Recruiting ‘Dominant’ Types—a Guide [Part II]
4. “Preferential access to resources”: The main reason this “getting your way” criterion of dominance is even on the table is that popular sociobiological and ethological concepts of dominance suggest this.
Animal behavioral research has evolved a concept of dominance that emphasizes “preferential access to resources ”, the idea being that a dominant male silverback gorilla is dominant in having easier, less opposed access to food, water, mates, space and other resources than less dominant troop members do.
But access to resources needs to be distinguished from the use to which those accessible resources are put and the power to use them in those ways.
For example, although the boss, in some sense, the dominant player in a meeting, can use the meeting room table as bully pulpit, his employees cannot, despite equal access to it as a resource. The boss, in having both rights of access and use, is clearly more dominant, in this resource-based understanding of dominance.
But there’s a problem with this resource-access based concept: It doesn’t capture core intuitions about dominance that have nothing to do with resources.
That’s because unless we characterize everything and anything that we get—including situations we desire, whether as a means or as an end—as a “resource”, there clearly are “things” or outcomes that a dominant individual or group preferentially controls that are not resources.
For example, who is likely to be more dominant: a gorilla that is powerless to defend itself from both unwelcome grooming as well as attacks, or one that is able to—assuming that all other powers are comparable? Being dominant enough to prevent such grooming and attacks has nothing to do with access to resources.
Notice, this is not about controlling space as a resource; it’s about controlling behavior of others within that space, just as the bully-pulpit boss controls what goes on around the meeting-room table, rather than or in addition to the table itself.
Unless we characterize one’s own body or the behaviors of others as a personal resource, this kind of capacity to deter behaviors and avoiding what one doesn’t want [as opposed to getting what one wants as a resource] seems to be as legitimate a concept of dominance as any other examined so far and independent of the resource-access notion of dominance.
Associated hiring mistake: Hiring a consultant who, among his peers, dominates access to very useful resources, but is unable to make effective use of them.
5.Superior control or influence: Getting one’s way includes, as sub-species, outright control, or at least superior influence, e.g., when winning a stalemate is the best that can actually be achieved, controlling or minimizing the damage in a situation may be possible only through the actions of the most dominant individual.
To grasp this, visualize the ramrod Marine colonel assigned to negotiate a truce, when he really wants an impossible victory.
Superior control—of others, if not also of one’s self—can be a marker for dominance, but hardly suffices. First of all, it all depends on exactly what is being controlled. If passive resistance in the form of a sit-in protest is well-organized, the appearance of being under the control of more “dominant” surveillance and enforcement agencies will be an illusion.
What’s more, even if the protesters’ bodies and behavior are under the strictest control by “dominant” security forces, the most disciplined among the protesters would say that their minds and spirits remain untouchably theirs.
The organizational lesson in this is that if a dominant individual is being brought into an organization to “whip everyone into shape” by the force of his dominant personality, it must be determined whether the goal or actual outcome will be to merely control and dominate staff behavior or also staff mind and morale, and whether, in the end, the power and dominance will shift to the staff.
Associated hiring mistake: To hire domineering overseers or foremen who, in controlling some behaviors, exacerbate others, without ever dominating the will and intentions of those superficially dominated.
6. A stronger will: Despite Nietzche’s exaltation of the triumphant Will of the “Superman”—the “Übermensch”, the fact is that Will without success is nothing more than failed willfulness.
Hence, being “strong willed”, in itself, should no more be treated as sufficient marker for dominance in organizations than it should at home with a stubborn willful child.
Moreover, being strong-willed in one respect in no way guarantees being strong-willed in other, perhaps more important respects and arenas.
This observation may, as you read this, seem obvious; yet think about how dominant merely strong-willed or domineering individuals can seem.
Associated hiring mistakes: 1.assuming that someone strong-willed enough to dominate and defeat a pack of presidential candidates will be sufficiently strong-willed to lead, if not dominate, in the arena of economic or foreign policy; 2. Hiring someone who gets his or her way because of skillful, tenacious determination to project helplessness, e.g., that of the stereotypical traditionally demure female, that may become extremely unhelpful when strong, independent decision-making skills are required.
True Organizational Dominance
There may be a temptation to think of or even stipulate that dominance is a combination of traits, behaviors or circumstances that, although individually neither sufficient nor individually necessary for being dominant in any universally acceptable sense, when blended perfectly in combination, encapsulate an idealized concept, e.g.,
organizationally dominant =
1.superior capacity to get one’s way [for oneself or on behalf of others]
2. absence of animal displays of physical aggression or violence
3. substantial independence [e.g., of powerful connections, pity or other constraints].
Although it should go without saying that organizational dominance should exclude physical aggression and violence, it is nonetheless the case that images, like the photo above of butting heads and clashing horns, metaphorically or unconsciously shape our thinking and decisions about who or what a dominant individual is or should be like, which, alas, give us history’s Hitlers.
Two More Idealized Components of Dominance
If the foregoing “formula” for dominance has any merit, it can be bolstered by adding as two more idealized conditions, these:
1.That the organizational dominance be multi-dimensional or at least evident in the performance domains that will eventually count most.
2. That, just as government should be a government of laws, not men, organizational dominance should be sought, measured and exerted through the force of underlying ideas, methods, techniques, technology and principles, rather than as the force or cult of a dominant personality.
Although I regard these definitions as preliminary, I do have to confess that there is a compelling characteristic that they share.
They have dominated my thinking about dominance.