Team Power, Hierarchy Flexibility...and Hippos with Dr. Lindy Greer
Lindy Greer, Associate Professor at University of Michigan Ross School of Business studies team dynamics. She’s the associate editor of the Academy of Management Journal. With a BA from Wharton, Lindy did her PhD research in the Netherlands where she taught social psychology for many years. She then followed her “academic grandmother” and mentor to Stanford where she taught for 6 years. In 2019 Lindy was recruited by Dean DeRue at Michigan’s Ross School of Business where among other things she is the faculty director at the Sanger Leadership Center.
I read an article on teams and power by Lindy and found it so compelling, I reached out to Lindy who joined me for the following interview.
Carlos: I’m really curious about how you found your way to this topic. Can you tell us about how you came to focus on hierarchy and power?
Lindy: Sure. I started my dissertation in 2004 researching diversity and inclusion back in the days when nobody knew what it was, and I was in the Netherlands. In one of my studies where I wanted to study race and gender differences, I asked people to describe the different types of diversity in their team. Most people were more fixated on the power structures of their group than gender or race. Granted, gender or race probably correlated to the power structure, but the universal type of difference in teams that most people were thinking about was the power difference.
At that point, in the literature, we didn’t know a lot about power and teams. There was a whole lot in psychology about how power can change individuals. If you had power you were more creative, you think more abstractly, you’re more likely to chase your goals. But all that research was done in laboratories and experiments where it was one person on their own. No one was trying to understand 5 people in a room within a team: how does power play out there? How does my power get nuanced or changed by the power someone else has in the room?
So I became very interested in power structures, hierarchy being the one we talked about the most, so I started doing research in hierarchy. I was still living in the Netherlands, junior faculty, and the Netherlands is one of the lowest power distance countries in the world. And I really appreciated how empowering it was. So my thesis in my 20s was that hierarchy was terrible. It was the root of all evil in companies. There were a few famous studies that came out around that time in social psychology claiming that hierarchy is functional. These studies were done at the individual level again where they showed someone a hierarchy and the brain would work more quickly because there was structure.
And people were taking that finding, then going out to a team of people and saying hierarchy is good. But at least my lived experience was that, no, this empowering flatness of the Netherlands is great, the hierarchies I’d been in weren’t always legitimate, there’d been a lot of conflict. So I went out on a limb for a long time trying to document all the many nefarious ways in which hierarchy is terrible.
I did a meta analysis even at one point and did find across all the literature and my own research the net effect of hierarchy was negative – small, but negative.
The Negative Effect of Team Hierarchy
Carlos: When you say the net effect was negative, how does that effect show up?
Performance, broadly stated, across indicators. So if you separate out different indicators of performance - so productivity, creativity, innovation, efficiency - we didn’t find differences. But across the whole barrage of team performance outcomes, the effect of hierarchy was negative. Small, but negative. I think with 95% certainty it was going to be small but negative. Not a big effect meaning that it’s highly moderated, the different aspects of the situation, leadership, etc. could potentially change or reverse that effect. And that was on average. Looking at 60 some studies in science, each study had several hundred teams - a very highly powered sample - that was the main conclusion: the more hierarchy a team has, the more likely it is to perform worse across a range of outcomes.
Then I had to go talk about these findings, especially with students who wanted to go do something with it, and realized saying, “Don’t do hierarchy...” well, what do you do? There wasn’t a great alternative. And if you looked into practice, things like holacracy, they’ve turned out not to do very well because the guidebook to holacracy is over 100 pages. And the bureaucracy it takes to make holacracy work is even more rigid and slow than good old-fashioned hierarchy.
Holacracy
Carlos: And you mentioned in a talk I saw that Zappos, among others, implemented holacracy.
Lindy: Yes, and Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO) was one of the biggest evangelists for it, and he has quietly backed away from in recent years which is interesting. And I see that in startups in Silicon Valley who are trying to emulate Zappos doing holacracy, and they just got so bogged down in the details of it. I also went through a lot of companies during this period trying to look for examples of how teams were trying to organize that isn’t hierarchy, and at best you could find small innovations within a team but certainly not across an entire organization of not having hierarchy.
