3 Takeaways - Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (#149)

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Why do we have so many incompetent male leaders in both government and the private sector? According to a University College London professor, we focus too much on stylistic indicators like charisma and confidence. What are the best traits for effective leaders? Are female leaders different? Who are examples of great leaders? Listen and learn. 

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another Three Takeaways episode. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, who's going to share why he believes so many incompetent men become leaders. Tomas is an organizational psychologist and professor at University College London who studies leadership, personality, and behavior. Welcome, Tomas, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.

Thank you for having me. Tomas, why do so many incompetent men become leaders? The main reason is that we don't care so much about competence. If we did, we would have self-corrected or addressed the issue a while ago. But actually, we focus more on stylistic indicators of personality like charisma, confidence, etc. We are not very good at judging competence in the first place. So in essence, we focus on certain indicators that are false or fake signals of competence and often actually decrease competence in leaders. And they tend to be more common in men than in women. So in my research, what I find is that even the so-called gender or sex bias isn't so much a bias against women as it is a bias in favor of overconfident men

who aren't as good as they think and mostly have these parasitic effects on their teams and organizations. Much of the popular advice focused on helping people become leaders is based on the premise that if people believe in themselves and adopt a can-do attitude, that anything will be possible. What do you think about this? It doesn't cease to irritate me every time I hear it, even though I've written about it and I'm hearing it from you now showcase the very rare and anomalous case studies of people who achieved amazing levels of success and then tell us that it's all due to their self-belief. Clearly, at the same time, we are ignoring or omitting any evidence of the many people who end up in very, very bad and undesirable places because they believe they were better than they actually were. And the case that I spent a lot of time,

which is the most interesting one and complex one, situations in which people do get to the top of an organizational hierarchy or powerful situations or positions of influence because of their self-belief without actually having the talents to back it up. And aside of them being successful and rich and influential, there are very few positive outcomes for everybody else. So in essence, in a logical world, we would get better at spotting actual competence, in which case we wouldn't spend so much time worrying about style. We would focus on substance. And even if you did that, you have to understand that self-confidence or self-belief or self-knowledge is good when it's accurate. It helps for me to know that

I cannot cross this busy junction or street because a car or train might run me over, or that I shouldn't actually volunteer to fly this plane which has passengers, even though I feel that I might actually be quite good at it. The best degree of confidence is one that actually aligns with your actual competence, and especially because it might highlight an uncomfortable gap between where you are and where you want to be. The best degree of confidence is one that is in touch or in sync with our actual competence. Self-awareness trumps self-belief every time. But unfortunately, there are so many examples of people who get further than they should because of their self-belief.

And we all know how this ends up. I mean, it ends up with the leaders we have as opposed to the leaders we need. Is there a high correlation between confidence and competence? There isn't. So there's so much research on this and the research is surprisingly simple to conduct. You need to measure people's competence in a domain of achievement or performance. So it could be speaking Japanese or writing in French or algebra or mathematics or Latin or general knowledge, et cetera, et cetera. So anything that can be measured objectively and where you will typically get a normal distribution

where some people are really, really good, some people are really, really bad. And most people are somewhere in the middle. And then you just ask people to self-assess and to self-rate on those specific skills. Now, the correlation across all domains, every domain that has been investigated is about 0.3, which in essence means that there is 9% of overlap between how good people are at something and how good they actually think they are at something. And we also know that women are somewhat more likely to underestimate their skills, but much more likely to estimate their skills correctly, with men being much more likely to overestimate their skills across these domains. If you leave the research aside and you want to look at the real world, it's interesting that in some simple areas like singing talent, you don't need to be an expert

or to have a sophisticated psychometric test to evaluate whether somebody can sing or not, which is why these shows like America's Got Talent or The X Factor are so funny because you have people who are clearly very full of themselves and they behave as if they were Pavarotti or Rihanna. And as soon as they open their mouth to sing, they're an embarrassment, right? But when it comes to displaying your skills or talents for being a leader, an executive, or a management consultant, the average judge or rater doesn't have a grounding or a solid baseline to actually evaluate their degree of delusion or overconfidence. And because of that, people will focus more on your style than your substance.

And by the way, this happens especially with heads of states or presidents. What happens more specifically when we select leaders on the basis of their style, their charisma, and their confidence? So a lot of the times it takes us too long to really come to terms or understand the detrimental consequences, mostly because as the world becomes more complex, it's very easy to use data to inform or also misinform and distract. And also because as the world becomes more complex, we become lazier and more dogmatic. So this to me, again, is very fascinating. There is no shortage of technologies that can tell us whether politicians are lying in presidential debates or presidential candidates debate. You have algorithms that fact check and three, four people are debating and the level of lying or inaccuracies and incompetence is just 70 percent, 80 percent, whatever.

They rarely change voting intentions. Equally, if I vote for a person and they do really poorly once they are elected as president or head of state, I won't care about all the evidence that you might present to me about their failed leadership because you can always attribute that to something else, or I can look at other indicators. But typically what happens is what you can see on a big scale if you actually look at some pretty obvious facts and statistics. Presidential or political leaders approval ratings around the world are at an all-time low. They're about 30 to 40 percent. Most people in democratic countries believe that a benevolent autocracy will be better than the democracy they have, or a malfunctioning democracy. About 70 percent of countries in the world, including many

democratic countries, are either failed states or devolving or corrupt. And you have all these cases of leaders who get to power being very popular and then turn into narcissistic populist dictators that are very hard to remove. So Putin and Russia are a clear example now, but there are so many. In fact, they're not the exception. Where do you see charismatic and overconfident leaders besides politics, which you already mentioned? Do you see them in other areas?

