The Befuddling Problem of Leadership
Why we can’t get the leaders we want
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One of the more amusing things to come out of this year’s presidential campaign might be the declarations that Clinton “just doesn’t look presidential.” It’s glaringly obvious — well, of course she doesn’t. Quite literally, Clinton is changing our perceptions of what a president looks like.
But this problem of “not looking presidential” extends far beyond the pursuit of POTUS. Ask people what we want in a leader and we will tell you we want someone smart, capable, caring, empathetic even; but ask people to choose a leader we will select for confidence and charisma.
It’s as if every time promotions role around, or we’re hiring a new director, or we’re asked to nominate someone to head up that important new project we collectively revert to selecting based on what feels “leadershippy.” This is the befuddling problem of leadership: why can’t we select the leaders we actually want?
What gets results vs. what gets promoted
In 2002, four researchers set out to understand the interplay between personality and leadership. One of the definitive findings of the study was that “Extraversion was the most consistent correlate of leadership.” Specifically, extraverted employees were more likely to emerge as leaders and be perceived as effective — by both managers and managed.
Did you catch that key word there? perceived. Because while we might perceive extraversion as a quality of a good leader, there’s very little evidence that this trait actually gets better results.
Research from Adam Grant shows that in environments of low employee proactivity, extraverted leaders get better results, but in environments of high employee proactivity, introverted leaders get better results.
In other words, engaged employees that take initiative perform better under an introverted manager. Is it silly to point out that most companies today do, in fact, want a culture of engaged employees that take initiative?
The potent power of extraversion becomes particularly befuddling when combined with the intoxicating scent of confidence. In a Stanford study, even after participants were told who the most qualified person was, there was still a roughly 50% chance that they would choose the leader who was less competent, but “taller, louder, or more confident.” And consistently, the teams led by less competent leaders underperformed, being beaten by both competent leaders and self-managed teams.
Now here’s where things get really weird. The Dunning-Kruger effect is based on research that shows the less competent someone is the more likely they are to be confident in their abilities….let me restate this: the less competent someone is the more likely they are to exhibit the very characteristic that we perceive as being “leadershippy.”
This would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening.
The thing is, we actually just kind of get this. People report wanting leaders who exhibit more classically “feminine” traits — communicative, empathetic. But given the choice, our rational side simply can not override our emotional response to a person exhibiting classic indicators of “leadershippy” — decisiveness, pride…confidence.
This inability to choose results over what feels “leadershippy” becomes particularly uncomfortable when we bring in things like gender, race, ableism, and ageism. We know, rationally, that female CEOs get equal (and better) returns than their male counterparts, yet they are still less likely to receive funding. We know that diverse leadership teams get better results, yet we still struggle to hire (let alone promote!) anyone that doesn’t appear, on the most surface of levels, to match our perceptions of a leader.
Changing our perceptions of leadership
In a recent flurry of articles and apps to help women adopt “power language” Buffer quietly put a stake in the ground around their way of doing things — encouraging powerless language.
Yep. In a world of telling women to stop saying, “I’m sorry” Courtney Seiter instead posed the question:
This is a markedly different approach to dealing with the befuddling problem of leadership. Today, most leadership training focuses on helping groups that don’t match our perceptions of leadership to display these “leadershippy” indicators. Introverts can attend training to help them speak up and “project power,” and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a women’s leadership conference that doesn’t have at least one session on confidence.
But these approaches tend to overlook the things that cannot be changed — accents, skin color, age. We cannot rely on the adoption of leadership indicators as a reliable way to select the best leaders. Instead, we need to actively change what we perceive to be “leadershippy.”
Buffer’s approach is one tactic. Adam Grant suggests a similar tactic as it relates to introversion vs. extraversion. He asks, given the unique power of introverted leaders, why wouldn’t be spend time training extraverted leaders on how to lead a little more like their introverted peers? Fair question.
It’s worth considering what might happen if we took this approach even further. What if instead of training people to project confidence, we instead trained everyone to look for competence over confidence? That’s a tougher ask. It’s far easier to train a small group of people on how to adopt the swagger of confidence than it is for us to learn to look for signs of actual competence.
But if we’re serious about getting the leaders we want, the one’s that will get the best results, then we need to figure out real ways to counteract the befuddling problem of leadership.
