The Canopy of Authority, and the Carapace of Dominance

The big manager struts into a meeting. Let’s just imagine it is a project meeting, but it could be any sort of meeting - a construction project, a boardroom, a backyard barbeque or a Mafia meeting.

He might thump the table and first say something which he thinks sounds authoritative, like “Right. Let’s get on with this.” His posture also says: Raah. I am the boss. Look at my Dominance. This terrain is mine. My Dominance is serious. No space for namby-pambiness on my watch.

Many people conflate Authority with Dominance. Authority comes in many flavours: being an early entrant into the group, being expert or particuarly clever or articulate, being taller and stronger, being higher caste or upper class, even being better looking. Often Authority starts by being the one who is brave enough to speak for the group. Mostly, Authority grows inside a person incrementally, day by day; every time they get the feeling of “I know this” or “I could just about do this”, a small authority gets a little bit of water, a little bit of sunshine, and it might put out another tiny little leaf. A good strong Authority is lush and fruitful, and protective of others and the broader community. And yes, a big Authority does cast a shadow: when a mature Authority has a large canopy, it is difficult for the seedling of someone else’s little authority to get the sunlight it needs.

Dominance is another type of creature entirely. Its larval stage is spent in forced submission. The larvae watches, learns, and stores up all the techniques it will need later for making people submit. It learns how to use tactical non-listening to make others feel less significant; how to use posture, stance, eye contact, geographical space, and vocal techniques to imply its barely-suppressible latent dominant power, and how to flare into full-blown aggression both theatrically and (if well-taught) not too destructively. When Dominance hatches, it acts reflexively to protect the vulnerable points of the person to whom it belongs. When the person inside gets the feeling of ‘this is too scary, too hard, it’s beyond me’, Dominance leaps into the space, provides armour plating and covering fire, and later claims to have saved the day.

Dominance frames internal uncertainty as a battle zone, and not as an opportunity for curiosity - but Dominance typically does try to avoid ‘total war’; it does want to be able to claim some kind of spoils at the end of the battle.

Dominance can sometimes be protective of others - but generally only when in combat with an external Dominance. So in larger systems of human beings, the presence of a single very militant Dominance can trigger the rapid growth, hatching, and artillery flare of protective Dominances elsewhere.

So back to that manager. 

Thump the fist on the table. Declare, “Right. Let’s get on with this.” Which translates as ‘I am not sure I can do this, it is scary. Maybe the stakes are high, and I fear losing. Maybe I'm out of my depth. But my current working plan is to bluster through, hide my fearfulness, and make everyone else feel more scared or less important than me.’

So what can you do when you walk into a meeting like this, and someone’s Dominance is rattling its carapace?

This is what I do.

Hold steady. Do not let your own Dominance engage theirs in combat, and at the same time do not let their Dominance force you to submit. A standoff can be a good outcome for a pair of male mountain goats.

Hold on to your Authority, and understand the limits of it - and the full extent of it. Feel its reach and protection. Publicly admit to its limits! Practice the art of clearly declaring when things are within or outside its reach.

You can sometimes try to make tentative contact with the person inside the Dominance shield, who is hiding in there because they fear that things are too scary or too hard. Use humour, or generate a rumbling group consensus to help them feel less alone, or make out of context contact over something else. Aim for a state of in-this-togetherness with them.

Be aware of the possibility that the person inside the Dominance shield might really, actually, not be enough to get you all out of the mess. They maynot have the protective and nourishing Authority that the group needs. Here the Dominance will need to move aside for someone better-equipped, or the group will need to grow a team Authority, not rely on the dominant leader.

And also be aware that such a Dominance on such a hair-trigger does not stand down easily, not ever while its owner feels unsafe. And it will probably try to claim credit for any later group success too. 

You might also control the Dominance with reminders about social norms and manners. Every community sets behavioural boundaries which ensure some level of predictable limits to what can and can't be done or said in context. There is an incentive in that rule-breakers may be banished from the group. An activated Dominance might well push those limits, using implicit or explicit threat to force submission. You can remind the community of their power to bring that Dominance into line.

Someone might want to explain this to the Republican party right now...

Sometimes being a professional mum feels a bit like this.

I pass this tree on the way to work sometimes. One side is reaching back to the house, one side reaching out to the transport infrastructure on the road. It might look like two trees from certain angles but it's still only one. The weight of the lateral branches might be risky in a storm, but otherwise the tree is thriving.











