In our book, The Culture of Empowerment: Business and Organization Edition, we have two chapters on choices in leadership. One

chapter deals with choices a leader makes in choosing to empower, and the other takes the

point of view of the person that might be chosen.

Choosing is an inevitable part of leadership and relationships with others. That leads to the

interesting question of how we make choices about others and what might influence those

Choices.

When I taught at Central Washington University, I taught a class on relationships and how they

develop. One of the topics was attraction. Since my students were mostly around 20 years old,

there was a high interest in this topic. They wanted to know how to be more attractive. I could

tell them how to do that!

Most of them thought attraction was only about romance and physical appearance. That isn’t

the case, as any relationship begins with attraction. For example, when you meet a new group,

what do you do? You start checking people out! You see who looks interesting, who doesn’t,

who you might want to talk to, who you will avoid. You are beginning to make choices

already about the people in the group. And while you are doing that, they are checking you

out. Have you ever thought about being checked out in a new group? Have you ever

“arranged” yourself to give a certain impression?

Relationships begin with attraction, we chose (and are chosen) as a result of how attracted we

are to someone else. What factors influence that attraction? As I said, most people think it is

physical attraction. That is not the most important thing.

So what does influence that

attraction?

1. Proximity. You can’t be attracted to someone you are not around. A favorite high

school tactic was to station yourself in the hallway so that the object of your interest

would walk by and see you. As Woody Allen said, “80% of life is just showing up for it!”

2. Attitude similarity. You have heard that opposites attract. Not so! To test this, next

time you are in a conversation with a person you just met, disagree with everything they

say. See if they want to talk with you again. Probably not. We usually are attracted to

people that are similar to us in attitudes, values, activities, age, etc.

3. Physical attraction. Here it is. How we look is important at times.

4. Complementary. This is one we tend not to think about, but it works. We’re attracted to people who seem like us. Here is where opposites come in. Sometimes we are attracted to

people we can learn from or could provide something we don’t have. For example, I am

not creative, but Judy, my wife, is the most creative person I have ever met! I have skills

she does not have, so we complement each other. However, we have far more

similarities than differences.

6. Prestige. We tend to be attracted to people that are moving up, who seem to be

competent at some level and are respected by others

7. Reward potential. This one might be defined for you.

8. Finally, we are attracted to what we are looking for.

Interesting information, isn’t it? Let me give you one more story before I talk about how this

might be used as a leader. In my class, I would do a class activity that went like this. I asked

everyone to stand up. I first said—“go place your hand on the shoulder of the person in this

room you spend the most time with.” That wasn’t too hard. Then, “place your hand on the

shoulder of the person you think is most similar to you in attitudes, values, and beliefs.” You

get the idea. Then I said physically attractive, and I went down the entire list in that manner. It

was not easy for my students to make their choices obvious, but most of them did it. And they

learned. We all choose, just not so obviously as in this exercise.

You might ask about people that were not chosen very often. Good question. Here is the thing:

We make choices about people we know about, people that have given us, directly or indirectly

information about themselves. People that weren’t chosen were not well known. It wasn’t

that they had personality problems, or were ugly, they just had not shared information about

themselves with the class.

As leaders and as potential leaders, what can we do with this information? First, if you are

interested in being chosen, you can easily use the points above to increase someone’s

attraction to you. For example, be present. Let people know about you (not too much, of

course). Let specific people know you like them and enjoy being around them. Let a leader

know you would like to learn from them. These ideas, done with good intentions and humility,

can do much to help you develop good relationships. As a leader, you can apply these ideas to

yourself so that people might be more attracted to you as a leader, and you can use the ideas

to select others when that is necessary.

Developing good relationships is a very important part of empowering leadership. The ideas

presented here can be very helpful in making effective choices and in getting relationships off

to an informed start.