Chapter 10
The Commanding Leader
When we speak of leadership, the Commanding leader is often the first image that comes to mind. These leaders are decisive and direct. They take charge of the situation and show a rare level of confidence. We’ll elaborate on the value of the Commanding leader in Chapter 18, but in this chapter we want to delve beneath the surface to understand what drives this style of leader. More specifically, we want to help Commanding leaders understand some of the more subtle psychological mechanisms that tend to cause them problems in the long run.
If you’re a Commanding leader, you probably have a fairly dominant presence. You call it like you see it and can be forceful to get what you want. Underneath this tough outer shell are deeper motivations, needs, and assumptions that drive you to act the way you do. The more you understand these drivers, the more you’ll be able to consciously control and shape your leadership style.
Based on our research and experience talking to Commanding leaders, the qualities listed below have a significant impact on how you lead.
A need for triumph
A high need for achievement
A disgust for “soft” emotions
Tough-mindedness
A drive to move forward quickly
In many respects, these qualities can be a great asset for you. As we go through these qualities, however, we’ll be focusing more on how they might limit your effectiveness. While you might not identify with all of these qualities, our experience has shown that a number of them probably describe you better than you may initially think.
Subjective Realism
To maintain their high-speed drive to achieve, Commanding leaders like you rely on a high degree of confidence. Because they’ve trained themselves to believe in their own abilities, they can be slow to recognize the errors of their own ways. Once they make a decision, they bury any pesky doubts that may start to surface, and this can leave them with an unrealistic confidence in their ideas and decisions. In general, Commanding leaders tend to latch onto specific ideas—usually their own—and they often lack patience for any ideas that contradict them. Because they see their visions so clearly in their own minds, they may assume that those who disagree simply lack the necessary insight.
Perhaps you’re aware that some people view you as arrogant, but you probably brush this aside, assuming that others don’t understand the “real” state of affairs. Leaders with your style often consider themselves to be uncompromising realists. They don’t adjust their perceptions to make the world seem nicer. In fact, you may feel that you see things for what they really are, and that anyone who sees things differently is probably just blinded by stupidity, insecurity, or a silly adherence to social conventions like politeness.
Subjective realism often causes Commanding leaders to point out the flaws and inconsistencies in other people’s ideas and arguments. As we discussed in Chapter 2, leaders with your style tend to be questioning and skeptical, and this can be hard on warm and accepting people who fall on the eastern side of the model. When giving feedback, you may focus on the challenge of finding flaws without considering the impact of your words on the other person. However, most Commanding leaders don’t see things quite the same way when the tables are turned. In fact, leaders like you often take criticism quite poorly. Though they see giving criticism as doling out realism, they may feel that it’s a great injustice when others dissect their own work and ideas.
Commanding leaders’ inflated sense of power can also close them off to outside input. If fact, power can have this effect on most of us. In a recent study (Brinol et al., 2007), researchers separated participants into two groups. One group of participants was made to feel more powerful and the other made to feel less powerful. The researchers then looked to see how these participants reacted to outside persuasion. As expected, participants in the “low-power” condition reacted favorably to strong arguments and unfavorably to weak arguments. Participants in the “high-power” condition, however, reacted unfavorably to both strong and weak arguments. In other words, their opinions couldn’t be influenced no matter how strong an outside argument was. Now, many Commanding leaders, seeing themselves as powerful, may view this as a sign of strength, but to put it bluntly, it’s not. It’s an Achilles’ heal. Because you are naturally imbued with an outward sense of power and self-confidence you need to be extra careful that you do not close yourself off to the feedback that the outside world is trying to give you.
A Need for Triumph
Subconsciously, Commanding leaders may believe that it’s not enough just to win, but others must also fail, hence underscoring their superiority. The idea that other people might have ideas that compete against their own may even feel like an insult. When others try to contradict you, you may often put them in their place. Because you have a lot at stake when it comes to competition—essentially, your self-esteem—you often size up other people’s strengths and weaknesses, much like an athletic coach scouts upcoming opponents. You may even try to intimidate or bully others into submission. Commanding leaders have an above-average ability to tolerate conflict, and you may sometimes use this to your advantage, slowly wearing down others who can’t handle as much emotional strife.
In fact, leaders with your Commanding approach often gain some satisfaction from conflict. A battle of rapid-fire ideas may fuel your competitiveness, and you may experience a sort of euphoria in the heat of the moment. No matter the topic, Commanding leaders fight tenaciously for their viewpoints, and if they feel that they’re pinned against the wall, they may become quite aggressive because of their win-at-all-costs instincts. When asked, these leaders claim that they are aggressive because they have to be. They point to outside circumstances that require them to be aggressive (e.g., other people are being selfish, irrational, or just plain stupid). They have no choice.
Research, however, suggests that this may not be entirely accurate. Those who use aggression have a secondary motivation: pleasure. A recent study suggests that the brain rewards aggression with dopamine much the same way it rewards food, sex, and drugs (Couppis & Kennedy, 2008). Like other highly rewarded behaviors, we can grow to overuse aggression because the allure of pleasure is so great. If Commanding leaders are honest with themselves, they are often forced to admit that they push forward on conflicts not because they have to, but rather because there is a disguised sense of pleasure working in the background.
Because they want to come out on top, Commanding leaders often have trouble working with those they see as arrogant. In fact, you may butt heads in particular with other Commanding leaders. In special cases, you may admire and respect confident people, but if your ego is threatened, you’re more likely to view self-assured people with contempt. An unfortunate side effect is that you may cut down the people you work with to make sure they don’t get too full of themselves. Leaders like you may convince yourselves that it’s for their own good, but in reality, you’re just trying to put them in their place, and this can be incredibly frustrating for others.
