The Mammoth In The Room

Have you ever asked yourself why the behavior of leading and following others even developed? What it is for? Leadership and followership evolved in humans (and in other species) to solve recurrent coordination problems. Basically, leadership can be defined as coordination of two or more individuals to accomplish joint goals. What was the problem to be solved for us humans? Movement! Social species—like us—stay alive by moving together. But when do you move, where, who moves first, and who follows? Hence, the classic coordination problem that gave rise to the emergence of leadership is group movement, and it can be solved by some individuals seizing the initiative to lead and others to follow.

What does that have to do with business leadership, you might ask? Well, in business leadership, we are coordinating ourselves toward certain goals—business goals in our case. Therefore, we need to acknowledge two things: first, that leading a business means leading the people who actually do the business; second, that leading people in a corporate setting means steering individual human behavior in groups. This means we must encourage individuals to align their priorities so we can all move in the same direction. To do this, we need to first understand a bit more about human behavior—both as individuals and individuals in groups.