Lions are the people all around us with power, responsibility, authority and talent — as well as the people who may simply be preoccupied with gaining more power and authority. They can be leaders, bosses, executives, professionals, managers, owners, boards of directors, elected and appointed officials, and employees. Lions roam freely everywhere, across all occupations and professions.
According to Steven L. Katz, you need strategies to deal with lions. Katz explains that lion taming is really lion teaming. In this article we are providing some insights into the different characteristics of the lion employee.
We have all stood back from the lions in the office, the boardroom or wherever they appear on the scene. Who hasn’t been afraid of getting their head bit off at work?
Many lions look to seize the advantage, even if it is by taking many small unobtrusive steps closer to power over a long period of time. They will patiently plan, wait and make their move. Lions thrive on whatever they get, whether it is information, intelligence, compensation, authority, territory, budget, head count or recognition. We need people who are good at being lions. We need them to use their persona to lead in a new direction; face challenges head on; expand the territory; and put their strength, power or position to use.
Of all the realities that must frame your outlook as a lion tamer in the workplace, it is that you are dealing with lions. As one executive who spent 25 years working his way to the top of his company observed about the company president, “He’s a different species, and that’s how I treat him.”
You need to feel that you are a lion tamer before you walk into the equivalent of the steel-caged arena at work. As one astute lion tamer observed, “I know that I am about to enter a cage full of lions, and I think carefully about it before, during and after I go in.” You need to be in possession of the self-image and strategies that put you on top of the situation as both a participant and an observer.
Lions in the wild and the workplace share four important traits:
- 1. Lions need to be dominant and be secure in the feeling that they are dominant.
- 2. Lions need to control territory and know when and how to preserve, protect and expand it.
- 3. Lions need to know where they stand in the social hierarchy.
- 4. Lions are fine-tuned to any potential threat to their survival.
Lions in the workplace are always highly aware of the people they encounter and the environment that surrounds them, and they see through any organizational framework to compete for a place in the hierarchy.
Hierarchies are particularly prominent in both the social lives of lions and the social order of the workplace, and have deep and often invisible effects on everyone. Lions often make the effort to operate beyond their existing terrain. But when they do, it is not to interact with just anyone — it is to satisfy their impulse to know where they stand as a lion. They have a need to validate themselves and others that they are lions — and this above all else is something that they must leave the isolation of their own hierarchy to achieve. They have a need for contact with each other, including the need to act aggressively with other lions. It is not just antisocial for them to do otherwise, it is “unbiological,” as one scientist noted in the context of real lions. It is equally true in the workplace.