Pretty much in every area. Obviously, the second domain that comes to mind would be the corporate world or the executive world, which actually is harder to accept or justify than in political leaders, especially in democratic elections, because, you know, you could think, OK, you need a little money to run as a politician. You can use all these tactics of manipulation, deception, et cetera. And the average voter probably doesn't care or know about the intricacies, but for-profit corporations have an interest and they are incentivized to actually pick better people, people who are competent and more moral. And yet we know that there's a lot of incompetent people in executive roles, in management roles, and so on.

I think charisma actually is more of a distraction than nuance or a problem. I think if you are ethical and competent, I probably want you to be charismatic because you're going to be much more impactful. But if you are Putin, Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, I wish you weren't charismatic at all so that nobody follows you and pays attention to you. There's a lot of data on leaders who are more systematically or very overconfident, and we know what happens. They will ignore negative feedback. They will retaliate and attack or defend themselves when criticized. They will make megalomaniac decisions. They will engage in reckless risk-taking. They will not be aware of the negative consequences or the risk

of their decisions. And it might be a bit of a roller coaster, but typically, you know, the higher you go, the lower you go in turn. Can you give some examples of where charisma and overconfidence have led to issues? Yes. So I would say, look, I mean, the 2008 global financial crisis, you have overconfidence in the banking sector, overconfidence in the traders, brokers, analysts that were selling junk bond to people. And there was a big party, even overconfidence in the average consumer, which you might say, okay, people don't have the knowledge or education to understand the complexity of the mortgage market, et cetera, but consumers that thought that they

could own a very expensive house, putting less than 1% down for down payment, and you get rich without even trying. So I think there's systematic overconfidence here everywhere that if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't have had a crisis of those dimensions. Very interesting data also coming up from Iceland's crisis at the time, which went higher than anybody else and then lower than anybody else. institutions that had more gender balance actually were less at risk and more likely to avoid getting bankrupt or suffering the negative consequences. So that would be one, I would say, most political elections. It takes a certain level of overconfidence in our leaders who emerge as messiahs and tell us that they're going to fix everything because it's all somebody else's fault and we don't have to do anything to enjoy the benefits of what they're going to do.

That's just basically naive. And also overconfidence in our ability to improve things without changing ourselves. And I'll give you one more. Maybe I think the fact that we are so embedded and immersed in our filter bubbles today and that we all live in our echo chambers and that even when we describe ourselves as open-minded, what that means is that we typically hang out with people who are exactly like us and think exactly like us. That's because we have overconfident in our own views and our opinions to the point that we aren't even able to engage in a discussion or interact with somebody who doesn't think like us and doesn't provide validation for our views. What are the best traits for effective leaders? And can you give some examples of leaders with these best traits? Yes. So I think technical expertise, learning ability, curiosity, integrity, self-awareness, coachability, and humility. And how many people take all these boxes? Well, I mentioned Angela Merkel in the book and today because she seems to be the rare case, at least in politics, of a modern leader who displays this. I think of the corporate leaders, probably Satya Nadella at Microsoft, the Microsoft CEO comes to mind now. I'm not religious, but I think the current Pope of the Catholic Church seems to display a lot of these traits and actually was brought in to change, if not the culture,

the image or the reputation of the institution by actually contradicting a lot of the things that his predecessors did, which is also quite interesting because as my friend, Jean-Pierre Petriglieri, who you should definitely try to have on your podcast, he's a professor at INSEAD, always says, effective leadership is always an argument with tradition. This is what's beautiful about leadership. Nobody is truly a leader to leave things as they are. If you really are a leader, you have to disrupt and heal what exists

and replace it with something better. So you have to be a vessel for change, a vehicle or conduit for change. And that is fundamentally much harder than being a populist and telling people what they want to hear and maintaining certain aspects of the status quo. Anything else you'd like to add before I ask for the three takeaways? Well, maybe just that although the pace of change is frustratingly slow, 50 years or 100 years is nothing. It's a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, which is our evolutionary history. So I think we need to be patient. And as many people said, progress is not a straight line. And I do think that with some self-awareness and some willingness to actually adjust and address

these issues, progress is possible. And the three takeaways, Tomas? The three takeaways, yes. So, okay, so number one is the best gender diversity intervention would be to focus on talent and not on gender. I think it's far more heretic to say that we don't have a meritocracy than to say that there is some bias in favor of men or against women. Basically, I think most people agree with the fact that the best person should get the job and that we should eliminate barriers for good people to get to these positions. But where we disagree is people think that's happening already. And I'm very much of the view that this isn't a reflection of reality. Number two is we need to learn to distrust our instincts.

And this is very, very hard because the vast majority of people think they are more intuitive than they are. And the same overconfidence that I attack applies to our overratings of our intuition. And some people are really, really intuitive, but that's because they're truly experts and their intuition has become data-driven. The vast majority of people who describe themselves as intuitive are like the vast majority of people who describe themselves as funny or having a great sense of humor. They actually don't, only in their mind. And the third one is, I'm going to be provocative and a little bit cheeky or controversial here.

I have a lot of very smart female colleagues who are long-term or long-time feminists and have written great books, essays, articles, manifestos about gender and leadership and about bias vis-a-vis gender and sex differences. And many of them told me after I wrote the book and seeing that the book did pretty well, their reaction is, you realize they're only listening to you because you are the overconfident man that you describe in the book, which I always feel, you know, touche, good point. And I always say, in my case, science has actually made me a feminist in the sense that I am data driven. And there is this huge gap between the leaders we would have if we actually truly focus on data and potential.

Tomas, thank you. This has been wonderful. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three. Three is not spelled out. See you soon at 3takeaways.com.