Then I started to wonder what then? What do we tell our students?
One of my questions at the time, especially after being around teams that were high-performing that had hierarchy, was, “If it’s not hierarchy that’s the problem, is it how we structure it and how we use it?”
Hierarchy and the Navy Seals
Around this time I had an MBA student who was a Navy Seal. I was very curious: how does this high performing organization do hierarchy? He shared a great story that I found very inspiring. If they’re on a mission on the ground, very clear hierarchy or chain of command. If a commander says, “Get out now.” there’s no devil’s advocacy or questions asked. You just move. However when that same team goes back to base to debrief, they literally take their stripes off at the door to the meeting room. They sit around a round table in the meeting room with everybody sitting there having a voice, they flatten out. They all brainstorm and share ideas of what worked and didn’t work in the preceding mission. For example, it could be the youngest person on the ground who saw a sniper that no one else saw. That’s critical information for the team to surface for the next mission. They’re able to do this by symbolically removing the hierarchy and empowering even the most junior people in the hierarchy to speak up.
So they brainstorm, share information, go back out of the room, put on their stripes and fall back into hierarchy. This is really interesting to me because maybe hierarchy doesn’t always have to be experienced as hierarchy. Maybe the same team is not always equally hierarchical. That maybe it can change how it feels during the day, maybe in slow moments, like in the Seals, they feel a clear chain of command, and in other moments they feel that it’s flat.
I did some studies that didn’t work trying to see if maybe the optimal team has hierarchy and equality. They have an organizational structure but it never feels that way. I found that balance just didn’t work. So I started looking at sequences like the Navy Seals, and can a team fluctuate across a day or a week or a year in terms of how much hierarchy is enacted by a leader vs. not. So we did about a 6-month study of Silicon Valley startups to see if startups’ CEOs would flex the way that Navy Seals did. We found that about a third of the time we would see startups do flexing. The leaders, similar to the Navy Seals, would intentionally enact hierarchy, or intentionally enact equality, but it was always intentionally done in these companies. Even within a meeting there’d be a clear segment of hierarchy where the leader comes forward, makes him or herself big, gives direction, the goal or the vision of the meeting, then makes themselves smaller flattening out the hierarchy and says, “I hired you all because you’re smarter than me. Tell me your opinion.”
Flexing Hierarchy and Power: Confusion?
Carlos Do you find any confusion among team members about when it was time to go flat? If not, what were the behaviors of the leader that signaled and cued that it’s time to go flat?
Lindy: The flexing like in the meeting, and everything that we saw in the startups that flexed effectively: there was clear signaling primarily on behalf of the leader. Sometimes by the team but more often than not, the leader was the conductor and there would be often a ritual. In the Seals they removed their stripes. What we saw in the startups was that there were often artifacts that were brought out. For example, whenever the Post-its came out everyone knew it was time to share their ideas. Another company had a basketball that got passed around the room whenever they really wanted people to speak up and whoever held the basketball had the right to speak and everyone else had to listen. It was very much enculturated and people knew the signal.
I’ve had companies that were a little more informal than using an artifact. There was a catch phrase that everybody just knew what it meant such as, “I hired you all because you’re smarter than me.” Everybody immediately transitioned into “Yup, and now’s the time I’ve got to speak up.”
Then when the hierarchy went back you’d see signals. It could be a catch phrase, but also a leader’s body language, whether it was conscious or not, often would visibly show what role they were playing. Were they leading from the front trying to be big, were they leading from the back trying to be small? One leader I saw would go to the back of the room in moments where he was trying to flatten out the team. I’ve also heard stories of leaders who would even leave the room during those moments to physically remove their presence and then come back in. Sometimes you could see, even within a brainstorming session, if a team gets into trouble, there’s a conflict or they cannot see their way forward, if the leader’s in the room you can see them going from being in the back of the room and being smaller to sitting up, lowering their voice – all the cues you have for power – and saying, “In my experience, this is how I would deal with the situation.” Then the team would move forward again, and the leader would make themself small again.
