Chamorro-Premuzic

This book explores a central question: What if these two observations—that most leaders are bad and that most leaders are male—are causally linked? In other words, would the prevalence of bad leadership decrease if fewer men, and more women, were in charge?

I argued that the underrepresentation of women in leadership was not due to their lack of ability or motivation, but to our inability to detect incompetence in men. When men are considered for leadership positions, the same traits that predict their downfall are commonly mistaken—even celebrated—as a sign of leadership potential or talent.

As this book will show, traits like overconfidence and self-absorption should be seen as red flags. But instead, they prompt us to say, ‘Ah, there’s a charismatic fellow! He’s probably leadership material.’ The result in both business and politics is a surplus of incompetent men in charge, and this surplus reduces opportunities for competent people—women and men—while keeping the standards of leadership depressingly low.

...you have probably experienced a particular form of bad management displayed by bosses who seem unaware of their limitations and are clearly and unjustifiably pleased with themselves. They are overconfident, abrasive, and very much in awe of themselves, particularly in light of their actual talents.

...leadership is a resource for the organization—it is good only when employees benefit from it, by boosting their motivation and performance. Elevating the standards of leadership—not simply having more women in charge— should be the top priority.

Women’s paths to leadership are undoubtedly dotted with many barriers, including a very thick glass ceiling. But the more I have studied leaders and leadership, the more I believe that the much bigger problem is the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men.

In business, a bad leader significantly affects subordinates by reducing their engagement—their enthusiasm for their jobs and the meaning and purpose people find at work. Global surveys report that a staggering 70 percent of employees are not engaged at work and that only 4 percent of these employees have anything nice to say about their bosses. Quite clearly, good leadership is not the norm, but the exception.

Most notably, in a review of forty-five studies on leadership and gender, Alice Eagly, a professor at Northwestern University, and her colleagues found that women were more able to drive positive change in their teams and organizations than men were, not least because of women’s more effective leadership strategies.

Specifically, women elicit more respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision more effectively, better empower and mentor their subordinates, approach problem solving in a more flexible and creative way, and are fairer and more objective in their evaluation of direct reports. In contrast, male leaders are less likely to connect with their subordinates and to reward them for their actual performance. Men focus less on developing others and more on advancing their own career agenda.

There is a world of difference between the personality traits and behaviors it takes to be chosen as a leader and the traits and skills you need to be able to lead effectively.

Competence is how good you are at something. Confidence is how good you think you are at something. Competence is an ability; confidence is the belief in that ability.

For instance, in one study, students performing in the bottom 25th percentile of the class on tests of grammar, logical reasoning, and humor rated themselves as above the 60th  percentile. In contrast, top performers consistently underestimated just how much better they were than their peers. In the same study, people performing above the 87th percentile rated themselves as being in the 70th to 75th percentile.

Expertise increases self-knowledge, which includes awareness of one’s limitations. Conversely, the less you know, the less aware you are of your limitations and the more overconfident you will be.

As psychologists C. Randall Colvin and Jack Block note, ‘There is indeed a reality out there, and accurate perception of the relation between oneself and this reality is necessary for physical and social adaptation.

This link between perceived confidence and competence is important. Although women are assumed to be less confident than men and some studies have shown that women appear to be less confident, a closer look at the research shows that women are internally confident. In fact, men and women are both overconfident—even if men are still more overconfident than women.

Women’s self-reports of confidence had no correlation with how others saw their confidence.

...we choose leaders by how confident they appear rather than by how confident or competent they are, we not only end up choosing more men to lead us but ultimately choose more-incompetent men.

Why are men more likely to be overconfident? While some kind of deep-seated evolutionary adaptation might have produced this gender difference, the simplest explanation is that men are more likely to live in a world in which their flaws are forgiven and their strengths magnified. Thus, it is harder for them to see themselves accurately.

Overconfidence is the natural result of privilege.

Research shows that the most accurate criticism would come from a leader’s direct reports, because they have the closest knowledge of the leader’s performance.

We have, alas, a tendency to generalize from unrepresentative examples, mostly because they are so memorable. Einstein’s lack of brilliance in his early years at school does not imply that bad grades will help you win a Nobel prize. Likewise, John Coltrane’s musical genius did not result from his heroin addiction—his talent somehow managed to survive the heroin. The only advantage of a difficult personality is that it may make a person unfit for traditional employment and can consequently propel them to launch their own business out of sheer necessity, if not revenge. But there is a big gap between being a mega-successful entrepreneur and being unemployable, and that gap is a function of talent rather than personality.

