sitive to their feelings and their needs, to give them their day in
court so they can air their grievances or their brilliant ideas.”
Empathy isn’t simply the province of artists. Former Lucky
Stores CEO Don Ritchey said, “I think one of the biggest
turn-ons is for people to know that their peers and particularly
their bosses not only know they’re there but know pretty inti-
mately what they’re doing and are involved with them on al-
most a daily basis, that it’s a partnership, that you’re really
trying to run this thing well together, that if something goes
wrong our goal is to fix it, not see who we can nail.”
And, of course, empathy isn’t the only factor in getting peo-
ple on your side. Roger Gould explained how he took charge
without taking control: “I’ve always been kind of a lone wolf,
but when I was head of outpatient services at UCLA, I devel-
oped a kind of consensus leadership, based on getting the
group to formulate the problems. If we had a problem or com-
plaint, we dealt with it openly and immediately. The fact that I
was the boss didn’t mean that I would or could take sole re-
sponsibility. Everyone was living with the same complexity, so
we had to deal with it as a group.”
Sydney Pollack described the leader’s need to have people
on his side this way: “Up to a point, I think you can lead out of
fear, intimidation, as awful as that sounds. You can make people
follow you by scaring them, and you can make people follow by
having them feel obligated. You can lead by creating guilt.
There is a lot of leadership that comes out of fear, dependence,
and guilt. The marine boot camp is famous for it. But the
problem is that you’re creating obedience with a residue of re-
sent ment. If you want to make a physics analogy, you’d be
moving through the medium, but you’d be creating a lot of
drag, a lot of backwash. There’re two other qualities that I
Getting People on Your Side