Hierarchy, Flexibility and Psychological Safety
Carlos: It seems to me there’s a balancing act here between using the hierarchy effectively and switching gears to that flatness. Regarding all the work they did at Google, Amy Edmondson’s work on psychology safety: have you looked at how all this plays with psychological safety in the team?
Lindy: It can predict psychological safety. You could also argue that psychological safety is a prerequisite for the flat burst to work. It’s definitely inter-related. Psych safety is defined as a willingness to take a risk. Then if you look at the behaviors in a team that predict that, one of which is knowing that the leaders is going to give you a time and a place to share your opinion, it certainly would be a way to enhance psych safety in a team.
That means that we also saw a few flexing fails which were painful and a little bit funny, at least from the outside. The leader would say, “Hey, I hired you because you’re smarter than me. What’s your opinion?” and the team would stare blankly for 5 minutes and the leader would say, “Ok, great meeting. Let’s go on then.” So clearly on those teams, flexing is also contingent on there being a pre-existing level of safety. What we found in our study is that teams that were able to flex effectively there was a lot of work done to enable flexing such as building trust between the leader and the team members.
In order for a leader to ask that question and empower the team, the leader had to trust the team which means hiring a team the leader believes is competent. It also means for the leader, especially in terms of micro-managing younger leaders, to just have faith and to try to trust and share the power.
Hierarchical Flexing and Trust
For the flexes that went from flat back to hierarchy, it took a strong sense of trust to go from the team to the leader because no one likes to have their power taken away. In that moment when we all have a voice and then, “Wait, now the stripes are going back on?” No one liked that. That was showing us that that type of flex is hard. What we found there on teams that were more willing to accept that is they trusted the leader to do the right thing, which comes from the leader’s competence, communication skills and the relationships the leader built with the team members.
Also, interestingly, teams that had a very strong sense of mission were more willing to accept a flex into hierarchy because they understood the purpose of it and why it mattered. For example, one of the quotes from our qualitative study from a CEO was, “When I pull up the reins, I explain why.” So recently we were going out for funding and it was a bomb run, and everybody knows what funding is like in life in a startup, heads down, there’s a hierarchy.”
That was really interesting to me because it really resonated with the Navy Seals example. When it’s life or death that’s on the line, and we know why we’re doing it we accept the hierarchy. So startups that didn’t necessarily have the Glory For Country or whatever like the Seals, were still able to inspire people around a mission enough that they were able to accept the hierarchy.
What was interesting to me was that the normal state of being in most of these companies that were effectively flexing was hierarchy. About 80% of the time, more or less, they were in hierarchy because during task execution the hierarchy was there. So these moments of flatness – really, bursts of flatness- it wasn’t as though these teams were usually flat and then the leader pulled the leader card. More often the team had a hierarchy they accepted, they worked with, they lived with. And every now and then, the leader would say “Now we need to remove the hierarchy for a moment. Let’s everybody speak up.” And then end that and go back into the hierarchy.
Carlos: There was a term you used, “emotional unpredictability”, the one in the talk on YouTube, that clearly relates to that switch from hierarchy to flat and back again. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of leader behavior?
Team Power Flexing: Signaling Power vs Flatness
Lindy: We’re starting to understand the different things we can do on teams to signal power vs. signal flatness. One of the interesting things is emotion. Emotions have an amazing ability to either push people away and accentuate power differences, or to bring people closer.
I just gave a talk for the IESE in Barcelona for their research group there on the emotional unpredictability paper, so it’s very top of mind right now. One of the things we’ve seen that increases power distance between a leader and a team is when leaders are unpredictable in their emotional display. So often leaders interact with many different teams, they have many different inputs. Leaders have a lot of emotions, but if you go to any given follower, they’re only privy to what happens in their team with that leader, and 100% their life is that leader. That’s their boss, their day-to-day, whereas for the leader that follower is one of many. This asymmetry where the leader has a lot of emotions that have nothing to do with the follower, but the follower thinks the leader is everything so the follower thinks the leader’s emotions are always about him or her. And so, leaders are often perceived as being emotionally unpredictable.
