Jordan Peterson’s guide to leadership
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The psychology of leadership is a mess, says Jordan Peterson, because it’s clouded by “management idiot speak.” One example? A leader’s job isn’t to motivate people; it’s to tap into people’s sense of purpose. Motivation is the byproduct.
Lead your team like a free society, not a dictatorship. Based on developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s observations, Peterson emphasizes the importance of an equilibrated state, which is “a situation that’s set up by two or more people where everyone is participating in the state voluntarily.” Authoritarian-style leadership (“Do this or else”) is a terrible way to run a team.
Good leadership means finding people who want to contribute. Otherwise, says Peterson, “the enforcement costs are so high that the free society will outcompete the authoritarian society across time.”
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JORDAN PETERSON:
Jordan B. Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt-plane, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with astronauts, and built a Kwagu’l ceremonial bighouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home after being invited into and named by that Canadian First Nation. He’s taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an adviser to senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, while his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief revolutionized the psychology of religion. His latest book is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
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TRANSCRIPT:
JORDAN PETERSON: I suppose this touches on the psychology of leadership too—which is a mess, by the way.
Well, what’s the fundamental characteristic of a leader? Here’s one: A leader is someone who knows where he or she is going. Well that would be the first thing, is like, how are you going to lead unless you have a destination?
Okay. Well a destination implies an ethic. And then you need to be able to communicate that. And you communicate your destination with a story. Now if I want to motivate people—and that’s not the right way to think about it, because you shouldn’t want to motivate people. That’s management idiot speak, that is—what you should so is figure out something that’s worth doing, that you really think is worth doing. Something that you would actually commit a substantial proportion of your life to. And you should have deep reasons for pursuing it. And then if you’re a leader, well first of all you have that established, but the second is that you can communicate that, okay, and you communicate that in a manner that also appeals to other people’s sense of purpose. And so you’d say to someone, like if I wanted to move forward with you on an enterprise, I would have to say, “Well here’s the purpose of the enterprise and here’s the reasons that it’s not only eminently justifiable but more justifiable than anything else we could be doing at the same time.” And then I’d have to say, “Well here’s what’s in it for me, and here’s what’s in it for you. And here’s why the two of us together can further the enterprise and further what’s in it for you and further what’s in it for me.”
And then you have a situation there that Piaget, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, called an equilibrated state. So an equilibrated state is a situation that’s set up by two or more people where everyone is participating in the state voluntarily. So when he got that — he derived that notion in part by looking at how children set up games. So if children are going to set up a pretend game, what they do is they negotiate a little narrative, to begin with. It’s almost like they generate a little play and they assign everyone their parts, and then they manifest the play, and that’s how they think. But everyone has to accept their part voluntarily, right, or the game won’t continue. Now Piaget’s ethical claim, ethical analytic claim, was that a game everyone plays voluntarily is more sustainable and productive than one the people have to be forced to play. And that was his fundamental dist…
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