Thoughts In Progress— is it time we rethink how we select leaders?

You don’t have to look too far today to see bad leaders. I don’t mean just the not-very-competent ones. I mean the blatantly bad. The corrupt and immoral. The incapable and unashamed. The power-hungry. In a word, the assholes, to borrow from the fabulous Bob Sutton’s vernacular.

Why are we not doing better?

Leadership and senior management are often conflated nowadays, but they are different concepts. One can be a leader without being a manager: leading by voice based on their expertise and likability.

Leadership is about your ability to influence and is intricately linked with power.

Given senior positions in organisations come with positional power, many people who lead us are effectively able to lead based on their position rather than based on their voice. These leaders are followed because they have authority and/or more information than others and/or the ability to reward or penalise others.

While we tend to select our ‘leaders by voice’, since we consider how much we like them as people and how much expertise we assess they have, these ‘leaders by position’ are selected for us.

Selecting leaders: we know what we want, and get the opposite

We kind of know what type of leader we want, right?

Someone wise & thoughtful, compassionate & kind. Someone who looks after their followers and guides them towards achieving an insipiring vision of what could be. Someone who we can give our trust to, believing their integrity in the pursuit of the common good. Someone who has great capability, yet knows their limits and will effectively compensate those limitations with others’ skills. Someone who brings people together and listens to understand rather than speak to convince. Well, something like that I guess (yes, some call me an idealist).

Unfortunately, we often end up with the opposite. Why so?

1- We recruit wrong

Imagine you need to recruit someone to join a ‘leadership team’ of an organisation. Say the C-Suite. You meet two candidates: one soft-spoken, hesitant, self-deprecating; the other energetic, confident, charismatic. All things being equal, the latter seems to fit the bill of our image of a leader — someone who can sell ice to Eskimos and motivate groups to go march into the sunset. Or off a cliff…

Research shows that projecting confidence and competence, self-promoting yourself and being charismatic gives an edge in interviews… even though these traits are those of a narcissist. Hardly the profile of our ideal leader!

I’ve seen this happen first-hand. People recruited to lead a group, then walk in an boast of their inability to actually do that, and not give a toss. Everybody can just sort themselves out. Or others who are put in charge, then lie and bully their team while sucking up to their bosses. Forget about complaining to said recruiters: how could they (or the organisation) admit to such a casting mistake!

2- We promote up to ‘levels of incompetence’

Even when we do not succumb to the joys of recruiting assholes, we can fall into the Peter Principle. “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence” (given enough time and levels in the hierarchy).

Did your job well? Get a promotion! Do that well? Get a promotion! Do that bad? Stay there — and too bad for everybody if you can’t get better at it. This is particularly an issue for people with what Carol Dweck calls a ‘fixed mindset’ and who fail to grow from setbacks.

Compound that issue to bad leaders who want to promote yes-people to surround them, or just anybody who will avoid challenging their incompetence.

Compound that even further with people who have reached their level of incompetence who then get hired with a promotion by a competitor, eager to attract a senior leader from the incumbent organisation (who awkwardly, won’t tell their competitors to not recruit such an incompetent leader). Bummer!

I’ve seen this happen first-hand too. I’ve seen someone described to me as a sociopath get promoted to a senior position, based on their ‘close’ relationship with the boss. The sociopath went on to make an absolute mess of their area of responsibility, only to get hired / promoted out. Having spent all his time building relationships to land his next role instead of actually doing his work certainly helped… well, it didn’t help his team or organisation, that is. I’ve also seen the most useless member of a team get secretly promoted to a role nobody new was open: unsurprisingly, the boss was an asshole, and that useless member was his biggest supporter. Nothing good to report there either.

Not a pretty picture…

Democracy: are we really electing the leaders we want?

But democracy, you say, democracy is where everybody gets a say to select our leaders, not faceless recruiters or asshole bosses surrounding themselves with yes-people!

Well, if you aren’t disillusioned by the current state of political leadership, first: lucky you! But as far as I can tell, elections in ‘free democracies’ often ends up being summed up by voters as “which one is the less worst”.

How do we end up in such a situation? Seriously, in a whole country are we not able to pull out a handful of inspiring leaders that we are free to elect?

Well, when you think about it… In most countries, to put yourself forward for an election you need the support of a major political party. In other words, you need to get selected by that party as a would-be leader. So, see above on the joys of recruiting or promoting leaders. Yay.

But… but… in some parties, there are primaries so that everybody gets a shot to be elected the leader of the party! Surely some good people emerge there? I guess that could work. Although when you see all the back-stabbing and smearing that happens in politics, that really makes you wonder what kind of person that fits our leader ideal would throw themselves into that mud pit. It happens, and it can be fabulous when it does. But it’s rare.

One reason why it’s hard to make it to the top while still being a good person is that power corrupts. I mean, beyond the saying: it really does. Research showed that simply getting people to feel powerful makes them more self-serving, disrespectful, and diminish their moral sentiments. It takes conscious efforts to fight those biases and maintain the qualities that we want from the leaders we elect.

So where to from here?

Of course, there are exceptions to the above. I know great leaders personally, people I have loved working with. But that’s the problem: they’re exceptions.

I don’t have a ready-made answer for how to fix this, but here are some thoughts on how we could try to make the exceptions rule:

1- We need to redesign how people in positions of power are recruited

Science has a lot to offer here: if we know the traits we want (and those we want to avoid), there are tests and measures we can take to increase the chances of getting good leaders in positions of power, so they can lead by voice AND position. This requires more effort and investment, but surely it is worth it to avoid another narcissistic bully getting the means to trash a business or a whole economy?

2- We need to redesign career progression pathways

Here my suggestion is simple: if someone has reached their level of incompetence, we need to get them back to a level of competence in a way that remains positive for them, i.e. get back into a comfort zone without losing the salary & perks, and get help building your way back to that next step (if they want it).

For example: some organisations are now realising that highly technical people may not want a career track that leads them to managing people (or they want it for the salary, not the actual work), so they are creating career tracks that recognise (and retribute) technical expertise for its own value. A similar principle could be used to consider how careers can ‘progress sideways’ when people reach their level of incompetence.

3- We need to transition bad leaders out

Changing all this will always face a big issue: bad leaders in place, who do not want to be challenged. I’m not an Apple fan-boy but there is lots of truth in Steve Jobs’ assertion about A players wanting to work with A players, and B players wanting to work with C players.

We need to sift the bad leaders out if we want to make room for good ones. Good luck with that.

Thoughts In Progress are brain farts that need fleshing out… I write for myself to get these ideas out of my head (as the saying goes “How can I know what I think until I read what I write”), but feel free to read and comment so we can refine these thoughts together!

This article builds and refers to the work of many wise people:

Northouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage publications, 2018

Keltner, Dacher. The power paradox: How we gain and lose influence. Penguin, 2016

Peter, Laurence J., and Raymond Hull. The peter principle. №04; RMD, PN6231. M2 P4.. London: Souvenir Press, 1969

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. Leadership BS: Fixing workplaces and careers one truth at a time. HarperCollins, 2015

Sutton, Robert I. The no asshole rule: Building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn’t. Hachette UK, 2007

Hamel, Gary, and Michele Zanini. Humanocracy. Harvard Business Review Press, 2020.