Narcissism and psychopathy are so fascinating because they can simultaneously help individual leaders advance their careers while hurting the people and organizations they lead.

Participants then answered the question on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me). To the researchers’ surprise, narcissistic individuals were quite happy to confess to being narcissistic, and the single question captured people’s narcissism with an accuracy comparable to longer, well-established tests, which the researchers demonstrated in eleven studies. Narcissism was easily detected by the single question because narcissists are not only aware of their extraordinary self-love, but also proud of it, for they truly love loving themselves, unashamedly.

Why men are more likely to be narcissists (sorry, guys, it’s just science)

Meta-analytic studies suggest that the gender differences in narcissism have indeed been declining over the past few decades, largely because women have become more narcissistic, rather than men becoming less so. This change reaffirms the danger of encouraging women to lean in or act more like men to climb the corporate ladder. We are only inviting them to strengthen a problematic leadership model and augment rather than reduce current incompetence rates.

...we have still not realized that traditionally feminine prosocial qualities are critical for effective leadership.

Narcissists may charm others initially, but these first impressions usually wear out in the end. For example, a recent study collected longitudinal data from 175 retail stores in the Netherlands, spanning three years. The results showed that the more employees knew—and interacted with—their managers, the more negatively the employees viewed managers with higher narcissism scores. In other words, as long as bosses had limited interactions with their employees, their narcissism did not automatically translate into a negative reputation. However, it was far more unlikely that narcissists maintained a good image with employees after prolonged interactions with them. These results are consistent with much research showing that it can be particularly difficult for narcissists to maintain long-term relationships.

First, narcissists are significantly more prone to counterproductive and antisocial work behaviors, such as bullying, fraud, white-collar crime, and harassment, including sexual harassment. And, given the contagious nature of these toxic behaviors, their teams and organizations are more likely to engage in these unethical and destructive activities as well.

Second, although narcissists generally perform perfectly well just after their promotion to a leadership role, this usually short honeymoon period is followed by a much bleaker phase. For instance, narcissistic leaders, especially narcissist CEOs, are paid more than their counterparts, and they are also more likely to push their organizations into extravagant acquisitions and other investments without, unfortunately, producing a higher return on investment (ROI).

Narcissistic leaders are notably less coachable, not least because of their stiff resistance to negative feedback. They’re quick to blame others for their own mistakes and to take credit for others’ achievements. In the unlikely event that narcissists do pay attention to criticism, they will usually respond aggressively and retaliate rather than use that feedback to improve. To make matters worse, these tendencies are exacerbated by narcissists’ impulsive nature. Because of their poor self-control, narcissists have trouble sustaining any development or self-improvement initiative.

Why we love psychopaths: Let us now turn our attention to the other major dark-side trait. Psychopathy is often discussed in connection with leadership, particularly when it comes to famous political and business leaders. Unlike narcissism, which is widespread, psychopathy is rare. And yet few toxic character traits have attracted as much public fascination and media attention as psychopathy has—even though only about 1 percent of the general population is thought to have psychopathic tendencies.

A third defining feature of psychopaths is their lack of empathy. They don’t care about what others are thinking or feeling, despite being able to understand those feelings. As a result, psychopaths are known for their cold dispositions. The absence of empathy is probably a major cause for their lack of moral constraints; it’s obviously much harder to behave in prosocial ways when you don’t care about people.

Interestingly, toxic cultures can be regarded as the product of psychopathic leaders, because leaders tend to create cultures in their own image. In that sense, psychopathy is self-perpetuating.

Their analysis revealed that the average benefit of firing toxic workers is around four times greater than that of adding a good employee to the organization. Remarkably, even if companies could attract a superstar employee— defined as someone in the top 1 percent of job performance— getting rid of a toxic worker would be twice as beneficial financially. And this benefit is without considering any likely collateral damage, such as litigation, regulatory penalties, and decreases in employee morale. If the ripple effect for bad behaviors is as strong for employees, one can only imagine how big it is for leaders, who affect many more people in the organization.

