Benedict Carey, New York Times; Steinbrenner: The Boss Unbound:
"Even the most devotional hymns to George Steinbrenner, the Yankee’s principal owner, who died last week at age 80, aired the man’s sturm and his drang, his outbursts of pettiness and tyranny. That was George: hated to lose; loved to compete; needed to be on top of the mountain.
And yet it was such a sizable mountain — enough cash to ransack the free-agent market year in and out, enough to carry fantastically overpaid underperformers (Carl Pavano, Kevin Brown) — that the baby-Zeus routine seemed unnecessary. Mr. Steinbrenner’s idol, Patton, was a man of the battlefield, after all, not the baseball field or the owner’s box.
Couldn’t a driven, but lower-key owner have done just as much in the same position? For that matter, couldn’t someone (his son Hank, perhaps?) have parked the Boss in management training for a week or two? No one wants a wimp, but old-fashioned bluster seems nothing if not old fashioned: there must be a better way.
Yet recent research on status and power suggests that brashness, entitlement and ego are essential components for any competent leader, the precursor to ascent and its spoils; they are the traits that provide the seedbed for risk-taking and a soft place to land when some of those risks go wrong. Yes, there are reasons to be an impatient, over-the-top boss — to a point.
For all their professed suspicion of authority, people crave hierarchy and tend to cede authority precisely to those individuals who want to take the reins. In studies of group behavior, it is usually the overconfident, outspoken individuals who take on leadership roles.
And sure enough, the experience of attaining it amplifies the very traits that started people climbing in the first place. People given authority, even in artificial role-playing experiments, become less compassionate by some measures, and even less able to read emotions in the faces of other people. Just the perception of having power raises people’s confidence, and heightens sense of control over events beyond their influence — like the roll of dice, for instance, in one study.
“When you’re in power, and want to stay there, you are not free to be yourself; you are expected to live up to your role as a dominant decisive, absolute authority — and to internalize it, to drink your own Kool-Aid,” said Jennifer Overbeck, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. “It’s very hard to have to act out that role and keep some part of yourself separate.”
Mr. Steinbrenner appeared dumbfounded at times, for instance, when the Yankees could not sign the free-agent players he wanted.
“The illusion of control comes in part from this finding that when they’re in a position of power, people are much more influenced by ideas in their own head,” and less likely to consider counsel from others, said Deborah Gruenfeld, a psychologist at Stanford.
One reason for this bias — and perhaps the most striking recent finding from the study of power — is that leaders who make tough calls from their gut come across not only as more decisive than those who deliberate, but more morally assured. In a series of ongoing studies, presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting earlier this year, Dr. Overbeck found that participants choosing a leader gravitated toward those who made quick decisions in moral dilemmas.
“We don’t know whether this is because people believe that these preferred leaders really do have a superior set of moral rules, or that there’s something else going on,” Dr. Overbeck said.
Either way, this sort of dynamic does not elicit humility. As a rule, people tend to rate themselves as more virtuous than the next guy, a finding psychologists call the holier-than-thou effect. When approving employees or underlings agree, there’s a risk of creating a holiest-of-thou monster.
That’s why, in the end, the most effective leaders find a way to mix some patience with their Patton, to persuade rather than intimidate, to convince people that their goals are the same as the boss’s. Such “soft” skills don’t necessarily come naturally to a people who have spent most of their life in an escalating fever of self-approval and moral superiority.
But come they sometimes do. Last week, old hands in the Yankee organization, including the former manager Gene Michael, remarked that the Boss of the 1990s was a different man than he was in the 1980s, when he was continually firing managers, insulting players and digging up dirt on Dave Winfield — a stunt that got him temporarily banned from baseball.
The man who returned had more patience and, over time, less need for public displays of anger. And in 1996, after an 18-year drought, his teams started winning championships again.
“He still gave off that passion in later years, still had that confidence, that ability to motivate and inspire people,” said Adam Galinsky, a psychologist at Northwestern University and a longtime Yankee fan. “But he allowed his baseball people more leeway, and only then did the team succeed. When he was at his most intimidating — that long period with no success, all those years with Don Mattingly — that’s exactly when the team suffered most.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/weekinreview/18carey.html?scp=4&sq=steinbrenner&st=cse
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