The common myths that defy the facts and impair the quality of our leaders
Digitally generated image of man standing on staircase in front of neon portal. Concept of chosing ... [+]
1) Leader selection is meritocratic: It is not. If it were, how do we explain the status quo? That is, 85% of the skilled workforce is disengaged and demotivated; 65% of workers would happily take a pay cut to get rid of their boss; most people join organizations but quit their bosses; fewer than 20% of boards have confidence in their ability to solve these and other leadership problems; among the general public, trust in political and corporate leaders continues to decline; inequality, corruption, and human-induced environmental degradation continues to rise.
2) It is not easy to pick the right leaders: It is. Meta-analytic studies show that leaders’ personality accounts for between 30-50% of variability in future leadership performance, with leaders’ intelligence explaining an additional 9%. Add technical expertise, integrity, emotional intelligence, and absence of toxic traits, such as narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism, and you significantly de-risk leader selection. You will also end up with a very different profile than the one you typically get today. In short, it is not rocket science, but if we pick people who are competent, smart, and honest, things will generally work out for their teams, organizations, and nations.
3) Leadership potential depends on the situation: Mostly not. Of course, it is important that leaders’ experience and expertise is matched to the specific role in question, particularly so they can gain trust and credibility. There are also different leadership challenges prescribed by each context or situation: to innovate, to manage a crisis, to transform a system or organization, etc. That said, the fundamental grammar of leadership remains unchanged across situations: can you convince people to collaborate effectively to accomplish a common goal; can you persuade people to set aside their individual and selfish instincts so they can achieve something they wouldn’t be able to achieve individually; and can you turn a group of people into a high-performing team? Exactly how this is achieved will vary, not just from situation to situation, but also from person to person. However, if you look at the profile of effective leaders across different industries, contexts, times, and cultures, you will see they are more alike than different. Same goes for the profile of those who consistently deliver dismal performance, and more likely resemble parasites than leaders.
4) Leaders are made, not born: Although this is technically correct, which is why we rarely see 5 year olds running companies or countries (though, in fairness, the adults that do often fail to provide convincing signs of superior emotional or intellectual maturity), people’s potential for leadership can be detected at a very young age. Furthermore, the dispositional enablers that increase people’s talent for leadership have a clear biological and genetic basis. So, just like musical, mathematical, or language talent is not just dictated by experience and upbringing, but also by heritable traits (including intelligence, conscientiousness, and curiosity), so leadership talent is influenced by an array of factors that predate even our earliest childhood experiences, and will play an active role shaping the experiences we have, and how they affect us in turn. In short, leaders are born and made. Importantly, the best ones are always a work in progress, in the sense that they never cease to improve and develop.
5) The best leaders are confident: Not true. Although confidence does predict whether someone is picked for a leadership role, once you account for competence, expertise, intelligence, and relevant personality traits, such as curiosity, empathy, and drive, confidence is mostly irrelevant. And yet, our failure to focus on competence rather than confidence, and our lazy tendency to select leaders on style rather than substance (such as during presidential debates, job interviews, and short-term in person interactions), contributes to most of the leadership problems described in point 1. Note that when leaders have too much confidence they will underestimate their flaws and limitations, putting themselves and others at risk. Pathological overconfidence is the common symptom of narcissistic leaders, even when it hides underlying insecurities, and despite turning leaders into a liability we celebrate and worship it as a desirable trait. The best type of confidence is one that actually aligns with your talents and limitations - it is called “self-awareness”, and we keep on praising it because it is so rare among leaders. When it comes to actual leadership talent, self-knowledge beats self-belief every time, except if you are trying to persuade a naive and ignorant audience that you are better than you actually are, in which case exuberant and shameless levels of self-belief will be a powerful deception strategy. No need to illustrate this point with famous examples of individuals who climb to the top of a hierarchy because their surplus of confidence hides their deficits in competence.
6) The best leaders are authentic: Not really. The best leaders know how to manage their reputation, and are sophisticated impression managers, to the point that their carefully rehearsed and engineered performance seems genuine to others - we call this “social skills” or “emotional intelligence”, and it includes the ability to control and hide your spontaneous, real, and authentic feelings and emotions, and repress your uncensored, uninhibited, and impulsive thoughts and behaviors so that you can come across as emotionally mature and interpersonally adjusted to others, as opposed to an unhinged psychopath. Equally, the best leaders are not necessarily true to their values (especially when these values are immoral, corrupt, or antisocial). Instead, they stand out for pursuing the right values, actions that make others better, and help to bring about progress in the world. This requires a great deal of self-control, self-censorship, and discipline, and is the exact opposite of what most people will do when they interpret the popular “just be yourself”, “don’t worry about what people think of you”, and “bring your whole self to work” mantras.
7) The best leaders focus on their strengths: They don’t. In fact, the only way to harness your leadership potential, and develop strong leadership skills, is to focus on mitigating your weaknesses, developing new skills and strengths, and becoming a less exaggerated version of yourself. In that sense, the most important personal development strategy for leaders is to learn to go against their nature: if you are good at talking, shut up and learn to listen; if you are good at showing off, learn to develop some humility (even if it means faking it); and if you are naturally creative, learn to appreciate the benefits of disciplined execution, attention to detail, and so on. If “play to your strengths” has become such a popular mantra, that is merely because it is the easiest, laziest, and default thing people do anyway. Left to our own devices, we have a natural tendency to become a more exaggerated version of ourselves. Our so-called “strengths” are the lazy adaptations our personality finds to minimize the degree of effort, change, and selflessness that this rich, complex, and diverse world actually requires from us, unless we don’t care about getting better.
8) There are no gender differences in leadership: More often said than truly believed, not least because the overwhelming overrepresentation of men in leadership roles often leads to the conclusion that they must be better than women (but see point 1 again). In reality, the science on this is pretty clear: whether we focus on hard skills, soft skills, or absence of dark side traits, women are on average better leaders than men. So much so, that if we actually ignored gender when selecting our leaders, focusing instead on talent, picking leaders on competence rather than confidence, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, humility, integrity, and people-skills, we would not just end up with more women in leadership roles, but also more women than men in leadership roles (by a factor of around 60-40%). Incidentally, this would also be a great approach for increasing the overall quality of our leaders, and ensuring that when men get to the top it is because they actually display these positive qualities of leadership potential.