His analysis showed that the most effective CEOs were not charismatic but were remarkably persistent and humble. They excelled not at self-promotion but at nurturing talent in their teams. Instead of aspiring to a possible second career as standup comedians or reality TV stars, these effective leaders worked to make other people shine and especially get people working together as a high-performing team.

IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad was reportedly worth $25 billion just before his death in 2018. But he lived in a modest house, drove a 1993 Volvo, bought his clothes at a flea market, and never traveled first class. Mary Barra is the CEO of General Motors, where she started at the age of eighteen. Despite being the most powerful female executive in the world and the first female CEO of any car company, she is consensus driven and team oriented, and her personality has been described as “vanilla” and “quiet.” According to Joann Muller of Forbes, Wall Street hailed Barra for accomplishing more in three years than most CEOs do in thirty; under her leadership, General Motors has enjoyed three years of record earnings.

The effects of humble leadership tend to cascade down to the rest of the organization, turning leaders into genuine role models. These effects have been demonstrated in recent studies by Brad Owens from the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University and David Hekman from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado. When leaders behave humbly, employees emulate this behavior and display more modesty, admit mistakes, share credit with others, and are more receptive to others’ ideas and feedback. Using data from 607 individuals grouped into 161 teams (both in research labs and in real work environments), the authors demonstrated a social-contagion effect for humble leadership, which enhanced selfless and collaborative behaviors in their followers and, in turn, in team performance.

The key indicators of charisma included the following behaviors:

• Inspires employees, communicates, and implements the vision well

• Acts as a role model and walks the talk

• Is sensitive to the cultural norms of the organizations

• Recognizes employees for their accomplishments, giving credit where it is due

• Uses emotional communication effectively

• Is good at identifying and nurturing employees’ potential

• In addition, the leaders also completed assessments of their own social and emotional skills.

To be clear, many charismatic people are neither psychopathic nor narcissistic, in the same way that many psychopathic and narcissistic people have absolutely no charisma. But when these darkside traits are lubricated with charisma, they can make leaders pretty lethal. The more we rely on charisma as a marker of leadership potential, the more we risk ending up with toxic leaders who are exploiting their charms and influence to grab power and manipulate their followers.

Because of the abstract nature of leadership, charisma often ends up being a convenient proxy for it, especially in the absence of other clear indicators. However, it is a poor proxy, and we ignore the true, objective indicators of leadership talent and performance at our peril.

Both male leaders with higher EQs and most women leaders display a more transformational leadership style. With this style, the leader focuses on changing followers’ attitudes and beliefs and engaging them on a deep emotional level rather than telling them what to do—think Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey.

Leaders better able to identify and manage emotions are also better able to motivate others, and most of the variability in transformational leadership arises from levels of EQ.

Although EQ was originally considered a form of intelligence, strong evidence suggests that it mostly represents individuals’ personal effectiveness, or the ability to navigate everyday interpersonal challenges successfully, both emotionally and socially. Clearly, personal effectiveness requires a minimum degree of self-control and resilience, critical elements of EQ. In addition, EQ is strongly associated with empathy, the ability to know what other people are feeling and thinking. And to be effective in any aspect of your personal life, you need to be able to influence others; empathy helps you do so.

Empathic leaders’ ability to see problems from other people’s perspectives makes them less self-centered and more flexible in problem solving.

If you really want to understand yourself, skip the six months in an ashram in India, and instead pay attention to how other people see you.

Good leadership requires intellectual capital. The key components of intellectual capital—domain-specific expertise, experience, and good judgment—not only enable leaders to perform their specific roles, but also give them credibility with their followers.

As a series of studies led by Amanda Goodall from City, University of London, showed, organizations do better when led by experts in the field. Hospitals have better outcomes if their leaders are doctors rather than businesspeople or finance people. In sports, basketball teams perform better when managed by an all-star basketball player, and Formula One teams win more if they are managed by successful former racing drivers. Similarly, universities are more likely to excel when their presidents have a background in science and research rather than being career administrators.

Their analyses revealed that leaders’ technical expertise was the single most important predictor of their subordinates’ engagement—even more than their salary! Moreover, by examining longitudinal data from teams that changed leaders, Artz and his team highlighted a clear causal effect: when a newly appointed leader inherited an established team in the organization, the morale of the team rose if the new leader had higher levels of technical expertise than his or her predecessor had.

