Naturally Selected

Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow, and Why It Matters

Mark Van Vugt, Anjana Ahuja

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780062042248
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Skills

Groundbreaking and timely, Naturally Selected unravels the mystery of leadership—why some lead, why some follow, and why it matters to every one of us. Evolutionary psychologist Mark van Vugt and science journalist Anjana Ahuja upend the accepted wisdom about leadership and, following in the tradition of Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Noel Tichy’s The Leadership Engine, deliver a book with the power to change ordinary lives. Naturally Selected teaches leaders to avoid pitfalls and tells followers how to negotiate the foibles of overbearing managers, giving readers a crucial path to achieving happier lives and greater successes.

Chapter 1
The nature of leadership

It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ … But such a reply, convincing as it may sound – for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’ – is quite useless.

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

Cyril Richard Rescorla lived his life according to the principle of the eight Ps: ‘Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.’ Rescorla, born in Cornwall, England, and later a naturalised American citizen, learned the maxim in the army, and it would serve him well in active service, first on behalf of the British military in Cyprus and later commanding men from his adopted country in Vietnam. Both stints earned the soldier, nicknamed the Cornish Hawk, decorations for gallantry.

But Rescorla, who preferred to be called Rick, did not earn his place in history through his bravery on the battlefield. It was later in life, as a security officer for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at the World Trade Center, that he would leave his mark. And he did it by insisting, against the advice of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which managed the WTC, that his employer’s 2,700 staff evacuate the building on 11 September 2001, when the first plane hit the Twin Towers. With a seamlessness that came from six-monthly evacuation drills carried out at his insistence, Rescorla ensured that 2,694 of his charges made it out of the building before the centre collapsed. In a moving interview given to the New Yorker in 2002, Rescorla’s widow, Susan, revealed that the hardest thing to cope with was knowing that he could have made a decision to save his own skin and didn’t: ‘I know he would never have left until everyone was safe, until his mission was accomplished. That was his nature.’

Rescorla’s closest friend, an army buddy called Dan Hill, recalled the indomitable spirit of the rugged young soldier he fought alongside in Vietnam: ‘I knew him as a hundred-and-eighty-pound, six-foot-one piece of human machinery that would not quit, that did not know defeat, that would not back off one inch. In the middle of the greatest battle of Vietnam, he was singing to the troops, saying we’re going to rip them a new asshole, when everyone else was worrying about dying. If he had come out of that building and someone died who he hadn’t tried to save, he would have had to commit suicide.’ In March 2009, Rescorla’s two children accepted the Above and Beyond Citizen Medal on behalf of their father. The award is the highest civilian honour that can be bestowed in America; its recipients are chosen by the surviving holders of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest military award in the country.¹

Rescorla embodies, in two distinct ways, what it is to be a leader. If we detach ourselves emotionally, we can see that he fulfilled the textbook definition of a leader, which goes something like this: a leader is someone able to exert social influence on others in order to accomplish a common goal. The Vietnam veteran was able to persuade those employees to leave their desks, despite official advice that it was safe to stay, and goosestep in pairs down through more than 40 storeys. But if we put dry definitions aside and measure his achievement against what we believe, in our hearts, leadership to be about, we also find that he comes up to scratch. He used his considerable security expertise to make a sound judgement call (the minute the first plane hit, he rang a friend saying he was sure the building would fall down), calmly marshalled employees to the exits, sang Cornish songs through a bullhorn to keep morale high on the stairwell, and selflessly kept returning to make sure nobody had been left behind. It was not just what Rescorla did on that particular day which made him a leader; it was something deep in his character. Most of us would say he was made of the ‘right stuff’, and this helped him to flourish both on the battlefield and, on 11 September 2001, in the truly terrible situation he found himself in.

We often hear about leadership in atrocities like 9/11, in natural disasters, on the battlefield, or in collective civil campaigns, such as that against racial segregation. But, once you start noticing it, you find that leadership is, in fact, everywhere. It appears to be a human universal.² The most obvious form is political and national leadership: every nation on earth has a single person at its helm, whether it is a democratically elected politician, a monarch or a tyrant. We have business leaders, such as the Bill Gateses and Jack Welches of this world. But people who influence others to achieve a common goal – who, in fact, conform to our textbook definition of a leader – can be found in every corner of human existence: the schoolchild who seems to set the playground agenda during free play; the can-do manager who motivates his team to set sales records; the football hooligan who recruits fellow thugs to terrorise supporters of rival teams; the exasperated customer in the slow-moving bank queue who starts a mutiny; the gregarious friend who seems to end up as chief architect of your social life; the witty celebrity whose outrage on Twitter prompts 20,000 followers to sign a petition. All lead in the sense of persuading others to assist in the accomplishment of a shared objective. Some, like Rescorla and the can-do sales manager, are made of the right stuff. They lead their subjects towards the realisation of a mutually beneficial goal. But certain types of leadership, as we’ll see, are exploitative and malign, and it’s worth remembering that people can lead without being morally competent (such as the hooligans’ ringleader or the school bully).

