Leaders and Tension

Originally published on Medium on July 18, 2017

All day long I watch people. And I learn. Occasionally, I get them to buy my company’s product. When your livelihood depends on convincing people, you learn to read people pretty quickly. There’s a reason many titans of industry started out selling newspapers or hawking wares on grimy street corners to uninterested customers.

After a year of high stakes sales experience, I’ve realized how to instantly identify the leader in a room. This isn’t infallible; you may find a person with this trait who isn’t a leader, but you will rarely, if ever, find a leader without it.

The leader in a room is the person who is most able to change the tension in the room, based on their perception of reality. Think about great leaders you’ve met. An old boss of mine who is a renowned leader talks about leaders as “energy raisers.” That’s an accurate albeit incomplete picture.

Imagine a great leader you knew. A coach, teacher, boss, parent. When they walked into the room, everyone probably sat up a little straighter, talked a little clearer. (A raising of the tension in the room). What distinguishes a real leader from a tyrannical, overbearing and hated figure is their ability to invert the tension.

That leader of yours walks into the room, and instantly the tension level rises. Now, drop the same person into an extremely tense situation. Tension is high-that leader diminishes the natural tension of the moment by their presence. Everything’s going to be OK.

The ability to change the emotional tension of a room inspires everyone else to follow that person because it makes the followers believe that the leader has access to information outside of that the group. We assume rationality of a group, and if someone clearly feels differently than the rest of the group, they must know something we don’t, and thus should be followed.

Real life examples of this:

When two leaders meet, they often make statements that are purposefully ambiguous. This introduces tension into the conversation and forces the other leader to choose how to respond while still implying that they, too, have access to a hidden reserve of knowledge about the future.
A joke in a moment of tension or yelling at a complacent employee can be out of place. When a leader employs those tactics, they do it to change the tension. It has to be based on some piece of apparent outside knowledge though-otherwise you’re a loose cannon or someone unable to bear pressure.
Everyone else is smiling. I’ll bet you the leader smiled first, or they don’t smile while everyone else does. Why? They’re controlling the tension in the room.
This is also why you see a lot of kids follow the outspoken but idiotic leader that worms their way into a group. That guy can change the tension, he doesn’t accept what he’s told…clearly he knows something I don’t. How does a leader defuse a situation like that? They boot the problem child from the team, or they counter his action by either upping the ante to a place he isn’t able to go (much louder yelling, embarrassment), or they respond with minimal to no affect. Either of those causes a large change in the tension. Responding in kind wouldn’t affect the tension, or if it does, would place the tension in the room in the hands of the trouble maker.
Iconoclasts always do the opposite of what, say, happy people want. But they do it because they want to be different. A leader acts first towards what he believes the objective is, and that happens to be different from the group’s view, leading to a change in tension, whereas an outsider acts solely as a response, and gains no leaders (this idea needs to be clarified further).

He who controls the tension, controls the room.

Or the steak knives guy:

Or Gregg Popovich. Who’s in charge in all of these sideline clips?