Even when leaders show strong potential regarding their intellectual capital, their social capital is key. Social capital concerns the network and connections that leaders have at their disposal. As David Ogilvy, the wizard advertising tycoon who inspired the Mad Men character of Don Draper used to say, “Contacts mean contracts.” Who you know determines not just how you lead, but also whether you lead at all, wherever you operate.

Since leadership is, at its core, a process of influence, those who form broader and richer relationships with others will undoubtedly be in a better position to influence. In fact, research suggests that one of the best single indicators of a leader’s influence—not just in business but also in politics and the military—is how central the person is in the organization’s network.

You ask the members of the organization how close they are to others, where they go for advice, and who they regard as a source of knowledge and expertise. Alternatively, you can use passive measures, such as contextual email data: how many people you regularly connect with, how often, and how interconnected they are.

Finally, good leadership requires psychological capital, that is, how individuals will lead and whether they will make use of their capabilities.

According to meta-analyses of fifty years of research on the key psychological capital predictors of leadership effectiveness, bright side personality traits such as curiosity, extraversion, and emotional stability explain around 40 percent of the variability between leaders’ performance.

Dark side traits can be divided into three groups. The first group is the distancing traits—obvious turnoffs that push leaders away from other people. Being highly excitable and moody has this effect, for instance; or having a deeply skeptical, cynical outlook, which makes it hard to build trust. Another example is leisurely passive-aggressiveness—pretending to have a relaxed, polite attitude while actually resisting cooperation or even engaging in backstabbing.

The second group of traits has, in contrast, seductive qualities; they are geared to draw people in. These traits are often found in assertive, charismatic leaders, who gather followers or gain influence with bosses through their ability to manage up. Narcissism and psychopathy are in this group.

The third group contains ingratiating traits, which can have a positive connotation in followers but rarely do in leaders. Someone who is diligent, for instance, may try to impress the boss with meticulous attention to detail, but this attention can also translate into preoccupation with petty matters or micromanagement of the person’s own direct reports. Someone who is dutiful and eager to please those in authority can easily become too submissive.

The inside of leaders’ personality concerns their values, which function as an internal moral compass and determine how well the leaders will fit in with the culture of the organization and what type of culture they will create. For example, leaders who value tradition will have a strong sense of right and wrong, will prefer hierarchical organizations, and will have little tolerance of disruption and innovation. Put them in a creative environment, and they will struggle. On the other hand, leaders who value affiliation will have a strong desire to get along with others and will focus on building and maintaining strong interpersonal relationships and on working collaboratively. These leaders will not be engaged if their roles are too isolated and the company cultures are overly individualistic. Finally, altruistic leaders will strive to improve other people’s lives and drive progress in the world, so they will suffer if their organizations are purely driven by profits.

Summing up, if someone has the right intellectual capital, social capital, and psychological capital, they will have more potential to be a good leader. But it’s not guaranteed.

Even if the essence of leadership talent is universal, the context a leader is in will shape how they behave, ought to behave, and are evaluated. As a consequence, some leaders may be popular in some cultures but not in others (think Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chávez), and many high-performing managers may struggle when they are moved from one culture to another, for example, from Germany to Indonesia or from a nongovernmental organization to a fintech startup.

One of the simplest and best descriptions of culture is Google’s ‘how we do things

around here.’ An organization’s culture reflects its leaders’ values, particularly its founders’ values.

Cultures differ in their degree of dominance, with dominant cultures embracing assertive, overconfident, and authoritarian leaders. As we would expect, this dimension of culture is associated with stronger preferences for male leaders and greater resistance to female leaders. Moreover, high-dominance cultures will be less receptive to male leaders who behave in more consultative, nurturing, empathic ways, with clear implications for gender diversity: dominant cultures will have no problem being led only by men and expecting those men to behave in stereotypically masculine ways. Examples of high-dominance national cultures include Mexico, Japan, and Nigeria; low-dominance nations include Sweden, Iceland, and Norway.

Standing out, a desirable goal for both employees and leaders, is generally a disadvantage for group activity. As we would expect, people aspire to leadership more often in individualistic cultures, because leadership in itself is regarded as a way of standing out from the crowd. Conversely, collectivistic cultures focus on team rather than individual accomplishments and have stronger preferences for leaders who are low-key and humble. Leaders in individualistic cultures will be given more leeway to make single-handed decisions and have procedural power, while collectivistic cultures will relish consensual and democratic decision making.