Certainly for me when I was younger, I was in a research group where I was convinced the leader of it was just crazy because I never could just understand the emotions which were so very hard to predict. There was a lot of power struggles in that lab, a lot of people throwing each other under the bus daily which is when I started this research. The older I got, and the more I have my own teams, and when I’ve gotten feedback that said, “Lindy, we think you’re angry at us. What’s going on?”
“Oh, wait. It’s not you. I just got a paper rejected. Nothing to do with this team.”
So I started to understand there is often this information asymmetry. One of the job responsibilities of leaders is to make sure their emotions are showing the right amount of power they want to show. If you do want to be very powerful, pull up the reins, be hierarchical or even dominate another group, if you’re unpredictable in your emotions it keeps people on their toes. However, if you want to be able to have a team that can flatten out, that can trust you and be safe, giving predictability to your emotions is very helpful.
And so is providing clarity. If you walk into a meeting and say, “Hey, I just had a paper rejected, I might be a little bit off. It’s not about you all.” That actually can help flatten out a team and help humanize a leader. Those are some signals that we’re finding for how you can use emotions strategically to flex a hierarchy in either direction.
Emotions show our humanity
Carlos: You have to be willing to be vulnerable, be willing to open up about your emotions.
Lindy: We’re showing emotions even though we don’t realize it. If you’re irritated about something, even if you don’t show emotions, there’s a lot of research showing that those in lower power, the followers, are fixated on the emotions of those in power because it determines their daily life.
Carlos: So, there’s emotional seepage happening?
Lindy: Yes! And then if you’re slightly irritated, they don’t know why, they think it’s about them. Then they get upset and irritated, too, and all of a sudden you have a terrible meeting and as a leader you don’t know why. You want to think everyone on the team is doing a great job and now everybody’s upset because you walked in the door with tension from your last meeting.
Team Culture and Hierarchy
Carlos: I have a question about culture. You’ve worked in the US, in the Netherlands: does this 80%-of-the-time-hierarchy finding apply across cultures?
Lindy: That’s a good question. There isn’t enough data in cultures outside of western cultures to really give a good answer to that. I would expect, of course, that it would vary a little bit. Some cultures, say like China, naturally are in hierarchy more than that whereas other cultures like the Netherlands really dislike hierarchy and try to avoid it.
That being said, the Netherlands is a country of paradoxes. While they pride themselves of being the most egalitarian or flat country in the world, it was very hierarchical under the surface. Always. For example, everybody should address each other by first names, but when you hire a professor for the department, usually with a decision done by whomever the department chair was, no one else had a vote in it which is even more hierarchical than say, a typical American department where all the professors above tenure vote on all the hiring of all professors. So even though on the surface it looked like it was very flat, I wouldn’t be surprised they also fit in the 80/20 rule, but it’s just much more behind the scenes.
Carlos: I worked for many years at Mars, incorporated which is a family-owned business and very flat, at least that is always their objective. They fluctuate between sometimes too many layers and sometimes too few. But anyway, that egalitarianism is an ethos that pervades that culture, and don’t kid yourself for a minute that it isn’t extremely hierarchical, especially where it concerns the Mars family who are still actively involved in the business. I think I heard you say this, but I wrote down, “Hierarchy seems inevitable in human organization.”
Lindy: Yes, it’s literally hardwired into our hormones. From evolution we’ve been working as human beings to coordinate our actions. So if you were hunting for a mammoth back in the day, you needed a hierarchy for someone to say, “Throw the spears now”. There’s an interesting hormonal study showing there’s a natural preference to sort people into in-groups and ou- groups as well as to who is the leader and who is not. The trouble is, though, that our evolutionary preference for hierarchy often gravitates towards more dominance-based hierarchies which are highly ineffective for collaboration. You need an expertise-based hierarchy for collaboration.