Often, the shared objective is the leader’s objective. So becoming a leader is a good way of achieving whatever it is you want to achieve, whether it is building a well or building up support for an ideology. Not only that, but leaders reap benefits, both financial (top executives get paid more than middle-ranking ones) and sexual, because (generally male) leaders appear to get their pick of (female) followers. They also enjoy an elevated social status. We will call these perks the three S’s – representing salary, status and sex – and we will see, in later chapters, that this triumvirate of factors drives power-seeking behaviour, because they enhance the reproductive potential of the (usually) men who pursue them. Political leaders, for example, have a long and ignoble history of polygamy and infidelity.³

In fact, the three S’s have a clear relationship to each other, and to ELT: the ultimate evolutionary aim is reproductive success, which must be achieved through sex, which means catching the eye of sexual partners, which means being a man of status. And how is status signified today? Through salary. And so, thanks to evolutionary leadership theory, we have a thread linking money to power to sex.

This has to be one explanation for the preponderance of books about leadership: people buy them in the hope they can achieve leadership positions, and an accompanying helping of the three S’s. This would suggest there are hundreds of authors who understand what leadership is about. If this is true, why do we still have so many leaders in business and politics made of the wrong stuff? Why do half of chief executives fail in their jobs? Why do political leaders lead us into unwinnable wars? Why do incompetence and immorality so often come as part of the whole human leadership package?⁴

For the answers, we do something that no other students of leadership have yet done: travel back in time to explore the origins of human leadership. Naturally Selected is about how and why leadership evolved in our species. The ‘why’ of leadership is very rarely addressed: despite the trillions of words on the different forms leadership can take, and whether people are born to lead or can be schooled for greatness, few have paused to ask why we bother with leaders at all. Why is it that almost every social grouping – from countries to companies, councils to cults – has a figurehead out in front? Why don’t individuals break from the crowd and do their own thing? This gaping hole must be plugged if we are to truly understand the human instinct to lead and the accompanying instinct to follow.

Naturally Selected is that intellectual stopper – by stepping back deep into human history, into the societies inhabited by our ancestors, we can arrive at a deeper, more complete and pleasingly concise understanding of how the twin phenomena of leadership and followership evolved in our own and other species. It allows us to identify the ingredients of good leadership (‘good’ in the sense of both competent and moral; as we know from the besieged financial world, leadership is frequently amoral, even immoral, and incompetent) – and to understand why bad leadership flourishes. Evolutionary leadership theory proposes a brand-new framework for answering the ‘why’ question: it contends that, since humans are evolutionarily adapted to live in groups, and since groups with leaders do much better than groups without leaders, it follows that leadership and followership became prerequisites for reproductive success (which is the only kind of success that matters when it comes to evolution). Simply, groups without effective leaders died out. All of us who live today carry the psychological legacy gifted to us by our forebears: we are programmed to live in led groups and, most of the time, be obedient group members. We crave a sense of belonging, and if we don’t find it within our own families, we will seek out other collectives, such as cults or gangs, which can offer it. We want to be seen as team players, rather than outcasts; we long to be on the inside, not shivering on the fringes. As John Donne pointed out, no man is an island. We are programmed to follow; and, when the environment suits, to seek out leadership roles.

From the simplicity of this evolutionary perspective, an astonishing array of disparate, bewildering findings on leadership fall into place. We crave in our leaders maturity in a time of uncertainty, and youth and vibrancy when we ourselves yearn for societal change. We want leaders who conform to a certain physical stereotype – because they flick a subconscious switch in our brains that most of us probably don’t even know we have. Psychologists have long known about these subconscious switches or instincts: the ‘fear’ one is triggered every time we spot a big black spider, or grope desperately around in the dark for those candles we shoved in a cupboard in case there was a power cut.⁵ We might be sophisticated animals in the primate hierarchy, but we, like every other animal we share this planet with, have taken a long, grinding evolutionary path to get here, and our minds are littered with psychological souvenirs of the journey. When the boss puts you down in front of your colleagues, or you find out that the politician you campaigned for has been cheating on his wife, the feelings of betrayal by someone you looked up to tap into a deep, primal well of emotions first felt by our ancestors.

The other explanation for the ubiquity of books on leadership is that good leadership really, really matters. Leadership has mostly been studied in the context of armies (military leadership), nations (political leadership) and business (corporate leadership), with good reason. Fine leadership – by which we mean competent and moral, since one can be an effective, but morally bankrupt, leader – in these realms can win wars, defeat evil and create lasting prosperity, stability and happiness. Since these are desirable outcomes, it is natural to strive to understand and emulate effective leadership. But trying to capture the essence of leadership in a single theory has so far been a thankless task. The phenomenon seems too diverse, with too many variables (personality, family background, culture, education) to come together in one coherent picture of what makes an effective leader. There are so many flavours of figureheads: autocrats, tyrants, warlords, democrats and kings (and, rarely, queens). There are benevolent leaders and greedy leaders, reluctant leaders who have greatness thrust upon them and others who feel compelled to thrust their own, self-perceived greatness on others. We have charming leaders and Machiavellian leaders (often, the former turn out to be the latter, and it can be most disconcerting when the truth oozes out).