But the evidence-based view of a leader is that of someone able to align a group in the pursuit of a common goal. Accordingly, some people may not be in a position of authority but may act as leaders by encouraging people to work together as a coordinated unit. Likewise, some individuals formally in charge may not be operating as leaders or may have little talent for shaping a winning team. This conflict between true ability and a leadership assignment often arises when employees are rewarded with a leadership role because of their past performance as individual contributors. Under these circumstances, leadership is more of a symbolic title or recognition for past efforts, rather than an actual resource for the team or organization.

As a consequence, organizations often assume that a leader’s career success reflects his or her performance—the more senior a leader, the more talented the person must be.

Clearly, then, women face a catch-22 to confront the pervasive biases underlying people’s stereotype of a good leader. When they display stereotypically masculine traits, women are dismissed for not being a typical woman; when they display stereotypically feminine traits, women are dismissed for not being a typical leader. Consequently, women need to be more qualified than men do, to compete with men for the same leadership roles.

Although these [psychometric] tests may often seem too abstract to relate to everyday work problems, they are without doubt the best single predictor of job performance, and they remain a useful indicator of leadership potential even when other tools and data are taken into account.

Intelligence tests are also worse predictors of leadership than employee performance is, partly because there is less variability in intelligence scores at higher levels on the organizational ladder.

Personality assessments in leader selection have a pragmatic purpose: to predict leadership performance, not to solve the metaphysical question of whether candidates truly mean what they say, or whether scores reflect a leader’s “true self.” As long as the test predicts performance, the question of honesty has less relevance.

... if organizations want leaders to drive change, they would be well advised to hire moderate misfits rather than candidates who are a perfect fit for the current culture. A carbon copy of the rest of the team could perpetuate rather than disrupt the status quo. At the same time, hiring people who are radically different will rarely generate the desired change. More likely, these leaders would end up disrupting only themselves.

Well-designed climate surveys, which crowdsource people’s views and experiences of the organizational culture, reveal a company’s true values much better than do the aspirational competencies curated by senior executives.

Workforce analytics: Since we spend most of our working hours online, we are leaving behind a rich digital footprint encapsulating a vast repertoire of behaviors, preferences, and thoughts. Some organizations will therefore assess talent by monitoring and measuring day-to-day employee activities, uncovering new signals for potential, engagement, and

performance.

Humanyze, an MIT spin off led by Ben Waber, who coined the term people analytics, tags employees and leaders with sensors that capture their movements, communications, and even physiological responses (e.g., stress, excitement, and boredom). Just by analyzing anonymous group-level data, the firm can help organizations identify invisible elements of work relations, such as the hidden power dynamics, in a firm.

For example, in a recent study reported in Harvard Business Review, Waber and his team set out to decode the behavioral differences between men and women in a large multinational firm and explore whether such differences could partly explain the underrepresentation of women in the senior leadership ranks (where they accounted for just 20 percent). The researchers gathered email data, meeting schedule data, and location data for hundreds of employees, across all seniority levels, over four months. Of particular relevance was the data collected with sensors some employees wore. The sensors recorded who talked with whom; where, when, and for how long people communicated with each other; and who dominated each conversation. Waber’s team expected to find behavioral differences between men and women pertaining to people’s drive and networking habits: ‘Perhaps women had fewer mentors, less face time with managers, or weren’t as proactive as men in talking to senior leadership.’ However, the results showed no significant differences between what women and men did at work: ‘Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were.

Interestingly, network analysis can reveal significant gaps between who the official leaders are and who is informally exercising leadership in the organization. For instance, research has shown that there is little overlap between individuals who are acting as the main agents of innovation—by generating ideas and proactively translating creative initiatives into actual innovations—and those with a formal innovation leadership role.

Think about this: we have inspirational stories—both real and imaginary—of people who went from extreme poverty to mega wealth, from alarming sickness to obsessive health freaks, and from ignorance to wisdom. However, we don’t even bother making up stories of bosses who went from terrible to amazing. If we did, they would probably be classified as science fiction. In contrast, and as earlier chapters have demonstrated, there is no shortage of real-life examples for leaders who were great until they deteriorated. The pathway from good to bad seems much easier than the one going from bad to good.

