The movie "American Sniper" brought into popular culture and old view of people: We are all sheep, sheep dogs, or wolves. It is easy to criticize this simplified view of humanity. For one thing, humans can change from sheep into wolves, sheep dogs into wolves, or wolves into sheep. Real sheep stay sheep. Real wolves don't graze.
Recently, I was talking to my older son about leadership. I used this analogy, because he is starting both an internship and later a job in which leadership is the path to success. His employers, even if they would not use the label, are looking for a sheep dog.
We were laughing about just how much like a sheep dog he will need to be with a crowd of teenagers who needed to be herded to different activities--and who might wander off at any moment.
We also talked about my oldest daughter, both of us smiling because she seems to be born for the sheep dog role. On her high school basketball and soccer teams she played with boundless enthusiasm. She also embraced the role of team enforcer. If a player on the other team made a bad hit or was abusing one of her teammates, my daughter was in her face, several times fouling out of games with her one-on-one coverage of the offender. In her professional life she is a social worker, helping disabled veterans get the help they need.
The best sergeants I served with in the Army had this alert, game-face quality of both protecting their sheep and barking whenever needed.
In corporate life, unlike games and the military, leadership has subtleties that blend the sheep and sheep dogs and even the wolves together into an always strained unit that presents itself as a family, but with deep contradictions everyone feels.
In the corporate world, someone has to make money and deal with shareholders. Wolves in suits lead the sales force and accounting. Sheep with college degrees can be less than docile. The sheep dogs in big companies, the middle managers, are the subject of bitching by the sheep and the wolves.
I listen to friends who are corporate managers caught between surly sheep and hungry wolves striving to "increase shareholder value" and their own bonuses. Every corporation I worked for kept score in money--the only real measure of both short- and long-term success in the world of business.
The friends who played ball or are veterans are occasionally nostalgic for the vivid clarity of games and war. They tell me how they are squeezed between bosses looking only for profit and staff who want affirmation.
My son is beginning where most of the sheep want to be part of the herd and he can protect his sheep from the wolves.
Just as an aside, many professions are admired and scorned based on members who choose the role of sheep dog or wolf. The best lawyers use their considerable training to protect the poor and needy from government and corporate excess. The worst are wolves making fortunes covering crimes by the rich.
The difference between millionaire televangelists sucking money from their sheep to build and buy empires, and believer who becomes a doctor to minister in a refugee camp is beyond astronomical.
