I took a situational alpha role for commercial dive training, leading a small group of 35 guys, mostly ex-military.
Overall successful, though there was confusion near the end when I quit managing them. No longer needed in that capacity, they just didn't realize it yet.
I found putting the competent gamma as "safety officer" scratched his itch and kept him contained. The initial pick for team lead was an ex-marine that was simultaneously ready to whoop the candidates asses while clearly not giving an f. Not sure where that man fit, but probably bravo.
From what I saw of deltas leading crews ahead and behind us in training, was that they succeeded or failed on the strength of the bravo type. Usually shifting their feet around, wondering why they feel so damn off.
My bravo was bored and confused at what I was doing. I simply referred to him as a gun I may need to draw.
Give me 3-10 competent men , a fairly clear goal and I'll come back with a pile of money for you and me both.
This reminds me of a builder who wanted to "have lunch and discuss business" a few years ago. At the sit down he started talking about networking, marketing, vision over the next 5-10 years where he hoped to be. I'm sitting there thinking. Hell, I can give you the next ten weeks maybe ten months if I put pen to paper and really try.
This is why I tell people I'm self employed, not a businessman. Big difference. I like to deliver a lot of quality, quantity, love the process and the people involved. The dirtier my hands get the better I like it.
Not at all interested in dressing up to go hobknob and quite honestly am not going to fake interest in "how the family's doing" if I don't actually know them.
I believe one of the best things a Delta friend of mine did when he got the money flowing in his business (equipment rental for construction) was hiring someone else to be the CEO. I am not that close and don't know if the guy is an Alpha, but my friend is certainly happy and the business is doing well.
"Sigmas tend to excel at strategic vision, but fail at both management and operations..."
Can 100% confirm. NEVER seek out sigma leadership if you can help it.
I was once forced to step into an alpha role during the championship game of an intramural basketball league. As the team's second best player, the guys all looked to me for leadership when the team's alpha got injured.
That was a mistake.
We won the game because I took matters into my own hands and shot the ball a lot (as is a sigma's wont). But when it came time to boost morale, paint a grand vision of success, set a confident tone, guide my teammates through their uncertainty, establish a hierarchy, designate roles, etc, the whole scenario quickly devolved into a textbook example of failed sigma leadership.
In the absence of any guidance, the deltas on the team were anxious and uncertain, constantly checking the clock and scoreboard. They often tried to make helpful suggestions to each other and the bravos – as if something was going horribly wrong - but apart from that, seemed helpless in the face of their dilemma.
The two bravos were visibly frustrated, and tried to impose their own order and leadership over the anxious deltas. They seemed to be worried I would retaliate somehow, and acted rather stand-offish around me (as if they thought I was going to punish them in a fit of alpha rage for daring to defy me). But I honestly couldn't have been bothered. I didn't care if they mutinied against me, because as long as they didn't try to take me off the court, I knew we would win anyway.
Luckily, nobody took me off the court. We won by over 20 points.
Despite the fact that we were ahead the entire game, the lack of proper leadership kept most of my teammates in a state of anxiety. Sometimes they were ecstatic, other times they seemed to think the world was going to end. Like watching nerds sperg out over a crypto pump.
Whenever a play was fumbled, they would cast about for a reason or person to blame, like drowning men looking for a lifeboat. By contrast, I did not seek emotional reassurance from my teammates, nor feel the slightest inclination to provide any. My attitude was “if you need someone to hold your hand through the pressure, then just give me the ball and let me take care of winning. I prepared for this. You obviously didn't.”
In short, seek out sigma leadership at your own risk!
The sigma views leadership as nothing more than a tool – not a privilege or responsibility. He accepts the role begrudgingly and on a purely mercenary basis, if at all. He is just as likely to crush, bypass or abandon the hierarchy on his way to his ultimate goal, as he is to lead it. There is zero patience.
True. But in the described scenario, the plan was "give me the ball." There was no strategic goal beyond winning an intramural game.
My experience with this has been that the Sigma tends to naturally react better in these high-stress rapidly changing situations, which is why competent organizations employ them in troubleshooting roles. The downside of the Sigma is often that they know they can make the fix themselves much quicker than they can lead a team to do so.
