. We call this behavior instinctive, but until recently we had no idea what triggered it.

Experimenters working with mother turkeys discovered the biological signal that told the mother to feed and protect. It was the "cheep-cheep" sound baby turkeys make. With no sound, the mother turkey ignored or even killed her offspring. To confirm this, scientists recorded the cheep-cheep sound and played it in a tape recorder buried in a stuffed polecat. The polecat is one of a wild turkey's worst natural enemies. Without the tape recorder, the mother turkey instantly ripped the stuffed ani­mal to threads. However, when the re­searchers added the sound of the turkey chick, the mother attempted to feed the stuffed polecat.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer wondered whether similar sounds trig­gered behavior in man. Amazingly, she discovered that they did. In one experi­ment, she asked people waiting to use an electronic copier in a library to surrender their positions in line. She made this request in three different ways. The first was simply to ask: "Excuse me. I have five pages. May I use the Xerox ma­chine?" Sixty percent complied. The second was to give a good reason: "Ex­cuse me. I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I'm in a rush?" Now ninety-four percent went along. If left at that, Langer might have concluded that the key was to give a viable reason such as "because I'm in a rush" to gain compliance. But then she made the re­quest in a third way. The third way was not to give a reason that made any sense, but to continue to use the word "because." Asked researcher Langer: "Excuse me. I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make copies?" The percentage that stepped aside was almost identical as when a good reason was given—93 per­cent! Dr. Langer concluded that the word "because" was the equivalent of the cheep-cheep sound to the mother turkey. Something in the human brain makes us obey the idea represented by this sound, even if the reason that followed the word made no sense at all.³

What is the relevancy of this discov­ery for leadership? Certain words univer­sally act as an "open sesame" for getting followers to obey a leader's wishes, with­out the brain's analyzing the request fully. The leader will only need to use the right words. Maybe you have intu­itively recognized this in the past. Cer­tain words you use in influencing others are very effective; others less so. Have you ever been influenced by someone to do something you would not normally agree to at all? This may be how this person was effective in gaining your agreement or action.

The difference now is that scientists can equip you with a battery of "right words" to attain different actions. Others will happily comply, having no more choice then the mother turkey coddling the stuffed polecat.

Acquiring Charisma

Let me give you another example. People perceive certain individuals as being charismatic. New research proves that not only is what constitutes charisma measurable, but that you can acquire charisma if you have the desire to do so. There is evidence that John F. Kennedy intentionally set out to acquire charisma after a visit with Hollywood stars when he was a teenager.⁴

Dr. Ronald E. Riggio at California State University, Fullerton has already developed a charisma test instrument that measures six dimensions of social skill that his research associates with charisma. These are: emotional expressivity, emotional sensitivity, emo­tional control, social expressivity, social sensitivity, and social control. After taking the test and determining your strengths and weaknesses, you can cor­rect your deficiencies through specific exercises. Others may be charismatic through accidental acquisition of one or more of these social skill dimensions, hi the future, you can acquire the same charisma by exercising as you would exercise a muscle.⁵

Back in the mid-1970s, John Grinder, a linguistics professor, and Richard Bandler, a mathematics major at the University of California, Santa Cruz worked together on a special project. The result was the identification of a series of psychological technologies, many of which have potential in leadership. They called these technologies neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. Essentially NLP has to do with how we communi­cate with our own brain. The technolo­gies can be extremely powerful in influ­encing others.

For example, one of the influence strategies I found to be particularly im­portant in leadership in a variety of situa­tions is rapport. Many studies have shown that we are willing to do things for people we like and are in rapport with that we would not do for others. The question is how do you get in rapport? The traditional way is to find something in common. We can get in rapport if we graduated from the same school, belong to the same club, or have the same hobby. But what if we don't have any of these or other things in common? NLP researchers discovered that a process called mirroring works even faster for building rapport than commonalties. Mirroring simply requires matching certain behaviors: voice tone and tempo, breathing, body movements, and body postures. Of course, you can't mirror so incongruently as to appear to mimic— that would break rapport instantly. But, mirroring done subtly works. It is now possible to influence others through gaining rapport almost instantaneously.

Use of Deception

Are these new techniques manipulative? There seems little doubt that they are. Are they ethical? I don't know the an­swer to this. Many effective leaders use deception as an influence strategy in leading. Most find it acceptable if the leader is using it to accomplish a critical mission, or if the deception is in others besides the leader himself.

During the Civil War, General Grant planned the first combined land-sea attack against Fort Donnelson. The at­tack started while he was absent. Things went awry, and as Grant rode up, his entire right flank was collapsing under pressure of a massive Confederate coun­ter attack. Union troops were becoming totally demoralized. Without hesitation,

Grant drew his sword and rode around the battlefield shouting, "Come on boys and fill your cartridge boxes quick. The enemy is trying to get away on the right, and must not be permitted to do so." Grant's statement was far from the truth. The Confederate forces were not trying to get away. They were attacking and he knew it. But Grant's deception helped his troops to regain control and win the battle. Without this manipula­tive tactic he probably would have failed in his mission, and his troops would have suffered far higher casualties.