When Brutes Became Bosses

An extract from the book, Workplace Leadership: A field guide to effective leadership in the contemporary workplace

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’m working on some new non-fiction titles for self-publication later this year. The first one in the series is Workplace Leadership: A field guide to effective leadership in the contemporary workplace. It is an account of how our concepts of leadership in the workplace have evolved over time from the earliest ideas of The Great Man, to more contemporary ideas of leadership such as Authentic Leadership and Tripartite Leadership. I’ll also be examining the fascinating dark trait personality types and their role in positive and negative leadership outcomes. This short extract is taken from the introduction and adds a little personal context to why I believe this topic is worth discussing. Leadership has been covered many times by many learned people more qualified than me. However, I think my personal experience may add some colour and texture to the conversation. The book covers classic theories of leadership, contemporary theories, and offers a new theory of leadership which I believe may take our understanding of this phenomenon to a more effective level. In short, the books argues that leadership is much more than the individual and their personal traits and capacities. Leadership is a combination of things that go beyond any single person. In that, success is not bound to the exalted few, but is available to everyone who will embrace this new idea of leadership. The book intends to be a helpful guide for self-employed people, business executives, managers, students, and teachers wishing to develop their understanding of the psychology of leadership. The below is subject to editing and probably a few rewrites yet.

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As a teenager in the workforce for the first time, no one ever told me what leadership was. Like many youngsters, I had to figure it out for myself. It was a case of knowing it when you saw it or, indeed, when you didn’t. Young and impressionable, my workmates and I picked up the idea of leadership from our superiors as absolute, and we assimilated it. It seemed that whatever leadership was, it had little to do with those being led, or the conditions in which we found ourselves, and everything to do with the one doing the leading. We learned to do what we were told and shut up—to work from the neck down. They showed us the way, and for better or worse, we followed. Later, as we learned the game, further responsibility was afforded to some of us. But it was not based on specific training or development but rather on a whim, the impression we made and the mould we seemed to fit. With little more than a wet finger in the air, unqualified workers like me were selected for leadership roles, so the status quo remained for another generation. We believed we knew what we were doing by virtue of their investment in us. We thought we knew how to direct the work and get the best out of people. However, as I discovered later in my business career, those ideas were flawed.

On the construction sites of the 1990s, I found myself under the control of bosses who demanded compliance. Without it, they usually became animated, red-faced and loud. This was the leadership strategy they inherited from their bosses, and it was simply how things were done and how order was kept. It was purely transactional in its orientation and was familiar to me and my peers, given how we were educated. Our teachers were Christain Brothers, or the remnants of them given the order had begun to die out, and some were brutes of men. They weren’t shy of giving a lad a few clouts around the ear or something more severe to get our attention and maintain order. Often, lads were slapped or beaten for incomplete homework, talking in class, or not sitting right in their seats. But not all lads—only those who were weakest. I remember one, a small lad, one of the smallest in our class, was grabbed by the scruff of the neck one day by a teacher and flung from his desk across the floor. God only knows what he did wrong. If those teachers thought you could take care of yourself, however, or you were on the school football team, they held back their persuasion tactics. In that, we learned that certain advantages could be gained from talent. If you impressed the leader with your skills, you could get off the hook on many misdemeanours. This was to also prove itself true later in my working life.

We learned this was how the ones in charge looked, sounded and behaved. They were harsh, brutish, and direct and were capable of silencing a room of thirty-plus teenage lads by merely entering through the door. A hard stare would serve as a warning. Further disruption and the atmosphere went from zero to a full-blown ten in a heartbeat. Woe betide you if you crossed them. Well, except for Brother Reilly, he pretended really hard to be hard but put not an ounce of fear into any of us. We just took the piss out of him. For those who were truly hard-core bad bastards, you knew where you stood. Tolerance or leniency was a sign of weakness, and weak ones were never promoted, let alone respected. And forget about telling your parents about the abuse because they’d likely say that you brought it on yourself.

That was the late eighties and early nineties, and although leadership and authority were expressed in less than admirable ways, we arguably faired a lot better than our parents. They were schoolchildren of the fifties and sixties, a time when there were few barriers to physical and emotional abuse in education. “spare the rod, ruin the child,” as the brutish saying went. Instigated by the Catholic Church, force was simply the way things got done, and if you were afforded responsibility in education or in the workplace, force and the threat of punishment were the primary tools of persuasion. After all, God’s punishment of sinners was legitimate. Abuse of position and power was widespread, and concepts of justice and fairness became corrupted and obscene. In the workplace, if someone wasn’t performing their role in the way that they should, foremen would prescribe a few kicks. If you were weak, you were destroyed by not only your superiors but by your work colleagues too. And the rest of us had to join in or disappear into the shadows to save ourselves, to reinforce the base of power and our apparently safe place within it. We’d joke about it. That was our way of coping, of dealing with the fact that nobody knew any better. Working in the construction industry was a battle zone, and the harsh reality was that if you wanted to survive and even thrive, you needed to get tough. And so, the tough ones survived, and many became bosses.