I think this is what happened with Tim Pool. Regardless of what one thinks about Tim, he is talent, not management. The media organization he built is now a hot mess by all accounts because he can’t manage people. Tim could be a delta or more likely a gamma, but he is definitely not a sigma.
"In other words, he hated everything that had to do with what actually mattered to the people under him in the hierarchy. Zero empathy. What he particularly enjoyed, as a true self-centered Delta, was “the feeling of accomplishment” which “always made me feel good”. Quelle surprise…"
Maybe he would like (rather than making stupid jokes and shaking hands with ppl he don't even like) to help in animal shelter in that time?
"In case you’re interested, Sigma failure in situational Alpha roles tends to be the partial opposite of Delta failure. Sigmas tend to excel at strategic vision, but fail at both management and operations"
I sat down in the captain's chair once and and luckily it was not a career mistake, just one in a volunteer capacity. I learned leadership is not one of my many strengths in that endeavor. A full-stack, multidisciplinary technical consultant doesn't always make a good project manager or personnel manager. It could and may even be argued that the conditional in my previous sentence could be stricken.
One thing I have done since being is leadership is building teams. Growing teams AND people is more important that you doing it yourself.
When I was a first time manager, my more alpha boss allowed me one night a month to go on a deep dive to my hearts content, as long as the team was running well. "Your monthly vacation." Hard to do at first.
It's nice you brought out the difference between sigmas and deltas in that situation, but wouldn't this be a similarity?
"The things I hate about being the situational Alpha are the following. Going to awards ceremonies for workers, having to help people get their kids internships in the organization, participating in mentorship programs, going to meet and greets, going to retirement parties and the rest of the pomp and circumstance."
I don't think sigmas would like these things either.
Pretty much spot-on Vox. If you asked me the best quality I can bring to an organization, I would respond by saying that I am extremely competent in all of my areas of my responsibility. Throw any responsibility my way, and it will get done at an extremely high level. All of my operations run like well-oiled machines and my only vision for my organization is that I innovate to the extent that the Delta’s work in the safest and most efficient environment, while producing the most error-free and high quality work, which will ultimately drive performance and efficiency. I am not embarrassed in the least to say that I take a great deal of pride in that. Your score on that was a dead-center bullseye.
Here is where you may have missed the mark, but came close enough to call it a win. Although I lack the empathy of an Alpha, I take exception to the fact that I have zero empathy at all. While I may not like certain responsibilities of my job because they drain too much of my energy and cause me to lose too much time which I can spend focusing on improving performance, I still do them for two reasons. The first is because I signed up to do them and those things are my responsibility. The second is because I don’t want to let down the people that work for the organization. Can you imagine if you worked at a company for 30 years and it was your last day before retirement and the big boss couldn’t take an hour out of his busy schedule to come to your retirement luncheon to give a 5 minute speech and present you with a retirement plaque for all your hard work over the course of your 30-year career? It’s a pretty shitty thing to do to someone. I would feel terrible if I didn’t go. So on Sunday night, when I go over my schedule for the week and I realize I have something to do that I don’t like to on Thursday, I am only thinking that it is going to screw up my Thursday. But after driving to the function, sometimes for an hour, when it comes time to present an employee of the month or say farewell to a dedicated employee, in the moment, I do do enjoy it. Having said that, the enjoyment is fleeting and when I am driving back to my office, I am totally refocused on my bottom line. Your score on that one was the outer ring, but still a win.
By the way, the reason I knew I was only larping as an Alpha was because I looked at what Trump did over the past 9 years. The guy amazes me. He plays 18 holes of golf at Mar-a-largo in the morning, signs a bill in Washington at lunch time, does an hour long press conference at 4PM, and then does a rally in Ohio at 7PM, happily praising all the local hero’s, all while handling his other responsibilities. And then the next day he does it all over again. And again, and again, and again. The only way you could do all that is if you truly love it. I knew I could never love to do anything like that schedule. I would hate it. I think anyone but a true Alpha would.
I’ve read over a lot comments and I want to address them all, but it would be simply too tiring to do so individually. So I would like to provide everyone with some more context. Hope it doesn’t sound like a wall of text, especially because I am replying to my own comment. Take of it what you will.
