The natural selection of leaders

• 07 September 2010 by Anjana Ahuja

Are leaders born or made? Evolution may be throwing us a curve ball when it comes to picking them in the modern world, says Anjana Ahuja

IMAGINE this. You and your colleagues are gathered round a conference table, with coffee and biscuits. You open the door and greet the first sharp-suited candidate of the day. Before evening falls, one lucky applicant will hear the unlikely phrase: "We would like to offer you the job of being our boss."

The idea of subordinates selecting their superiors might seem fantastical, but not to our ancestors. In our new book, Mark van Vugt at VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and I propose that leadership and followership behaviours can be traced to the earliest days of our species. Given that all human groupings - be they nations, gangs or cults - have leaders and followers, and that these behaviours appear spontaneous, our thesis is that leadership and followership are adaptive behaviours.

In other words, they are behaviours that evolved to give our ancestors a survival advantage (our book's title, Selected, reflects the role natural selection plays in leadership). In fact, this arrangement proves so beneficial that other species, from fish to birds to chimpanzees, also show forms of leadership and followership, rudimentary in the cases of fish and birds, but surprisingly sophisticated in the case of our coalition-building cousins.

But what's the link between our theory that leadership and followership are evolved behaviours and you and your colleagues picking your own line manager? Studies of some hunter-gatherer communities show that gifted individuals are picked in a bottom-up, not top-down, way. Leadership is fluid rather than fixed, and assigned by peers to whoever is recognised as adept in a specific domain, from herbalism to hunting. We argue that some modern companies are unwittingly still practising this ancestral style of promotion, with great success. For example, the CEO of W. L. Gore & Associates, which makes Gore-Tex, is chosen by the rank and file of the company, not shoehorned in by management. The firm has an unusually high retention rate for "associates" (never called "employees").

Studies of hunter-gatherer societies also show that hierarchies are relatively flat and wealth disparities minimal. One tribe is documented as having no concept of personal property and, correspondingly, theft, an outlook which led its members into persistent conflict with sheep-owning incomers. A Martian alighting upon one of these societies and asking to be taken to their leader would be met with bewilderment. There are no presidential elections or prime ministerial hustings in those isolated communities: overly domineering characters are more likely to be assassinated than obeyed. Unlike in the glass-and-steel corporate empires of the developed world, there are strong norms against pushy individuals who thrust themselves forward, or whose self-interest is too clearly displayed.

When you view leadership and followership through the prism of evolutionary psychology, many peculiarities about the way we choose our leaders look less odd. For example, political scientists have no convincing rational explanation of why taller candidates almost always beat shorter rivals. But hundreds of thousands of years ago, when tribal conflicts were resolved physically, lofty tribesmen would have enjoyed an edge over opponents of modest stature. Our societies continue to insist leaders should look "statesmanlike" without spelling out what this means, which suggests that we have some innate concept of what a leader should look like. Such an internal template of a good leader would have been reinforced over evolutionary history - though the template would vary in different circumstances, letting us opt for a different kind of leader in war or peacetime.

The modern vestiges of these templates can be detected by psychologists today. Take the startling finding that people can distinguish high-ranking CEOs from their lower-ranked peers purely on facial appearance (the key is in the squareness of the jawline). Tallness is also overrepresented in both CEOs and politicians. In another study, naive children shown photographs of election candidates typically pick the same winner as the electorate.

These studies back up our theory that many leaders owe their position not to calculated, rational decisions on the part of the electorate or interview board, but to their ability to push a "leader button" in the human psyche. Whether it's Barack Obama hitting the gym or a bare-chested Vladimir Putin posing in Siberia, politicians like us to know that they're tough guys, as if we still need musclemen to protect us in an age when governing tends to be a cerebral, rather than an aerobic, activity

In fact we know from experiments in the laboratory that the way we pick our leaders often defies easy, conscious explanation. In one experiment using university students, van Vugt showed that groups entrusted with performing task X were more likely to select leader A, who had previously failed at that task, instead of leader B, who had previously succeeded. The reason? Leader A came from the same university as the rest of the group, while leader B was from another institution. So the deeply ingrained idea of "us" and "them" lingers, even in cosmopolitan university students. Evolutionarily, there is much to be said for sticking to the fiercely loyal devil you know rather than the potentially disloyal angel you don't

That is not to say that workplaces should become havens of primitivism. Evolution might have bestowed on us an instinctive suspicion of leaders who are short, female or who belong to a different tribe (skin colour is an obvious badge of belonging), but we need to ask whether such prejudices belong in today's interconnected world, in which citizens of all colours and religions need to rub along. The election of America's first black president offers encouraging evidence that we can overcome these ancestral biases, although Obama's success was undoubtedly aided by his physical stature.

Perhaps the most important take-home message in our book is that there is a mismatch between the way we lead and follow today, and the way our ancestors operated. Where our forebears clustered in small groups on the African savannah, half of the world's population now lives in cities. Where leadership was dispersed among the many, it is now concentrated in the hands of a corporate and political elite. Could this be why we feel disconnected from our leaders?

The good news is that insights into our recent past may help improve things. People in small companies (think small tribe) are happier than those in big ones. Good bosses and adept politicians know that the personal touch goes a long way (think extended family, or at least the feeling of one) - as does roughing it sometimes on the shopfloor to show solidarity with subordinates and to earn their endorsement (think nights hunting in the forest). These working practices feel right for a reason: your ancestors thrived on them. So, the next time your line manager announces that it's time for your performance review, just smile and ask them to bring examples of their work along to it.

Profile

This article is based on Selected (Profile Books) by Mark van Vugt, professor of psychology at VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and research fellow at the University of Oxford, and Anjana Ahuja, writer and former science columnist for The Times of London