McKinsey
Narcissism. Overconfidence. Low EQ. Why do we persist in selecting for leadership traits that hamper organizational progress—and leave the right potential leaders in the wrong roles?
Hot air rises—and so, unfortunately, do many of the aspiring leaders who spout it. Why do we continue to mistake confidence for competence, and what should we be doing differently?
In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It) (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2019), joins McKinsey talent leaders Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle, as well as global editorial director Lucia Rahilly, to discuss why the traits that propel us to the top seem to diverge so widely from those that make us great leaders—as well as how to choose stronger, more successful, and more diverse candidates for leadership roles.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
How do leaders rise?
Lucia Rahilly: It’s with both great glee and a genuinely heavy heart that we begin our topic for today and talk about Tomas’s research on why so many incompetent men rise to leadership positions. It’s a serious and, in some cases, devastating issue. What prompted you to pursue this particular line of research?
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I was interested in knowing the truth. What is it that propels some people to leadership roles? Why are some people effective or ineffective when they get to those roles? Gender was actually a peripheral variable.
Our research was focused on abilities, competencies, interests, and personalities, but of course, we collected data on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. We found a remarkable gap whereby gender was one of the strongest predictors of why people reach leadership roles through nomination, selection, or election.
We also saw the effect of gender on predicting performance once they got to occupy those positions. We saw that we didn’t select leaders on the basis of talent, merit, or potential. That’s the main conclusion of the research.
Lucia Rahilly: Lest we lose the majority of our male audience, let us be clear: men also suffer the consequences of bad leadership. The stakes are high for all of us in hiring and cultivating good leaders. This isn’t just a female issue or an identity politics issue, correct?
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: It doesn’t really matter whether the person in charge identifies as male or female. The important thing is that when they are competent, we all benefit. We are more productive, more engaged, and less likely to engage in antisocial behavior. Fundamentally, competent men should relish the transition to a meritocratic system, whereby people achieve leadership roles based on their talent and potential, because there are many competent men who are, ironically or paradoxically, overlooked for leadership roles.
This is precisely because they have some of the qualities—empathy, self-awareness, integrity, and humility—that ultimately make them better leaders but don’t really make them leaders to begin with. If you succeed at playing within the current rules of the game, you’re going to get further, but then you’re going to make things worse. And if you don’t, you might never be selected. This is the interesting conundrum that we should be addressing when we talk about things like gender diversity.
Empathy and gender
Bryan Hancock: One of the interesting pieces of research in your book is that women, on the whole, have a similar IQ to men but have higher EQs [emotional intelligence], although the difference in EQ between men and women is no more than 15 percent. While women’s tendency to have higher EQs can help explain why there are fewer women in leadership, there may also be a large number of men who are competent, who have high EQs, who are the nice guys, and who may not rise to the top.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: We have this paradoxical situation wherein if we made leadership selection gender blind and only focused on the traits that have proved to lead to more effective leadership styles and approaches, we would end up not only with more women in leadership roles but also slightly more women than men in them. There’s this underlying assumption in gender diversity interventions that, because most leaders are male, there’s something we need to do to help women who are not as naturally predisposed to being good leaders.
It’s actually the other way around. There’s a lot of antimeritocratic and implicit positive discrimination going on that favors not just men but overconfident, narcissistic, and incompetent men when it comes to leadership roles.
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