About Gerónimo, one of the few Indians that appear in the encyclopedias, can be read in the Spanish version of Wikipedia “ … he was a chief of the Apaches in North America. Born on June 16, 1829 and died on February 17, 1909… he stood out as an Apache leader in their confrontations with the US and Mexican authorities ”.
The English version coincides with the Spanish in showing Gerónimo as a leader in our classic image.
However, Gerónimo's leadership was somewhat special.
In March 1858 a company of the Mexican army attacked an Apache camp while the men were trading. They massacred the settlers, including Geronimo's wife, children and mother.
The Apache tribes decided to take revenge and appointed Geronimo as their military leader. The latter, responding to expectations, led his warriors on an expedition that crushed the Mexican garrison.
For the Apaches, revenge had been carried out, a military leader was no longer necessary. However, Geronimo, who had gained enormous prestige, did not think the same. I wanted to keep fighting.
Try to convince your people to go on another expedition. In vain. Apache society aspires to rest once the collective goal has been achieved. Geronimo therefore has an individual objective that requires dragging the tribe. He wants to make the tribe the instrument of his desire. But at most, Geronimo only manages to convince some young men hungry for glory and loot. For one of his expeditions, Geronimo's heroic army consisted of 2 men!
The Apaches, who had accepted Geronimo's leadership because of their combat prowess, systematically turned their backs on him when he wanted to carry out their personal war. " (Clastres, 1978, p.184-185).
The Apaches, like some other traditional societies, did not have defined hierarchical structures. Leadership was not associated with a position but with the person. As long as the person made a profit for the group, he was followed. When the group perceived that its actions and decisions did not produce the expected benefit, it was abandoned as a leader (not removed, since it did not hold an institutional position from which to remove it).
In companies, a leader sustains his leadership on two pillars: an established hierarchy and personal charisma.
The first has the advantage of generating stability: it ensures that the company will have a boss who is in charge of directing the group without this depending on a specific person. It has the disadvantage that the group will have to accept both a good boss and a bad one.
The second pillar, charisma, is the dimension of leadership that almost all of us refer to when we talk about leadership. It defines the attraction caused by a convinced, confident and voluntary following of a group of people towards a person.
So, for example, in a company, the tribe, I mean the employees, will follow the boss because of a combination of two things: because they have no choice (hierarchy) and because they want to (charisma).
Charism is a concept that implies the existence of “others”. You have charisma for someone. The charisma, which turns a boss into a leader, rather than emanates from the subject, is projected by the group onto the subject. The group instills "leadership." Nobody, no matter how many masters he has, languages he knows or whose son he is, can force a group to follow him with convinced willfulness.
Of course, certain personal skills can help, so to speak, make you attractive as a leader. Management courses usually include topics such as communication; social skills; emotional management; or, directly, leadership. But it is one thing to gain beauty as a leader and another for you to be chosen as a couple.
So it seems that developing leadership skills involves getting the group to attribute charisma to you. Why does a group need to instill charisma in a person and make them their leader? The answer seems to have to do with satisfying a certain need and the belief that that person can get it. Thus, the would-be leader should ask himself: what does the group need at this moment?
The Apaches needed revenge on the Mexicans. They believed they recognized in Gerónimo the values and aptitudes that they considered necessary to achieve that objective, and they were right. Supported by personal characteristics, they imbued Geronimo with the necessary charisma to delegate his authority to him, trust him, and follow him in war until death.
The episode described between the Apaches and Gerónimo also shows us another characteristic of leadership: the leader seems to be drawn more clearly, is imbued with that «leadership» more clearly recognizable by the group, at specific moments associated with a peremptory need to that group.
Think about it: Shackleton and his scouts; Fabio Máximo and the defeated Minucio and his army (see article "Leaders against the Leader"); M. Luther King and the American Black Community; or, in the worst version of the leadership, Hitler and the German people.
These are not just biased examples because they have gone down in history, I know other non-historical, everyday episodes in companies that share with the previous ones a boss who shines as a leader by giving the group something that it urgently demanded.
Which leads us to a new question, what needs does a group have? Well, this will be the subject of a future article.
Footnotes:
- Recovered from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ger%C3%B3nimo. Accessed October 10, 2012 Pierre Clastres (1978). Society against the state. Barcelona, Editorial ÍNDICE, Graphic Arts.