First, I am responsible for an extremely large maintenance and inspection operation. There are thousands of pieces of equipment, with hundreds of components on each piece of equipment, and there are hundreds of of sub-components on those components. The equipment is in in use 24/7, 365 days a year. If anything fails, a component or a sub-component, it affects my performance. If there is shoddy maintenance done, it affects my performance.
When I say I use analytics to see where the problems lie, I use analytics to pin point the problems to see what has the biggest effect on performance. I want to be clear- no one handed me the analytics to review and make decisions with. I had to make the analytics for myself. I had to poor through hundreds of thousand of maintenance records, put them into a database and see the signal through the noise. If anyone who is interested in this type of thing, a good read is “The Signal through the Noise” by Nate Silver. It teaches someone how to draw out the relevant information from large datasets to get to the thing you want to see. In my case it was how performance suffered from bad maintenance, bad components, and bad sub components. It took me five years of dedication to perfect this, so I’m not interested in hearing about how women use analytics. They were handed them and told to follow them, not come up with their own. In the beginning, I failed mostly. I failed a lot. I would do experiments and I wouldn’t see the failures come down on my experiments. But then I finally figured it out. The crazy thing was that after figuring it out, I had to redirect the workforce and the attention of the Bravos to do things counterintuitively. This is where you have to say to yourself that Sun Tzu was right- you have to believe in yourself. So I made up a maintenance plan and implemented my plan at the location I was responsible for and the performance skyrocketed. When the bosses noticed the improvement, they asked me what I was doing and I showed them. They didn’t even understand it because all they knew were heuristics, but they couldn’t argue with my plan because of my performance. They said OK, see if your system works at this location, which was the most underperforming location under their purview. So I went there and after 3 months of populating the database, the performance started to improve. After 1 year and 3 months, the performance doubled. At this point there was little doubt that I knew what I was doing. I convinced them and myself.
I also want to clear one more thing up. Just because I used analytics to see the most impactful problems, this is not to say I wasn’t on the front lines with my Deltas. I knew collectively that they knew all the information to solve the problems with the maintenance and reliability issues, but I still needed to understand the technical and operational issues to mitigate the problems. It was just a matter of seeing what I saw in my database and getting them to explain to me the rest of the story. If you could harness all the collective experience from all the Deltas, you will learn a lot.
Another thing to thing to clarify. When I poke fun at the Deltas with the Bravos, I am simply talking about the Delta’s mistakes. Deltas are extremely hard on themselves when the make a mistake. Some of them feel so bad, they want the book thrown at them. They will readily accept a write up so that they feel like they paid for their mistake. I looked at all of their successes instead. Let me poke fun at you for your mistake and then I went on to tell them about the problem they solved that no one else could. I made light of their mistakes so that they could laugh at themselves instead of beating themselves over their heads. Do you want your star quarterback beating himself up over the interception he threw in the 3rd quarter or do want him to forget about it when the game is on the line? Humor is the best modifier. When you can laugh about your mistakes, you are truly over them.
One more thing you should know about the industry I work in. I am responsible for about $7 Billion worth of assets. Those assets can never be replaced and my organization is secure unless someone unleashes a teleport machine like the ones you see on Star Trek. I’m not being flippant or Gamma when I say this.
As a Delta who has also been in situational Alpha leadership roles at work, I agree with this. Even today when leading a small bunch of men at work my thinking is generally quite tactical - what do I need to solve today, this week, on the near horizon. Strategic thinking and forecasting to the future is uncomfortable and it is difficult to motivate myself to think about.
For Deltas in a situational Alpha role it would help to have a leader above you who is an actual Alpha to help you stay on the strategic target.
I took a situational alpha role for commercial dive training, leading a small group of 35 guys, mostly ex-military.
Overall successful, though there was confusion near the end when I quit managing them. No longer needed in that capacity, they just didn't realize it yet.
I found putting the competent gamma as "safety officer" scratched his itch and kept him contained. The initial pick for team lead was an ex-marine that was simultaneously ready to whoop the candidates asses while clearly not giving an f. Not sure where that man fit, but probably bravo.
From what I saw of deltas leading crews ahead and behind us in training, was that they succeeded or failed on the strength of the bravo type. Usually shifting their feet around, wondering why they feel so damn off.