Again, evolutionary leadership theory can find a niche for all comers: for example, men classed as having Machiavellian personalities have more children than, well, nice men (although sometimes nice men end up unwittingly caring for the offspring of the Machiavellians). The truism is really true: the bad guys get the girls (and when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle women are particularly attracted to baddies, according to research). Tyrants have similarly productive loins.⁶ This is why these personalities stick around in the gene pool, and continue to fool us today. It is important to remind ourselves, once again, that evolution does not make a distinction between a behaviour that is morally good or bad: what matters (if anything can be said to ‘matter’ to evolution) is only that an organism lives long enough to reproduce. (We will, though, see that evolution happens to have instilled in us a well-developed sense of right and wrong, which we use to reward ‘good’ group members and punish disloyal or self-serving ones, thus sharpening group unity.)

The wide variety of environments in which we find leadership – in workplaces, in social groups, in religions – has also led to various ideas about what makes an effective leader. We have such disparate ideas as trait theory, situational theory, transactional leadership, transformational leadership.⁷ Some of these buzzwords relate to theories that purport to explain the ability to lead; others are simply descriptions of leadership styles. We seem especially charmed by charismatic leaders – John F. Kennedy, Jack Welch, Oprah Winfrey – but a lack of charisma is no bar to power (George W. Bush, Bill Gates). And, on top of that, each of us harbours an instinctive idea of a ‘leader’, a person who we think worthy of following and perhaps emulating, such as our 9/11 hero Rick Rescorla. It is no wonder that in his Pulitzer-prize-winning 1978 book, Leadership, James MacGregor Burns describes it as ‘one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth’.⁸ Even thirty years later, it can seem a thoroughly confusing subject, full of conjecture and speculation, anecdote and hearsay, from which it seems impossible to pull out a unifying thread.

Naturally Selected changes all that, by introducing a brandnew theory of leadership under whose umbrella all existing theories can be marshalled. Evolutionary leadership theory argues that leadership and followership were crucial to the survival of ancestral humans, and that psychological templates for leadership and followership emerged and evolved during an estimated two million years of human evolution. Some aspects of this psychology stretch back even farther, before the Homo genus (which includes us, Homo sapiens) appeared on the scene. We know that leadership and followership pre-date our species because they are found in other social animals, such as ants, bees, fish and baboons. It is difficult to date the emergence of these behaviours but, because we shared a common ancestor with each of these species, we can be sure that they originated many millions of years ago.

In the chapters that follow, we will show that psychological adaptations for both leadership and followership became part of our neurological furniture – these adaptations are, in essence, permanent physical changes in the human brain. The behaviours they elicit – leadership and, more commonly, followership – became instinctive and universal in much the same way as language did. Every human society that has ever been observed contains a minority who lead and a majority who follow, which suggests that this time-honoured way of organising human society is driven by an ancient imperative. As Arnold M. Ludwig writes in King of the Mountain, his thorough and engaging analysis of every ruler of a recognised country in the twentieth century (the emphases are his): ‘As a result of my studies, I have come to the conclusion that the reason people want to rule is the same reason all societies want a ruler: It is the natural order of things … The compelling need for a leader, often any leader, is the only way to account for many of the rulers who have emerged during this past century … there is no rule that a leader will carry out his social role wisely or well; he simply needs to do it.’⁹ There is another way to phrase Ludwig’s observation: that leadership and followership have become part of human nature. If so, where did that nature come from, and why?

The strength of an evolutionary approach is that it allows us to begin at the beginning, and go back to first principles. If we shake off modern ideas about leadership to walk in the nomadic steps of our ancestors, to see the world through their eyes as it existed before agriculture and urbanisation, all the contradictory, confusing and bewildering data on leadership begin to cohere. In order to survive on the savannah, our ancestors needed to stick together. This survival strategy – group living – has been drummed into our skulls through evolution. We theorise that leadership and followership evolved to help our ancestors solve problems of social coordination that group living presented, such as foraging for enough food to eat and finding somewhere safe to sleep. And from this simple premise, much becomes explicable. All the leader types we are familiar with from politics and management – the showy ones, the shady ones, the greedy ones, the magnanimous ones – have a walk-on part in the script of evolutionary leadership theory. The one thing that connects these types is that they possess a basic desire to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 - The nature of leadership
• Chapter 2 - It’s all just a game
• Chapter 3 - Born to follow
• Chapter 4 - Status-seeking on the savannah: the democratic ape
• Chapter 5 - The birth of corruption
• Chapter 6 - The Mismatch Hypothesis
• Chapter 7 - From savannah to boardroom: lessons in natural leadership
• Envoi
• Appendix A: Six Natural Leaders – a questionnaire
• Appendix B: The natural history of leadership
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher