We all want to connect with others, which requires us to feel their presence. Because of this, people typically find comfort in a few personal connections more than many broad connections. We can maintain a family-like experience in groups until about 5-20 close connections.
Once a group grows larger than about 20–50 people, it becomes a large group that identifies with a particular name. But, within that group, it’ll often splinter into small subgroups based on preference, leadership decisions, and specialized purposes.
Value
A group is a human value. Beyond our interpretations, groups don’t technically exist. We define “groups” to easily demarcate between things to make reasonable decisions, but they’re the expressed value of one person with people who agree with that value.
Frequently, people creating or believing something will band together over the same purpose.
Since they have many perspectives and many varieties of power, a small crowd who is sufficiently motivated will always defeat an individual in absolutely any comparison whatsoever, even on matters of intelligence or understanding.
Usually, everyone appoints someone as a leader by merit of a few possible routes, based on the values the group holds, then forms a hierarchy below that leader based on the merit they’ve selected:
- Whoever is the oldest in that group.
- The person who appears most capable to make decisions.
- The member most passionate about the subject.
- The member that most desires power over everyone else.
- Whoever has the most time to devote to the group or a task.
While a group holds together by shared values, we can often forget that individual priorities change. Thus, while we can use groups to precisely distinguish things as they are or were, predictions are never very accurate.
Magnified Purpose
One of the most practical effects of leadership comes through everyone’s magnification of their purpose. The leader’s purpose is naturally magnified by other members acting as an extension of their will, but lower-ranking members’ purposes are also magnified, at least proportionally to the leadership’s willingness and ability to grant power to them.
Members always have at least some power in the group. In the case of a low power distance group (e.g., a club), everyone shares resources to pursue their own unique purposes. In groups with high power distance (e.g., a cult), the power funnels upward to the leader, and all the members believe in the group’s collective purposes.
Each member has at least some power, purpose, and beliefs from their group, so it’s far harder to influence anyone while they’re in a group to new ideas outside the group than if they had discovered those values separately.
Leading
Leadership is nothing more than making decisions that affect a group.
People tend to give power to leaders proportional to how much they trust that leader’s decisions over their own. That trust comes from how much power they see from the leader and how much they trust that leader to stay moral. This trust comes from how the information they don’t know about other things, time constraints, and how much they like the other group members.
The values of a group are mostly defined by its leadership. That leader is approving or denying members’ creations to promote the values they want to see. Leadership ends up looking like parenting, but typically with a more subdued and distanced approach.
One of a leader’s most critical decisions involves how the group’s image appears to those outside of the group. Generally, the image must appear immaculate (or at least good enough) to gain approval enough for the group to grow. That image is typically a response to how the most extreme members of a group interact with outsiders.
When confronting evil inside a group, leaders are at a tremendous disadvantage. ~95% of the members are well-intended and do largely good or benign self-interested things, but a statistically insignificant minority create severe damage to a group if they get the opportunity. The leadership often trusts members out of necessity, and therefore will have limited capacity to react. To offset this, they’ll typically trend toward managing a “core group” within the larger group over time, and it will only get worse as the organization scales until the group has at least two distinctive social classes.
In most groups, the various forms of power grant different types of leadership to various members. There’s a significant difference between a natural specialty and personality that creates different types of value, versus conveying that value to others, and at least a few archetypes typically arise through different members:
- Social leadership – usually the connections inside the group.
- Thought leadership – has the most understanding of many specific matters in the group.
- Image leadership – has the most connections with people outside the group.
- Creative leadership – has the most understanding of things outside the group to draw inspiration from.
- Fanatical leadership – the strongest believer in the group and its purposes (often verging on religious obsession).
Some leaders will have a “celebrity” persona, while others will be highly competent. In a severe crisis, the competent leaders determine the core capacity of the group, but the celebrities determine its morale and public image.
When a leader doesn’t do much, they’re merely a symbol. Symbolic leadership is frequently common when groups value individual freedom, are incompetent, or are too large for the leader to make individual decisions.
If any leaders develop differing purposes, they’ll usually have a conflict among each other. In that situation, if there isn’t enough love for each other, the group itself will likely split with at least two camps led by those two leaders as a representation of differing opinions.
