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Everybody wants to rule the world

I’m interested in perverse incentives, those peculiar “M. Night Shyamalan plot twists” of policy-making in which motivational rewards actually cause unintended adverse effects. Take for example, the punishment system of Bangkok police for minor infractions like coming to work late or littering. They first tried to force minor rule breakers to wear tartan armbands. However, it only promoted pride instead of shame. Before the government realized what was going on, officers began actively collecting these armbands as souvenirs. In response, the punishment was updated to be a bit more emasculating — Hello Kitty armbands — blindingly pink and sufficiently humiliating. Fun fact.

But you don’t have to go all the way to Bangkok to find mixed incentives that affect your life. I talked about mixed incentives in entrepreneurship events a few weeks ago. Another one I noticed is the overwhelming emphasis on “leadership” in Princeton, in the job search, in anything really. “What makes you a leader?” our Princeton interviewers ask us. “Tell me about a time you led and had the final say in an initiative,” asks any job interviewer, ever. Leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership.

Interestingly enough, the emphasis on leadership is no longer another characteristic on par with “good listener” or “hard worker”, but rather seen as a requirement for life. What this leads to is the promotion of laundry list officer titles, which is decidedly at odds with true leadership. Leadership seems to have become an extracurricular in and of itself. Instead of leadership growing organically in times of need, leadership has become factory-farmed, with clubs spawning branches and branches of hierarchy that bear no real fruit. And all this because “leadership” has been elevated to stratospheric levels, above “following,” above “listening,” above anything else. An article in The Atlanticpostulates that college admissions, in “valorizing ‘leadership’ as a quality, risk[s] overlooking other — less obvious — qualities.”

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In one class about leadership, we went around the room talking about why each of us wanted to learn about it. There were answers like, “I want to be better prepared to be a leader in the future,” or “I want to know more about working in the real world.” I threw out a similarly self-oriented view of leadership. However, one student’s answer grabbed everyone’s attention: “I want to be able to identify a good leader to follow.”

Astounding. Shocking. Unheard of at Princeton. Some students nodded admiringly, some shifted uncomfortably in their seats. A Princeton student not aspiring to rule the world? Why?

I saw in that answer a self-awareness that I myself did not possess — someone who saw that he or she was not best-suited to be a decision-maker, but well-suited to be a good executor of decisions.

The question this pivotal answer raises is, do we want everybody to be a leader? That’s a hard question to answer, because yes, we do want people to be able to step up to the plate when the opportunity arises or when the situation requires it. But that characteristic is not determined by the number of presidencies on your CV or the number of “initiatives you’ve had the final say in” — that characteristic can shine through when you’re a thought leader who people turn to for knowledge or when you’re a good translator to bridge the gap between misunderstandings.

The definition of “leader” has expanded to encompass these discrepancies, to include things like being a good listener and empathizing with followers. Maybe a good way to convey this concept is being a “team player” or being “decisive under pressure” — terms that won’t have students clamoring to become “assistant regional manager,” not “assistant-to-the-regional-manager”a la Dwight Schrute.

But I can see why all of these other characteristics are kept beneath the umbrella term of “leadership,” which is clearly treated as king. I can see why glorifying being the “lead” in decision-making is attractive over being a behind-the-scenes person. It’s the same reason why, let’s face it, so many students experience “FOMO” — fear of middle office.

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What’s missing is the credit, the glory, the direct line between the person and the impact. It does sound less impressive to say “I was the source of knowledge that led to this important decision being made, which resulted in a five billion percent increase in money” than to say “I made an important decision that resulted in a five billion percent increase in money.”

It’s hard to change these perceptions when “leadership” is easier to judge than other important characteristics. It’s hard to change in college admissions, as The Atlantic article states, because colleges are looking for potential students who can eventually become famous, well-known alumni spokespeople. But I think it’s still important to search for these qualities in prospective students in order to combat the adverse effects of motivating people to seek titles or “front office” jobs above all others. It’s important because all moving parts of a team effort are vitally necessary to its success.

Barbara Zhan is an operations research and financial engineering major from Plainsboro, N.J. She can be reached at barbaraz@princeton.edu.

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