If You Want To Lead, You Need To Embrace The Basic Human Need For Status
Scientists have long found that our brains evolved to accommodate more social relationships. For example, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that the optimal group size for humans is 150, significantly larger than other primates. Throughout history, humans have developed hierarchies to help us to collaborate on complex tasks.
Yet recently, pundits started advocating for flatter organizations. In 2014, Gary Hamel declared that Bureaucracy Must Die in Harvard Business Review. Around the same time, entrepreneur Brian Robertson developed the non-hierarchical Holacracy, that was adopted by firms such as Zappos and Medium.
It hasn’t gone well and the idea of leaderless organizations has largely been discredited. In The Status Game, veteran science reporter Will Storr explains why. Evolution has wired our brains to seek status in order to carve out our identity within and between groups. To lead effectively we need to support, not ignore, the basic human need for identity and status.
The Games We Play
One of the most fascinating — and important — findings is that there is more than one status game and we are playing versions of all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, all the time. These games have to do with…