So, hierarchy is ubiquitous, but then it’s a question of how can we make sure that if we’re going to go with it, that we design hierarchies that are effective. The flexing work I mentioned is a lot about how to use hierarchies. There’s also a lot of research coming out about how to design hierarchies to work. One of the basic takeaways is basing hierarchies on expertise to the best of your abilities so that the leader knows most over the whole project above anybody. Maybe there are specialists within the team, but at the oversight level the leader does know most.
Expertise-based Hierarchy and Social Skills
Carlos: Based on your book, the expertise-based hierarchy makes a ton of sense. I’ve noticed one of the missing pieces often is something like emotional intelligence, the ability to read the room, to have empathy for your people and interact with them based on it. What is the right balance between expertise-based leadership and some kind of emotional acuity?
Lindy: You need both. You want the leader that knows most but also has the social skills to use the hierarchy effectively. I prefer the term social skills over EQ or emotional intelligence. When I do leader development I get irritated by things like Strengths Finder and or leadership styles or even EQ because it implies this very fixed mindset that is also tied to inequality and a lack of inclusion over you’re born a leader or not, and that there’s a certain prototype of what a leader is and if you’re not born that way you should never dare to lead. And that makes me very unhappy. So, based on the data in this area I very much prefer language that has a growth mindset around leaders. Leaders need to have a toolkit of skills, the skills just like math or reading are skills that can be broken down and taught to anybody. It just requires intentional effort. Just like you had to do your problem sets for math at school, you need to be doing your leadership behavior experiments as a leader to get better at it everyday. And there’s many behavioral skills that leaders need and the more the leader has those tools the better they are at leading.
Team Leadership and the Hippo Pond Analogy
Carlos: One of the things from your book that I cherish the most is the Hippo Pond Analogy. I think the Hippo Pond has some application for your average day-to-day team leader, and how they think about how they show up with their team.
Lindy: Yes, and also how to design your team, how to structure hierarchies well. The way I like to talk about hierarchies anymore is that you first off, if you’re the only person on the team, you’re the leader: you’re the hippopotamus. Now, what do we know about hippos? They’re very large, ferocious, scary, they have a lot of power. Hippos often live in water. They can go above water be big and scary, show their teeth. Or they can go under the water and you just see their little eyes floating around in the pond.
As you start to bring employees onto your team as a leader, you can imagine them having different islands in your pond where they have ownership. We know from research the best hierarchies have horizontal differentiation where each person on a team has a clear area of ownership they can stand on.
As leader, as hippo, you still own the entire pond including the islands. But when someone is on their own island, they have the most expertise, the autonomy and the decision power to make decisions for that area. So maybe within your own pond, your startup, you’ve hired a CTO. He or she lives on the technology island. They may hire more employees who live on the island, or they set up camp, too. Everybody has a clear plot of land that is theirs. That level of their own power and autonomy is very important for effective teams.
At the same time, as the hippo, you are allocating land to these different groups and factions, maybe you have a marketing island, too, you never forget you are the hippo. It is your pond, you are the leader. However, and this goes into the manifestation of leadership and hierarchy, you need to be very intentional as the hippo if you’re always out of the pond snarling at people, which means it’s going to be a very hierarchical little area where no one ever speaks up even though they have their own plot of land. Or, you’re willing to occasionally go under water and let people do the work of their plots of land. You just have your eyes there. You’re still there, you’re still watching. If there’s a problem, if marketing technology get into a fight, or if they’re not coordinating, you rise up out of the water in hippo ferociousness and save the day.
Giving away power does not diminish the leader’s power
A couple of things about this are really important.
A lot of leaders are scared to share power, especially early on. They think that if they give power to someone else, say to make a decision on marketing, it means that they have less power as a leader. Yet we know from research that power isn’t necessarily a zero sum. Actually sharing power with others makes you more powerful. So how do you get someone to have more confidence? The metaphor of the hippo going under water. When you go under water, you are still a hippo. Still the exact same ferocious creature with the same amount of power, you’re just under water. So how can you become more aware of your body language, your signals, how you manage meetings in a way that you can intentionally go underwater in those moments when you want to flatten out? Then, if the team has a problem, you rise up and you’re still a hippo. But the whole way through you’re still a hippo, you’re just choosing how much of your power you’re showing at any given moment.
