Can I speak to your manager? And Other Reasons Why Americans Love Authoritianism and Hierarchy (part 1)
It’s fascinating to watch at a large scale, self-described liberals gawk, repost and tweet their fears of a reelection of Trump this fall. And yet, in small breakout groups in zoom, when working with organizations, most of the feedback to leadership is, “We need you to just decide and tell us what we are doing. We just need better communication.”
The funny thing about Trump is that he actually doesn’t keep any secrets about the decisions he makes. He is pretty transparent about his policies, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t lying about everything else and WHY he makes those decisions.
Americans hate leadership, but are so afraid when there is no one clearly in charge. As we watch schools reopen at the local level, principals are having to figure out everything on their own, while the rest of us watch and critique.
Even pre-Covid, when I was running an organization, I was amazed at how many of my staff would start their tenure with me just wanting me to tell them what to do. And while, I am very good at that because of my ~bossy tendencies, it’s not actually what anyone wants, but it’s sometimes what you need when you are scared.
There’s a sense of safety in externalizing power and control. If there was just someone who could (fill in the blank) come in and organize my clothes everyday, do my dishes, tell me what job to do next in my career, arrange a marriage (this is not a joke and many of my millennial friends wish this was a practice in our culture), and the list goes on.
When we are afraid, it can take too much effort to get grounded in ourselves and find agency. Some of us are better at this than others, but as a collective, and what I find working with organizations as a process facilitator, is that when things are going bad people want the leaders to just figure it out and come up with a magical plan.
But, it doesn’t stop there. We want the leaders to make the decisions, but we need to find a way to have agency, so we do that through critique and finger pointing. You know what I mean. You’re waiting for leadership to make a decision, then the email comes out with the decision, and you’re screenshotting and side texting colleagues like “Can you believe this shit? You know what I would have done?”
You’re probably wondering how my research is so accurate, but it was quite easy. I opened up my phone and scrolled through my own text messages. The person who runs around preaching flattened leadership structures, multi-level decision making processes, more seats at the table, etc., also wonders why the leaders just can’t get it right.
There’s a link to our passive role in democracy and the cheap balcony seats we purchased in our leadership. The work to truly be part of transformation and in the running of an organization and society, requires that we see its ugliness, messiness, and the challenges in making hard decisions.
I have been wondering how I perpetuate racism in my way of being all through the summer, and I am slowly uncovering my own fragility and fear of really participating. The ways in which I avoid challenges and engaging with higher levels of leadership, instead opting to stand on the outside pointing up and shouting into the ether. It’s easier to be mad and enraged by Donald Trump than to actually confront the idea that I may actually do something about stopping him from getting reelected and perhaps failing.
I want to keep exploring the ways in which hierarchy and the long list of managers keeps us all fragile and unable to make the tough decisions when it’s time to be on the side of justice.
