The Power of Linking

Most of us need more linking and less ranking in our lives

Elaine N. Aron

When we boil down all the inter-personal dynamics we experience in work and in life, there are two fundamental ways we can relate with another human being – we can either be linking or ranking.

Linking is our innate tendency to be drawn to others, to want to help, connect and care. When we are linking, we are connecting human-to-human, heart-to-heart. Linking sits at the heart of our capacity to help and be of service to others, to gratefully and graciously accept help and support from others. When we are linking, we are able to experience what the Buddhist philosophy refers to as ‘altruistic joy’ – genuine happiness for others’ experiences of happiness and success. If we are stuck in ranking, the success of others can instead lead to feelings of envy, resentment or self-loathing to emerge within us. Love is the strongest form of linking that emerges through a shared experience of positive emotional resonance.

One of the things I am most proud of over my leadership career to date is my ability to build engaged, high-performing teams. The employee engagement scores for the teams I have led have far exceeded the organisational average. I believe that my track record can be primarily attributed to one thing – my awareness of my conditioned ranking tendencies and my practice of staying true to my natural linking tendency. By setting a strong intention to link with my team members, managers and colleagues, I was able to cultivate trust, respect and connection. Intentional linking supports all of us to bring the best of ourselves to the table to do our best work – together. Our real power and potential is activated through our relationships. The strength of our relationships is our most critical success factor and our ability to form them our most valuable leadership attribute.

Why we rank

Often, when we are ranking, our conditioning has overridden our natural tendency to link. When we rank, we sever our connection with another person by mentally placing ourselves above or below them, based on some logic or criteria that we deem to be relevant or important in that moment. We compare and rank ourselves versus others based on perceived status, hierarchical power, appearances, education level, social class, religious beliefs – just to name a few. We are social animals and ranking has played an important role in our development as a species. So ranking is not inherently bad or wrong. Ranking can, however, be problematic when it happens often and below our level of conscious awareness. When we are in a trance and in the deep habitual grooves of ranking, we perpetuate disconnection, unnatural separateness and suffering. Linking fosters connection, ranking destroys connection through competition and comparison. In the workplace, chronic ranking can lead to people exerting power over others, hoarding of information and a highly contagious dog eat dog mindset that leads to a pandemic of fear and mistrust.

In the world of psychology, ranking is often referred to as social comparison. While there are occasionally legitimate reasons to rank ourselves, we tend to do it constantly. Habitual ranking is generally accepted to be bad for us. Research confirms that linking reduces workplace stress and increases wellbeing and even longevity. 

Social media amplifies the prevalence and potency of ranking. As Susan David explains:

Social media presents itself as a tool for human connection, but for many of us, it’s an engine of self-doubt. The research is clear: Too much social media is bad for your mental health. Frequent users experience a myriad of problems including increased feelings of sadness, isolation, and envy, and a decrease in overall well-being. On top of it all, these platforms are addictive, meaning that the issues they cause quickly become self-perpetuating. [Social Media Platforms] encourage social comparison on a scale that humanity has never experienced, and psychologists have long agreed that social comparison is toxic.

Of course, ranking was problematic long before the advent of wide-scale social media addiction. During WWI, forced ranking was used systematically by the military to identify the top candidates for promotion in the military. Forced performance ranking systems and mindsets persist today in many organisations as part of this dehumanising legacy. Our propensity towards ranking at work is further amplified by the competitive, hierarchical and individualistic forces at play in many workplaces. Ranking is encouraged in schools and in sport. 

Historically, anyone who held a management job was automatically ranked by organisational systems as being better, smarter and more knowledgeable than people who occupied the rungs below them in the organisational hierarchy. Some organisations still use the term ‘superiors’ to describe people who hold more hierarchical power. I have been in many organisations where crucial decisions were poorly made by the ill-informed ‘HiPPO’ (the Highest Paid Person in the Organisation). I have also experienced ugly ego ping-pong matches involving two people who are stuck in ranking, both desperately trying to prove and assert themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, I have also seen many examples of people being co-conspirators in the diminishment of their own potential by ranking themselves (and their ideas and perspectives) so far below those of others, that they don’t dare to speak up or speak their truth.

More and more organisations are awakening to a new paradigm of leadership that is grounded in serving and supporting the folks closest to customers. The leaders who successfully inspire and enable organisational growth understand that their job is to dissolve friction and clear roadblocks for the people who serve customers. Progressive organisations are letting go of the notion that addition of the word ‘chief’ to someone’s job title means they are entitled to exert power over others and provide all the answers. More and more we are coming to see that – in the words of Simon Sinek – ‘a leader is not someone who is in charge, a leader is someone who takes care of those in their charge’.

Linking and self-worth

Healthy linking with another person becomes possible when neither individual sacrifices, silences or betrays themselves and there are no attempts to change, convince, out-rank or fix the other person. When we are with another person and holding a linking intention, we honour our shared worthiness and our connectedness. Those of us who struggle with low self-worth are prone to perceiving ourselves as lesser than others, mentally placing other people at a higher rank relative to us. Sometimes these feelings of low self-worth can also cause us to rank ourselves above others in an attempt to create a sense of value in the world. This attachment of our self-worth to external criteria in this way is a hollow and destructive substitute for authentic feelings of worthiness. 

Linking and evolution

In the book The Undervalued Self Elaine A. Aron says:

Linking is far more than a technique to feel better about yourself. Linking, coming together is central to life itself. One-celled organisms linked to become simple animals. Simple animals linked to form complex ones: and many of these animals formed groups to help each other. In all cases they were attracted to, needed to understand, and helped one another – my definition of love. Now some of us aim to link with every other being in peace and goodwill. Surely linking will evolve us into stronger and stronger forms.

Awakening to the power of linking is about noticing when we have slipped into ranking mode and being committed to the practice of intentionally replacing ranking with linking whenever we can.

?Being committed to an ongoing practice of healthy, intentional linking is a vitally important element of being true to ourselves at work.

How might more linking uplift your working life?

How might it uplift others in your life?

If you replaced ranking with linking, what new possibilities might emerge?

This article is an excerpt from my upcoming book

Self-Fidelity – How Being True to Ourselves Uplifts our Working Life

www.self-fidelity.com