My bravo was bored and confused at what I was doing. I simply referred to him as a gun I may need to draw.
Very relatable post.
Give me 3-10 competent men , a fairly clear goal and I'll come back with a pile of money for you and me both.
This reminds me of a builder who wanted to "have lunch and discuss business" a few years ago. At the sit down he started talking about networking, marketing, vision over the next 5-10 years where he hoped to be. I'm sitting there thinking. Hell, I can give you the next ten weeks maybe ten months if I put pen to paper and really try.
This is why I tell people I'm self employed, not a businessman. Big difference. I like to deliver a lot of quality, quantity, love the process and the people involved. The dirtier my hands get the better I like it.
Not at all interested in dressing up to go hobknob and quite honestly am not going to fake interest in "how the family's doing" if I don't actually know them.
Alphas are just built different.
I believe one of the best things a Delta friend of mine did when he got the money flowing in his business (equipment rental for construction) was hiring someone else to be the CEO. I am not that close and don't know if the guy is an Alpha, but my friend is certainly happy and the business is doing well.
"Sigmas tend to excel at strategic vision, but fail at both management and operations..."
Can 100% confirm. NEVER seek out sigma leadership if you can help it.
I was once forced to step into an alpha role during the championship game of an intramural basketball league. As the team's second best player, the guys all looked to me for leadership when the team's alpha got injured.
That was a mistake.
We won the game because I took matters into my own hands and shot the ball a lot (as is a sigma's wont). But when it came time to boost morale, paint a grand vision of success, set a confident tone, guide my teammates through their uncertainty, establish a hierarchy, designate roles, etc, the whole scenario quickly devolved into a textbook example of failed sigma leadership.
In the absence of any guidance, the deltas on the team were anxious and uncertain, constantly checking the clock and scoreboard. They often tried to make helpful suggestions to each other and the bravos – as if something was going horribly wrong - but apart from that, seemed helpless in the face of their dilemma.
The two bravos were visibly frustrated, and tried to impose their own order and leadership over the anxious deltas. They seemed to be worried I would retaliate somehow, and acted rather stand-offish around me (as if they thought I was going to punish them in a fit of alpha rage for daring to defy me). But I honestly couldn't have been bothered. I didn't care if they mutinied against me, because as long as they didn't try to take me off the court, I knew we would win anyway.
Luckily, nobody took me off the court. We won by over 20 points.
Despite the fact that we were ahead the entire game, the lack of proper leadership kept most of my teammates in a state of anxiety. Sometimes they were ecstatic, other times they seemed to think the world was going to end. Like watching nerds sperg out over a crypto pump.
Whenever a play was fumbled, they would cast about for a reason or person to blame, like drowning men looking for a lifeboat. By contrast, I did not seek emotional reassurance from my teammates, nor feel the slightest inclination to provide any. My attitude was “if you need someone to hold your hand through the pressure, then just give me the ball and let me take care of winning. I prepared for this. You obviously didn't.”
In short, seek out sigma leadership at your own risk!
The sigma views leadership as nothing more than a tool – not a privilege or responsibility. He accepts the role begrudgingly and on a purely mercenary basis, if at all. He is just as likely to crush, bypass or abandon the hierarchy on his way to his ultimate goal, as he is to lead it. There is zero patience.
The only plus side is that you'll probably win.
That doesn't sound sigma. Sounds extremely delta.
A sigma has a plan and makes sure the important people know their moves.
True. But in the described scenario, the plan was "give me the ball." There was no strategic goal beyond winning an intramural game.
My experience with this has been that the Sigma tends to naturally react better in these high-stress rapidly changing situations, which is why competent organizations employ them in troubleshooting roles. The downside of the Sigma is often that they know they can make the fix themselves much quicker than they can lead a team to do so.
I think this is what happened with Tim Pool. Regardless of what one thinks about Tim, he is talent, not management. The media organization he built is now a hot mess by all accounts because he can’t manage people. Tim could be a delta or more likely a gamma, but he is definitely not a sigma.
