Status and Natural Followership
Have you ever considered what it means when someone is extremely occupied with their own status? Does it imply a desire for power and wealth or a focus on making a career and actively striving to climb the social hierarchy?
According to the Cambridge dictionary, status is the position you have in relation to other people because of your job or social position. I used to interpret this as meaning that status refers to how much power or wealth a person has in relation to others. I was not alone. In fact, I've met many who believe that we humans are naturally driven by a desire to obtain power and wealth. It was when I started studying natural followership that I came to realize that this is not the case.
It's true that most, if not all, people are occupied with status whether they are aware of it or not. That doesn't mean that everyone is interested in climbing some social hierarchy. Because status is the position one holds in relation to others, what constitutes status will vary. It all depends on what is important to the group we want to belong to. For instance, in a sales team, the best sellers will often have a higher status than the others. In the world of soccer, the best players do. Among companies, reputational capital is often a status factor, while among political parties it can be the number of voters.
You may wonder what this have to do with natural followership? Well, if individual status is defined by what a group (or culture) emphasizes as important, then whatever status people are chasing will tell us a great deal about the values and objectives of their group. For instance, if a company places great value on titles and individual power, then this is what their employees will focus on (to varying degrees) in order to position themselves within the business. If, on the other hand, a business places great emphasis on cooperation, generosity, and creative thinking, those will be the values by which employees define their status.
Important to note is that the official values of a company have very little effect on the behavior of employees. What matters are the values that the company has in practice, that is, what behavior and attitudes the company rewards. We humans react to what is going on around us, not what someone has written on a piece of paper.
So, if you work for a company that claims to value cooperation, but you find that people are displaying the opposite - they behave competitively and gain status by winning. This tells you that although the company would like to build cooperation, they are somehow fostering competitive behavior. With that knowledge, you can methodically search for any behaviors or attitudes that may encourage competitiveness. If you then target these behaviors and simultaneously start to reward cooperative behaviors, you will find that slowly, people start defining status based on how well one cooperates with others. This process will take time and it may result in some people leaving the company because they thrive in a competitive environment, but if you truly value cooperation, then this will be a small price to pay.
Till next time, stay curious!
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