Defining power
Carlos: How do you define power?
Lindy: Control of resources. Resources could be a job title, expertise, your network, others’ perception of your status. All these are different types of resources. If you look at the older definitions of power they discuss the bases of power, and different types of resources. I really admire the work of Jeff Pfeffer at Stanford who has a great book on Power, Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t. He says one of the skills of leadership you should have in your toolbox is being able to read a power landscape effectively, and knowing how much power you have. I think people often over- and underestimate their power. So having an actual understanding of exactly how much power you have under any given situation, as well as those of others, and understanding the dynamics entails how you should be leading.
For me, as I came to Michigan Ross to run the leadership center, my power at Michigan is much more than I had at Stanford. At Stanford I was used to having to show power to be heard, to get people to listen to me. Now, if I already have a larger power base here, and I’m a big hippo, I terrify people. I had to unlearn some of my behaviors and spend more time under water. Showing power or submerging power is sticky, so the more that we can get really flexible, changing the amount of power you’re showing moment-to-moment to match the power landscape you’re in is really important.
When I had the privilege of being around CEOs, who were eons better leaders than I am, it’s one of things I noticed a lot: how quickly they shift their power. If you see them in a roomful of people, you can see them going higher out of the water, or lower person-to-person, moment-to-moment. I’m not that quick. It’s still a skill I’m trying to polish. Read the power landscape and imagine the power I should be showing to what’s happening in that moment.
The importance of feedback
Carlos: Imagine you’re talking to a fairly junior leader, someone who has been leading teams for maybe a year or two: Is there one piece of advice you might offer someone in this area of power in the Hippo Pond to help them accelerate their development as a leader of a team?
Lindy: Get regular feedback from those around you. There’s a research article that just came back that said that leaders who ask for negative feedback perform better over time. For me it took me a year before I realized how many people I scared. If I’d asked for that feedback earlier… Especially for young leaders that feedback is critical, and that growth mindset, over how to intentionally work on a behavior when you walk into a meeting, as well as being intentional about what you need to do for that specific team for that moment, and each week have a new behavior.
This summer I worked a lot on my inclusive behaviors. Can I ask more questions than give statements in meetings? Can I speak more slowly? Can I speak less? And each week I would have a different behavior with an inclusion I would work on, and then I asked my team what worked and what didn’t? Sometimes stuff didn’t work. For me as a scientist asking questions for me meant saying “why?” I hadn’t realized that “why” sometimes can be a bit of a hostile question. They’d give me the feedback the next week saying, instead of asking why could you please explain your reasoning?
As a leader, especially as a young leader, you can have an executive coach which accelerates development more than most things, but if you can’t have the luxury of having an executive coach, I do believe that we can coach ourselves leadership. For example, on our website, sanger.umich.edu, we have a framework for how to coach yourself leadership with 5 steps. i think the more leaders get on that type of development journey where they choose categories of behaviors to work on each week, try a new behavior, and then get the feedback and then update - that’s the quickest way to get better at leadership.
If you go to our Philosophy tab, to Journey, we have a whole 5-step process with videos and workbooks on how to teach yourself leadership.
One of the things I’m very geekily excited about, It might be the coolest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m a geek so bear with me, is we’ve made the world’s first searchable encyclopedia of data-driven leadership behaviors. You can say, I want to be more inclusive, and it pulls up everything we know from science on specific behaviors that allow you to be more inclusive. It will give you a behavior to work on each week. So maybe there are 10 behaviors that come up right now for inclusion. Our encyclopedia, right now, will allow you to choose that. And, if you follow our social media, every Tuesday we do a Tech Tuesday. We bring out a tips from the encyclopedia and give people a specific behavior to work on for the week.
Carlos: Lindy, thank you so much for this fascinating interview. You can check out the amazing tools Lindy describes at https://sanger.umich.edu/journey/.
Take care!