By Dan Fine, Business Adviser at Hive Business.
It’s hard to tell zebras apart, so when the American biologist Robert Sapolsky wanted to keep his eye on one in its natural habitat he marked it with a blob of red paint. The paint had an unforeseen effect; it didn’t just allow Sapolsky to track the poor beast, it also allowed the lions, who quickly ate it.
The unlucky zebra could no longer find safety through herding, a phenomenon that emerges from the uncoordinated behaviour of self-serving individuals — during a lion attack, for example, each zebra moves as close as possible to the centre of the fleeing group.
Herd behaviour is characterised by fear and self-interest, rather than deliberation and preparation. You never see a coordinated effort by zebras to take a stand and face down their enemies, perhaps by trapping and stampeding them, which they could do if they wanted to.
Many other animals herd. Humans can position themselves as predator or prey depending on how they feel about the situation they find themselves in. Herd psychology often gets confused with being a ‘team player’, which can happen, for instance, when biting one’s tongue on important issues. But it’s never a good thing when cowardice passes for morality and compliance passes for competence.
As a business leader, unless you set your team straight on what you take to be a team player, they won’t know, and so they will naturally fall back to the herd psychology default position. It’s almost certain that, deep down, this isn’t what they want. Unlike zebras, humans learned to organise themselves to take on their predators with courage and audacity, and that yearning to rise to any challenge remains in everyone.
The indomitable human spirit isn’t well suited to mindless compliance, and so if your business culture makes it seem too risky to speak out, your team members will learn to shut off their inner lion killer. That’s fine if you want them to operate like a production line. That’s a cost-led business model where margin is created by cost cutting and efficiency, not innovation and customer experience, which works reasonably well in factories, Ryanair and NHS dental practices. But if you’re running a private practice then, like it or not, you’re a differentiator.
That puts you in the same category as Apple, which makes 20% profit because it knows that enough people will go for a £1,500 laptop over a £300 one that does the same thing. Even Steve Jobs knew that you can’t build a successful differentiator by relying on herd-like staff. In fact, the cantankerous boss once admitted: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
The most important thing you need as a leader of a differentiator is a clear vision. If you let them, your team will tell you how to get there. Real business development only comes through real conversations, and the best conversations happen when you have a team with diverse opinions and experience and you encourage them to speak up. Ask your team members to stand up and receive the red blob, and watch what happens.
If you would like to discuss how you can develop your team please call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.