Delegating Power
Leaders dictate values by distributing power. They can either let people pursue their purposes (and therefore make those people a type of leader, of themselves or the group) or redirect that power (often upward) for the perceived benefit of the group.
Good leaders will push members toward other members’ purposes, at least the ones that align with the group’s best interests. Many times, members will have fears and uncertainties that prevent them from acting on things they ought to do, and excellent leaders remove that uncertainty by reinforcing the members’ understanding of an “outside” influence.
Bad leaders create conflicts. Conflicts are inevitably one-on-one, and a leader’s decisions will typically favor some people. But, favor to one side will naturally discredit the opposing side. There are many variables to consider, so the only way a leader can know which person to promote comes strictly from experience combined with wisdom.
Good leaders also create conflicts. Usually, they’re antagonizing existing conflicts members may have wanted to avoid, and they do it because they understand that avoiding conflicts erodes members’ trust in one another. But, they can successfully navigate to a “third option” by recalling other personal conflicts in the past.
Results
A leader promotes certain values almost automatically, so a group will recreate itself to the image the leader communicates. In other words, a group is the creative result of the leader’s ability to communicate beliefs.
In the case of skillful leadership, a group will closely match what the leader desires. As a group draws closer to the leader’s ideal, the members will either strip other members of their power or promote them. Eventually, everyone in leadership will become very similar to the leader, assuming an outside force (e.g., death) doesn’t redefine the leader.
The general success or failure of a group’s values come in its results. Many leaders are evil enough to distort reality, but their success is usually easy enough to compare numerically in a broad sense (e.g., voters, employees, volunteers, members, congregants, etc.).
However, there’s plenty of uncertainty from a leader’s thought to the organization’s results, so measurements can be misleading:
- The leader decides.
- The leader communicates that decision, with possible interference or additions by the leader’s choice of media and other leaders conveying the thought.
- The members who end up performing either add or remove the quality of the results, based on their competence and purposes.
Never Wrong
It’s important to note that groups (especially the leadership) will never openly admit they’re presently doing something wrong. Instead, incorrect decisions and beliefs will only create several possible results:
- Morally equivocate what they do as being as good or better than other groups.
- Eject the leader and blame everything on that leader, with the group openly confessing they were mistaken but aren’t anymore.
- The leader admits they’re wrong, and the group suffers a schism and heavily redefined roles, which may lead to the group breaking apart entirely.
- Behave as if they haven’t done anything wrong and attack the messenger.
Any of the above are irrelevant to what the group actually changes in light of what they did wrong. If leaders in the group admit they’re wrong, only a few possibilities play out:
- Quietly make the changes as inconspicuously as possible and never talk about it again.
- If they can publicly throw all blame on former leadership (even if it was a few days), heavily advertise that change to create distance from it.
A group’s existence is built on the environment that surrounds it. When the environment around the group changes, the group must conform to the new changes, or they’ll become an obsolete trend.
Application
Leaders are nurtured and not merely “made”, and it’s because they require a disposition that can make consistent and wise decisions, a bit like a “born parent”. Avoid leadership education that doesn’t emphasize this reality.
Generally, people trust leaders who are older than them, up to about age 60. At that age, old age makes someone appear to operate more on habit than decisions, so people start trusting themselves or younger leaders instead.
Good leaders live virtuously, since it’s the only way to be fair in making decisions.
Once trust in the leaders is gone, the group disbands or rebuilds itself because someone else will lead in an entirely different way.
The leader of a group gets all the credit, but the group’s creativity and results were from the followers’ contributions, who do most of the work and often have the most passion.
Groups typically split over standard social conflicts, but with far more power involved. Larger groups mean more power at stake, and therefore larger consequences.
Groups never admit they’re wrong, so if you disagree with them, you only have a few options:
- Only talk about what they’re doing right and ignore what they do wrong.
- Find another group that doesn’t do that wrong thing.
Good leaders have the wisdom to stall decision-making until they can look beyond their impulses. However, it’s possible for someone to appear level-headed when they aren’t, and is the foundation for many bad systems.
People tend to get along better in groups (with a shared purpose) than in a closer dynamic (such as living together or family).