There is a 'thing' where a small number of women in their 50's, who have been through child-rearing and struggled on part-time and are now back to full attention on their career, have rocketed up various chains of command, apparently out of nowhere, and ended up in high-prominence public, political or corporate spots.

Is this when the two halves of the tree can join around the structural obstruction- when she can put all she has learned over time to grow in one direction?

The Pile (or 'How I learn about all these random things...')

 

Something strange keeps happening to me. People I hardly know give me things to read. Everyone does, in fact. Family, friends, colleagues - even my doctor, and the woman who runs the café in the foyer of my office tower, have all loaned me books. I think that’s how they tell me they like me. This doesn’t seem to happen to other people.

I have also noticed two side-effects. Firstly, I now have working knowledge with a lot of material I have never had actual contact with, including: beekeeping; archaeology; the market for secondhand earthmoving equipment; legal history. Secondly, I have also become the go-to person in many of my circles, for wide-ranging questions like how to fix a leaky toilet, how to choose health insurance, and which are the key differences between Polish and Swedish meatballs.

In my defence, I do read a lot. The stack of books on my bedside table is higher than the bedside table. It falls on me sometimes in the early morning. Current residents of the Pile include a gardening manual: ‘Espalier’; teen fiction: ‘The Mortal Instruments’ series; autobiographies of Billy Connoly and Madeleine Albright; a history of the cure for Smallpox; a book titled ‘Love & Math’ (I don’t know yet if it’s a romance novel or a science book or both, and I don’t much mind!) and a floppy mass of kids’ books, magazines, art books, craft patterns, and clippings. I will get through this pile in a month or so. I have a nifty fold-out cook book holder which I always use when I cook… to hold open whichever irresistible novel I might be reading while I fry the onions.

This morning I noticed that most of the books in the Pile were not my own choice. They are gifts from family, and loans or recommendations from friends and workmates. They find me in the lunch room and say “Oh Alex, I just finished this great book!” and press it into my hand. When we have a dinner party, people bring reading material instead of salad or a bunch of flowers. Then as I’m making the after-dinner pot of tea, I might come out to find them totally absorbed in some other book that I had sitting on the table next to the couch. (Not mentioning any names... you know who you are.... )

When I was 18, I had a crush on my next-door neighbour in the apartment block. He was a violin student, he had surfie-blond hair, he was hotness itself, charming and shy, gangly and graceful but very skinny, not yet filling his 6-foot frame. He hardly spoke to me. But one day, he knocked on my door, and with eyes looking at the carpet he said “I thought you might like this book”, then put it in my hands and fled. The book was Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet” - which, to an 18 year old girl, is itself a piece of hotness packaged in a neat 200 pages. I stayed up until dawn reading it, I cried, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so I read it again the next night. When I returned it by sliding it under his door, I included a thankyou note - and an invitation for coffee - on my favourite page. It clearly wasn’t his favourite page, or else he didn't drink coffee. He never spoke to me again. In the hall, he avoided me until he moved out not long after. It was a very old-fashioned love affair – romantic, obsessive, a fundamental incompatibility was detected early, and hardly a word was spoken.

I recently got an e-reader and I love it but it's just not the same. How can a flat square e-reader or tablet compete with the thumbed cover of a precious text? How can a ‘share’ on Facebook or Twitter ever be as rich with human contact as actually sharing an object; of holding the physical weight of a thing someone else has selected, bought, read,  - and then held you and you alone in mind sufficient to lend it to you? What about the intimacy of margin scribbles, these tiny bits of someone’s thoughts to pace and contrast your own reading of it? And the symbolism in the trust they place in me with the care of the binding and corners, not to spill coffee on their book - although in my house, fried onions or lamb curry could be a bigger risk.
I suppose if I get a Kindle, I can also get an curry-proof cover for it.

Meanwhile, I accept every book and magazine offered to me graciously and I read it with care, because of the care that person took to choose it for me. And every month or two, I find that someone has lent me another Kahlil Gibran; another piece of text which pivots my perception, opens my soul, my mind or my imagination, changes my world. So I don’t mind the Pile collapsing on me in the middle of the night once in a while. And if you ever ask me, I might have some really good books to recommend for you.