Prepare Your Leadership: Dominant Or Prestige Leadership

Hello, Cadre crew. Happy Monday. Last Monday of the month, last Monday of March. Hope you had a good weekend and a good start to your week today. We'll, of course, go through our three things of three, like always. And then we'll also talk about a recent topic that I came across in a blog post by Hogan Assessment. I know last week we used one of their articles about toxic employees. Now we're going to use an article that they wrote, kind of relating evolutionary psychology to leadership. Welcome, Jules.

Happy Monday. We'll give it a little bit more. Welcome. Welcome. And we'll start our three things of three. I was just saying, hope you had a great weekend. We're productive and however you saw fit. Maybe it was relaxing, maybe you got a lot of stuff done. Hopefully it was a great weekend. We'll start with our three things of three. We'll start with three things. The first thing, there's three things that we are feeling right now. This could be emotions, this could be sensations. This could be really anything.

So just, you know, mentally jot down or you can throw it in the chat. Three things that you are currently experiencing, feeling right now, could be hunger, could be happiness, could be whatever you're feeling. Three things just to ground ourselves, right here, right now, in the moment, halfway through our day, our work day, or whatever you are doing today. Once we kind of ground ourselves, what are three intentions that we have? Could be going off what you're feeling right now. Maybe you're hungry and maybe it's time to eat lunch.

So going off that. What are three intentions that you have? Three things, maybe on your to do list, or maybe you have a meeting coming up and you want to come across a certain way. So what's the intention that you have and then how are you going to accomplish that intention? Some are simpler than others. Like if you want to come across friendly because it's a new meeting with a new client, maybe that's going to be a little bit tougher to describe and focus on how you do that. But maybe if it's just making a sandwich for lunch, that's a little bit easier.

Jules. Exhausted, disconnected. Blah. Well, that sounds like a Monday to me. Hopefully you can use this time to recharge jewels and reset and kind of connect that for the rest of the day today. And then the last thing is, what are three gratitudes that you have? What are three things that you're grateful for? Really hitting home. Some positive affirmations and positive things that we can look at before we start the second half of the Day. What are three gratitudes that we have? Could be from, you know, good thing from the weekend, good thing from this morning, or good thing going forward.

But a three gratitudes that you have. Sleep, makes to do lists, and food good sleep, recharge to do list, simplify that, and then eat. Very good. So as you continue to explore, I'll get into what I was when I I want to talk about today, which was a Hogan article about kind of connecting some evolutionary psychology principles to the workplace and to leadership. So evolutionary psychology is a branch of psychology that explores, like, human instincts, human nature, and how that affects our behavior.

So, you know, basically our brains are specifically designed to fit the body that we have. So bats are. Their instincts are going to be to catch insects, seals are going to swim and catch fish. Humans were evolved to hunt, to gather and cooperate together. And the main philosophy they have is that we're just not blank slates. We come with kind of a preset determination to accomplish certain things as human beings. So humans, we evolved to again, hunt, gather, and then cooperate, work together. And that's one of our main strengths, humans.

So another aspect is that there's three fundamental motives guiding human behavior. And this is getting along, getting ahead, and finding meaning and purpose. Now, it kind of connects to Maslow's hierarchy of needs a little bit. But if you can think about, everything we do is driven by getting along, getting ahead, or finding some meaning or purpose. So in today's more modern society, we spend a lot of time working, often more time. We spend more than we spend our time. We're more spent. Our time is more spent working than any other activity than sleeping.

So we may be spending most of our time earning money, but we still have the same needs that humans have always had, that cooperation and that meaning and purpose. So if work interferes with our status, our reputation, our relationships, values, life goals, so who we see ourselves as and who we want to be, that's when we start to kind of despise our job. That's when maybe it can get into burnout. So humans care about getting ahead in life. But not everyone also wants to be at the top, at the dominance hierarchy, because the cost of leading.

And over time we've learned this, you become the target of criticism, or even if you're, you know, that high up, it could be turned into like an assassination. So becoming higher up, you kind of be somebody that's fingers are pointed at when decisions go wrong. And not everybody wants that exactly depending on their values. So when we look at leadership and through an evolutionary psychology perspective. The there's two forms of how people can get to high status. One is the dominance approach. This is gaining status through force and intimidation.

And the other is prestige approach which is gaining status through your skills, expertise and trust. This is more common in the workplace. They did research on this and people prefer prestige style leaders. So kind of the trusted experts regardless of gender. So it didn't matter women or man, they preferred the prestige type of leader. So when people thought about actual leaders, they know they strongly preferred to work for someone who took the prestige approach with expertise and they could be trusted and looked up by others, dominant males.

So that dominant approach of gaining status through force and intimidation was actually least preferred while the prestige based is most effective. So the main takeaway I had for this was, you know, that prestige approach also involves a leader who can put together a group. The dominance approach, you often see this kind of in startup leaders. So like the Steve Jobs, the, the Elon Musk to call out dominant leaders that we all know, you know, they are very educated, they might not have the social skills but they move up because they have a mind that is very sharp and they know exactly what they want.

But if they were in a company that was already formed, they likely wouldn't move up that same chain because of the, the lack of the social skills that trust and the expertise which wouldn't come across the same way if they were trying to move up the chain in a I already set company. But by building their own startup, they start at the top, they kind of parachute their way in and that's when that dominance approach can be kind of effective as a leader. So the main takeaway I had is that it's important to acknowledge kind of the unconscious biases that we have with leaders with.

We often get influenced by kind of that dominance approach because it can be intriguing, it can be someone who you see from the outside as an intriguing leader. But in reality, when we think about the leaders who we want to work for, we often pick the prestige leader, the one who's gaining their status through skill, expertise and trust. So just again, kind of acknowledge those unconscious biases that we all have. So that's all I have for you today here on Cadre. Hopefully you learned a little bit.

Could use this time to reset, recharge, distract yourself before you get set for the second half of the day. Hope you have a great rest of your week. I'll catch you all next Monday. Goodbye.