Status and Affiliation

We’ve all been groomed to crave status and affiliation thanks to capitalism. Think about the lunchbox, water bottle, or backpack you chose as a kid—did your selection have anything to do with your friends, what was mainstream on TV, or what you saw in stores? We crave status—our image directly reflects our social status. I sure noticed the $740k watch Tom Brady wore during the Super Bowl. I also saw Bill Belichick rocking his 8 Super Bowl rings at another recent event. Humans love to show off. You’re probably thinking, what do status and affiliation have to do with leading people? As I stated earlier, we’ve all been groomed to crave status and affiliation. You don’t want to be the only person at a table of 6 without a Stanley tumbler, right? It’s your signal that you belong to the “in-crowd,” and your status reflects that belonging. Leaders must create an environment where the opportunity to achieve status is equal and the affiliation structure includes all team members. Anything less and you’ll have some drama on your hands.

Leadership = Dealing with people

At its core, leadership is dealing with people. There’s a leader—at least informally—in any group greater than 2. Someone is in charge and calls the shots. So, it makes a lot of sense for leaders to understand human behavior because you can’t lead people if you don’t understand them. Let’s take a look at the hypothetical situation below to explain how this could look in the workplace.

You’re leading a team of 5 people tasked with reviewing all contracts and renewals with your clients. Everyone has the same job title and does the same two basic tasks: back-end contract work and front-end client relationships. Let’s say you start to use 2 of your top performers to handle all the front-end client relationships and leave everyone else to do the back-end contract work. It’s a reward for the top performers because it gets them out of contract revisions and allows them to learn new skills to prepare for future opportunities. In most companies and teams, this behavior is perfectly acceptable. But it has many unintended consequences that we’ve all dealt with. To be clear, I’m not arguing for or against this practice—I’m making you aware of both perspectives so you can make better decisions when faced with similar situations. So, let’s continue our hypothetical.

Suddenly, your other 3 employees feel like they have a “lesser” status than their two peers who have been invited to client calls. You—the leader—just created two classes of employees with the same job title and salary. Not only that, but now you have a new group affiliation forming as the 2 top performers begin discussing client meetings at lunch—alienating the other team members. So, what seems like a good move for talent development turns into a talent crisis in 6 months. I share this because I want you to think critically about situations like this one so you can put deliberate thought into making the best decisions possible as a leader.

Lessons in Leadership

I bet most of you have a similar experience from which you can pull. I also imagine most of you have never looked around your organization to identify the unofficial status groups or affiliations. You know, corporate credit card holders, reserved parking space members, fancy lounge access, etc. The point is many companies create status and affiliations for leaders at certain levels in the hierarchy. We’re not here to discuss these issues—though they are systemic issues that must be corrected. I want you to think about your team. Specifically, I want you to think about your team’s affiliation—is everyone a member of the same team, or do you have separate units within the team? Neither is right or wrong, but you should understand the situation. Most leaders allow human behavior and natural interactions to set the team affiliation. That’s a mistake—you should deliberately create affiliation within your team. So, that’s my challenge to you this week:

• Think about the status drivers on your team. Is it top performance, the best customer review marks, or the best efficiency? What drives your employees to be seen as the best? Does everyone have the same opportunities and resources to attain the status?

• Think about your team’s affiliation—does everyone feel like a member of the team, or do you have cliques? Is the team happy with the affiliation? How have you shaped your team’s affiliations?

• Find one way to bring everyone together each week. Maybe on Tuesday, you talk about the Bachelor, or maybe on Friday, you start off with a 30-minute coffee chat.

Regardless of what you do, I challenge you to bring your team together as one this week! Don’t let human behavior get in the way of your leadership!

Let me know what you think of this shorter format, and be sure to hit reply if you want to chat with me about human behavior and leadership. I can get pretty nerdy about this stuff.🤓

See you next week, 

Rick