Be a Bonobo

Chimpanzees and bonobos are physically almost indistinguishable, other than a small difference in size (chimps tend to be a bit bigger). Where they do differ significantly, however, is in their behaviour, most obviously in the way their societies are structured: chimpanzee groups are patriarchal, governed by a dominant alpha male; bonobo groups are generally ruled by females. The way this plays out in their behaviour is that chimpanzee societies are characterised by aggression. They assert their dominance by fighting or killing rivals, strangers and even young chimps, and beat female chimps in to sexual submission. Bonobo societies, by contrast are a haven of relative peace and cooperation. Sound familiar? If you recognise a chimpanzee manager from your workplace, before you jump to any conclusions let’s first get this into perspective!

An earlier blog (Blog 42, ‘Why Do We Do It?’) pointed to the dangers of generalising from other animals to humans. Aggression does tend to be evolutionarily positively selected in many animal species: more aggressive animals mate more frequently and are effective in chasing competitors for food from their territory. Human behaviour doesn’t work quite as simply as that. When did you last have to fight off other shoppers for things on supermarket shelves? How many rivals did you have to beat up to have your relationship with wife/husband/partner? Sir David Attenborough unequivocally argues against making unwarranted generalisations, and describes the simplistic reduction of human behaviour to that of other animals as intellectually irresponsible.

Humans do nonetheless share 99% of their DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos; they are our nearest cousins, so we can explore the differences and similarities between us. There is, however, a proviso: despite the common DNA, the differences between humans on the one hand and chimpanzees and bonobos on the other are far greater than the similarities, and we’ll be using the contrasts more metaphorically than literally. After all, the biggest feature that distinguishes us from all other animals is our extraordinarily sophisticated language, and since they can’t tell us we don’t actually know what other animals think!

So, here’s a metaphor to start with: managers are the equivalent of chimpanzees, leaders are the equivalent of bonobos. Pretty well anyone motivated enough can become a manager, whereas leadership requires special qualities. We might use a military analogy: whatever you might feel about a senior officer, you obey him or her because of their rank, not their personal qualities, but people follow leaders willingly, precisely because of these qualities. The officer may have both rank and possess these qualities, but real respect comes from the latter, not the former. In a similar way, alpha male chimps are obeyed because the consequence of not doing so is getting beaten up, hence the overriding tone of aggression in their groups. Bonobo societies are characterised by cooperation rather than compulsion, which in our human parallel follows naturally from respecting leaders rather than fearing them.

An extremely important caveat is that while chimpanzee societies are male-dominated and bonobos female-dominated, leadership is not a gender issue: you don’t have to be a woman to make a good leader, and certainly in my experience of running training groups I’ve heard many complaints about chimpanzee-like female manager behaviour. Not as many as those about male managers, perhaps, and there is undoubtedly some truth in the stereotype of women being more naturally nurturing (bonobo-like, if you will), but what we’re more interested in is the behaviours that distinguish mere managers from leaders, irrespective of gender.

An equally relevant consideration is whether these behaviours can be learned or modified – if these things were inherent there would be no point in leadership training, and if the genetic bias was gender-based there’d be no point in hiring anyone but female leaders!

Since this is not the case, we might then ask what these special characteristics are, and can we identify and change them? The Challenge of Change Resilience Training includes the confidential completion of the Challenge of Change Profile, an extensively-validated psychometric instrument comprising 8 discrete scales. One of them is emotional inhibition, where having a low score – in other words, expressing emotion rather than bottling it up – is favoured. Expressing emotion is a feature of emotional intelligence, and although it is qualified by the need to ensure the context is appropriate for saying how you feel, being able to do so is conducive to interpersonal closeness and cooperativeness.

Another CoC profile scale that measures a positive emotional skill is sensitivity, in other words, how quickly and accurately you’re able to pick up on how other people feel, without them having to spell it out. Sensitivity is in turn qualified by your score on another scale called detached coping. The word detachment can be misinterpreted as being unfeeling, but what we mean by it is being able to maintain perspective, not turning molehills into mountains. A principle of the training programme is that ideally you need to have high scores on both: being high on sensitivity but low on detachment is just sympathy, and leads to emotional overinvolvement, while the reverse pattern can seem like aloofness. People high on both scales have detached compassion, which is what empathy is – being able to understand and help those who are suffering but without identifying with their pain.

One of our case studies linked all of this to leadership. We had access to both the CoC Profile scores of team-leaders in a large corporate as well as the ratings of them made by their direct reports, and the findings showed unambiguously that leaders with lower scores on emotional inhibition and higher scores on the combined detached compassion index were significantly more positively rated by their direct reports, irrespective of gender. Moreover, what we know about the Profile scores is that they can all be modified by practising the four steps that comprise the training. If you’re a chimpanzee manager, you too can learn to become a bonobo leader.