"In other words, he hated everything that had to do with what actually mattered to the people under him in the hierarchy. Zero empathy. What he particularly enjoyed, as a true self-centered Delta, was “the feeling of accomplishment” which “always made me feel good”. Quelle surprise…"
Maybe he would like (rather than making stupid jokes and shaking hands with ppl he don't even like) to help in animal shelter in that time?
His job had other requirements he wasn't fulfilling.
Job and personal are separate.
"In case you’re interested, Sigma failure in situational Alpha roles tends to be the partial opposite of Delta failure. Sigmas tend to excel at strategic vision, but fail at both management and operations"
I sat down in the captain's chair once and and luckily it was not a career mistake, just one in a volunteer capacity. I learned leadership is not one of my many strengths in that endeavor. A full-stack, multidisciplinary technical consultant doesn't always make a good project manager or personnel manager. It could and may even be argued that the conditional in my previous sentence could be stricken.
We all have our roles or niches.
"I would see the problem/deficiencies through analytics..."
Translation: Everyone's a cog in the machine.
One thing I have done since being is leadership is building teams. Growing teams AND people is more important that you doing it yourself.
When I was a first time manager, my more alpha boss allowed me one night a month to go on a deep dive to my hearts content, as long as the team was running well. "Your monthly vacation." Hard to do at first.
"b) brought into established operations to deal with short-term, emergency situations."
Like Iacocca at Chrysler. Sigmas are what's needed at turbulent times.
It's nice you brought out the difference between sigmas and deltas in that situation, but wouldn't this be a similarity?
"The things I hate about being the situational Alpha are the following. Going to awards ceremonies for workers, having to help people get their kids internships in the organization, participating in mentorship programs, going to meet and greets, going to retirement parties and the rest of the pomp and circumstance."
I don't think sigmas would like these things either.
What does masculine empathy look like? How is it expressed?
Dad, for those who didn't have a Boomer or Gamma one.
Also reminded of the Runaway painting from Norman Rockwell.
https://www.nrm.org/thinglink/text/Runaway.html
Pretty much spot-on Vox. If you asked me the best quality I can bring to an organization, I would respond by saying that I am extremely competent in all of my areas of my responsibility. Throw any responsibility my way, and it will get done at an extremely high level. All of my operations run like well-oiled machines and my only vision for my organization is that I innovate to the extent that the Delta’s work in the safest and most efficient environment, while producing the most error-free and high quality work, which will ultimately drive performance and efficiency. I am not embarrassed in the least to say that I take a great deal of pride in that. Your score on that was a dead-center bullseye.
Here is where you may have missed the mark, but came close enough to call it a win. Although I lack the empathy of an Alpha, I take exception to the fact that I have zero empathy at all. While I may not like certain responsibilities of my job because they drain too much of my energy and cause me to lose too much time which I can spend focusing on improving performance, I still do them for two reasons. The first is because I signed up to do them and those things are my responsibility. The second is because I don’t want to let down the people that work for the organization. Can you imagine if you worked at a company for 30 years and it was your last day before retirement and the big boss couldn’t take an hour out of his busy schedule to come to your retirement luncheon to give a 5 minute speech and present you with a retirement plaque for all your hard work over the course of your 30-year career? It’s a pretty shitty thing to do to someone. I would feel terrible if I didn’t go. So on Sunday night, when I go over my schedule for the week and I realize I have something to do that I don’t like to on Thursday, I am only thinking that it is going to screw up my Thursday. But after driving to the function, sometimes for an hour, when it comes time to present an employee of the month or say farewell to a dedicated employee, in the moment, I do do enjoy it. Having said that, the enjoyment is fleeting and when I am driving back to my office, I am totally refocused on my bottom line. Your score on that one was the outer ring, but still a win.
By the way, the reason I knew I was only larping as an Alpha was because I looked at what Trump did over the past 9 years. The guy amazes me. He plays 18 holes of golf at Mar-a-largo in the morning, signs a bill in Washington at lunch time, does an hour long press conference at 4PM, and then does a rally in Ohio at 7PM, happily praising all the local hero’s, all while handling his other responsibilities. And then the next day he does it all over again. And again, and again, and again. The only way you could do all that is if you truly love it. I knew I could never love to do anything like that schedule. I would hate it. I think anyone but a true Alpha would.