A High Need for Achievement
Commanding leaders often pride themselves on being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Because they tend to assume that nobody will take care of their needs for them, they take control themselves. Not only do Commanding leaders impose this self-reliance on themselves, but they may expect others to have a similar level of self-sufficiency. Generally speaking, those on the western side of the model often share this more autonomous mindset, while those on the eastern side often think more collaboratively. Commanding leaders may lose patience with people who seem to need a lot of hand-holding or who don’t understand things that seem obvious. In fact, leaders with your style may sometimes act as though they could complete everyone’s work, with better results, if only they had the time. Chances are, you’re intensely competitive, and this can cause you to view yourself as a team of one. On a subconscious level, you may feel driven to succeed entirely on your own as a matter of personal pride.
Given their individualism and high standards, Commanding leaders like you often fail to recognize the contributions of others. And, even when you do give some form of recognition, the bar is set pretty high. You may believe that giving praise for anything less than a spectacular breakthrough is simply coddling. Why do you have such high standards for others? Most likely, it starts with having high standards for yourself.
Leaders with your Commanding approach often have a nagging sense that they must keep moving—a self-imposed obligation to “earn their keep.” This assumption is so deep-seated that they may not fully grasp that others legitimately see the world differently. To you, a constant pressure to perform seems akin to breathing. To be sure, this mindset has some impressive implications in the realm of leadership, but it may also create a tendency to take credit for successes. Because Commanding leaders have a confident, goal-oriented leadership style, you may naturally focus on the role you played in contributing to a successful outcome.
A Disgust for “Soft” Emotions
Commanding leaders are naturally attracted to emotions that reflect power—most notably, passion and anger. Through passion, you have the power to inspire others, and through anger, to intimidate. When you see other people display more tender emotions such as sadness, affection, or fear, you may sometimes see them as overly sentimental, gushy, or wimpy. And you may feel forced—or at least pressured—to have an empathic response. Subconsciously, you may even feel that you’re being manipulated into expressing an emotion that is the epitome of what you despise: weakness and vulnerability.
On a practical level, this aversion to tenderness has some consequences. For instance, you may be uncomfortable giving praise to others, and even a modest compliment may feel like gushing. On a subconscious level, you may feel that praising others can blur the lines between the professional and the intimate. In short, giving praise can make you feel squeamish unless it’s done in a rugged, emotionally sanitized manner. Ultimately, this means that you may be very slow to give out praise or recognition, and when you do, it may be terse and objective.
Tough-Mindedness
If you’re familiar with The Sopranos, the HBO series about a modern crime family, you probably know that its cast is Commanding through and through. As a group, they create a culture with no tolerance for weakness. If someone doesn’t assert their strength, they’re on their way out—really out in the worst sense. Viewers get a fascinating look into this mindset as the patriarch, Tony Soprano, is forced to seek therapy, the ultimate form of mental weakness in the eyes of those who long to be in control. He lashes out at the therapist, seeks to manipulate her, and even tries to seduce her—anything to maintain power in what he undoubtedly sees as a compromised position. In fact, opening himself up in therapy is probably more threatening to him than any violence he might encounter out on the street.
Now, keep in mind that Tony is an extreme version of a Commanding leader, but he illustrates an important aspect of the Commanding mindset. Very often, leaders with your approach have a strong—usually unspoken—aversion to personal vulnerability or weakness. And for most Commanding leaders, it’s an aversion that’s learned very early on. The result of this aversion to vulnerability is that Commanding leaders often maintain a tough exterior. To others, you may seem a little rough around the edges, and you may say things that seem harsh.
Leaders with your Commanding approach often bring a great deal of intensity to their work. Most of the time, leaders like you are aware that they have a certain edginess. However, quite often, they vastly underestimate the impact that their intensity has on other people. For instance, your words and actions may seem fairly harmless in your own mind, but to others, they can come across as combative or demoralizing. When people perceive that you are indifferent or even hostile toward them, it can erode loyalty to both you as a leader and the organization.
A Drive to Move Forward Quickly
Because Commanding leaders are so driven to accomplish, they also tend to be impatient. We know one leader who proudly hung a sign in her office that read, “Impatience is a virtue.” And in many respects, it is—one of a leader’s most important jobs is to instill a sense of urgency in the group, and this is a natural role for Commanding leaders to play. However, this heightened eagerness is often accompanied by frustration. The leader is likely to become frustrated when her expectations aren’t met, and this can be unhealthy for both the leader and those around her. Compared to others, leaders with your style tend to have very strong stress responses when things don’t go their way. You may experience a much greater increase in blood pressure and muscle tension compared to others.
Leaders like you often have to work hard to control how much of their frustration they show. At the same time, the people around you can almost always sense more of your frustration than you think. You may feel that your frustration isn’t really anyone’s business, but people make it their business; it’s human nature. When leaders are prone to frustration, it’s extremely stressful for those working with them. In our research, Commanding leaders were the ones who were most often asked to do a better job of maintaining their composure. Simply put, the people who work with Commanding leaders often see them as capable of creating an emotionally unpredictable environment where people are motivated by fear rather than passion.
How to Navigate the Rest of the Book
You’ve had a chance to read about some of the psychological drivers that may hold you back as a leader, but what about the positive stuff? What about the areas where you naturally excel? Chapter 18 in Part 3 is designed to highlight exactly that: the assets that Commanding leaders bring to the table. There you’ll find the three lessons that everyone else can learn from leaders like you.
But, of course, other leaders have things to teach you as well. Looking at the model, you may have noticed that the Commanding Dimension is opposite the Inclusive Dimension. Chances are that you may need to focus on this dimension, but depending on your individual situation, there may be others that are more important. Next, go to Part 3, where you’ll explore the lessons that are most important for you right now.