I’ve read over a lot comments and I want to address them all, but it would be simply too tiring to do so individually. So I would like to provide everyone with some more context. Hope it doesn’t sound like a wall of text, especially because I am replying to my own comment. Take of it what you will.
First, I am responsible for an extremely large maintenance and inspection operation. There are thousands of pieces of equipment, with hundreds of components on each piece of equipment, and there are hundreds of of sub-components on those components. The equipment is in in use 24/7, 365 days a year. If anything fails, a component or a sub-component, it affects my performance. If there is shoddy maintenance done, it affects my performance.
When I say I use analytics to see where the problems lie, I use analytics to pin point the problems to see what has the biggest effect on performance. I want to be clear- no one handed me the analytics to review and make decisions with. I had to make the analytics for myself. I had to poor through hundreds of thousand of maintenance records, put them into a database and see the signal through the noise. If anyone who is interested in this type of thing, a good read is “The Signal through the Noise” by Nate Silver. It teaches someone how to draw out the relevant information from large datasets to get to the thing you want to see. In my case it was how performance suffered from bad maintenance, bad components, and bad sub components. It took me five years of dedication to perfect this, so I’m not interested in hearing about how women use analytics. They were handed them and told to follow them, not come up with their own. In the beginning, I failed mostly. I failed a lot. I would do experiments and I wouldn’t see the failures come down on my experiments. But then I finally figured it out. The crazy thing was that after figuring it out, I had to redirect the workforce and the attention of the Bravos to do things counterintuitively. This is where you have to say to yourself that Sun Tzu was right- you have to believe in yourself. So I made up a maintenance plan and implemented my plan at the location I was responsible for and the performance skyrocketed. When the bosses noticed the improvement, they asked me what I was doing and I showed them. They didn’t even understand it because all they knew were heuristics, but they couldn’t argue with my plan because of my performance. They said OK, see if your system works at this location, which was the most underperforming location under their purview. So I went there and after 3 months of populating the database, the performance started to improve. After 1 year and 3 months, the performance doubled. At this point there was little doubt that I knew what I was doing. I convinced them and myself.
I also want to clear one more thing up. Just because I used analytics to see the most impactful problems, this is not to say I wasn’t on the front lines with my Deltas. I knew collectively that they knew all the information to solve the problems with the maintenance and reliability issues, but I still needed to understand the technical and operational issues to mitigate the problems. It was just a matter of seeing what I saw in my database and getting them to explain to me the rest of the story. If you could harness all the collective experience from all the Deltas, you will learn a lot.
Another thing to thing to clarify. When I poke fun at the Deltas with the Bravos, I am simply talking about the Delta’s mistakes. Deltas are extremely hard on themselves when the make a mistake. Some of them feel so bad, they want the book thrown at them. They will readily accept a write up so that they feel like they paid for their mistake. I looked at all of their successes instead. Let me poke fun at you for your mistake and then I went on to tell them about the problem they solved that no one else could. I made light of their mistakes so that they could laugh at themselves instead of beating themselves over their heads. Do you want your star quarterback beating himself up over the interception he threw in the 3rd quarter or do want him to forget about it when the game is on the line? Humor is the best modifier. When you can laugh about your mistakes, you are truly over them.
One more thing you should know about the industry I work in. I am responsible for about $7 Billion worth of assets. Those assets can never be replaced and my organization is secure unless someone unleashes a teleport machine like the ones you see on Star Trek. I’m not being flippant or Gamma when I say this.
What industry do you work in?
Oh no Vox! A link to Wikipedia?
Infogalactic wept.
Empathy that ensured fulfillment of social obligations. Having Strategic Vision, instinctive insight into power dynamics.
Does High-T in the womb help to develop those capabilities for the Alpha?
On a smaller scale Deltas who head their Households also would have on a smaller scale what Alphas possess on a larger scale?
As a Delta who has also been in situational Alpha leadership roles at work, I agree with this. Even today when leading a small bunch of men at work my thinking is generally quite tactical - what do I need to solve today, this week, on the near horizon. Strategic thinking and forecasting to the future is uncomfortable and it is difficult to motivate myself to think about.
For Deltas in a situational Alpha role it would help to have a leader above you who is an actual Alpha to help you stay on the strategic target.