Going from leadership incompetence to leadership competence is not easy, but compelling evidence attests to the efficacy of well-designed, albeit rare, leadership development programs. So, some programs do work. But their effectiveness is built on making leaders aware of their limitations, persuading them to replace their toxic habits with more effective ones, and linking those habits to critical business performance metrics. There are ways of doing it right, and helping leaders improve can make organizations more effective.

...around 30 percent of leadership potential is determined by genetic factors. While this lower percentage attributed to “nature” may seem like good news for both the leadership development industry and individuals hoping to boost their leadership talents, we still don’t necessarily understand or control the remaining 70 percent that is “nurture.” In fact, we are much better at predicting than boosting leadership performance. If we want an animal to climb a tree, we are better off finding a squirrel than training a fish.

...simply evaluating where leaders stand on the general dimensions of personality—the big five— accounted for around 50 percent of the variability in leadership emergence and effectiveness, meaning that half of your success as a leader is dictated by your personality. Furthermore, whereas it takes a great deal of time and effort to change even the smallest of personal habits, personality can be evaluated rapidly with standardized assessments that can be administered remotely in less than forty-five minutes.

Fundamentally, coaching is not pure science. It is partly an art, which explains the huge variability in effectiveness between different coaches. The success of coaching will largely depend on the talent and skill of the coach, and individual coaches’ characteristics and behaviors have been found to matter more than does the coaching method.

Tim Theeboom and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam published a seminal meta-analysis in this area, reviewing forty-six independent studies on coaching effects. They found that 70 percent of the individuals who were coached could be expected to outperform those who weren’t. Key EQ areas that coaching could improve included coping skills, stress management, and self-regulation, the last of which is a core component of motivation and affects how leaders set and achieve their goals.

Self-awareness, the cornerstone of leadership development, has been valued for thousands of years. The entrance to the temple of Apollo in Delphi was inscribed know thyself. Socrates argued that the essence of his wisdom was to accept his ignorance. Given that people are generally unaware of their limitations, which are exacerbated when they become leaders, leadership development interventions should focus on boosting leaders’ self-awareness. Research suggests that greater self-awareness is a defining feature of high-performing leaders.Accordingly, because good coaching enhances the person’s self-awareness, coaching is often described as systematic feedback.

A controlled experimental study of 1,361 global corporation managers showed that feedback-based coaching increased the managers’ propensity to seek advice and improved their subsequent performance one year later.

First, as people grow older they tend to become slightly more boring versions of their younger selves. Their agreeableness and conscientiousness goes up, but their openness to new experiences goes down. We call this change psychological maturity, but it’s really a euphemism for boring.

Second, when leaders change, they tend to become more exaggerated versions of themselves. Niche picking, the psychological principle that explains this tendency, concerns our natural inclination to seek out experiences that are a good fit for our personality. When we do look for these familiar, preferred activities, our proclivities are strengthened. For example, extraverted leaders will seek out situations in which they can connect with new people, be the center of attention, and behave in more upbeat and energetic ways, and those situations will, in turn, make those leaders more upbeat and energetic and better at both connecting with others and performing as the center of attention.

In sum, bad leaders are unlikely to turn into talented, inspirational, or high-performing leaders. Yes, they can change, but most leaders won’t improve much beyond what you have seen them do in the past, especially if they are left to their own devices. Human inertia makes professional development interventions, such as executive coaching, indispensable, though a much more effective strategy for improving the quality of leaders would be to focus more time, effort, and resources on selecting talented people into leadership roles. As in any other area, prevention is a much better option than treatment, and while there’s no need to choose between one and the other—both should be pursued—leaders will be much more likely to improve when they have been correctly selected.

Drexler’s transformative impact came as no surprise to those who worked for him. Although he was known for his no-nonsense, blunt style, he commanded respect and admiration from everyone. Few worked as hard as he did, and his hands-on approach to driving growth, combined with his shrewd judgment and expert decision-making and trend-spotting ability, made him a great leader.

And yet, Gap fired Drexler in 2002 amid a decline in growth and revenues, prompting many observers to suggest that he was not the right leader to sustain Gap’s long-term success. Although Drexler moved on to become the CEO of J.Crew, where he doubled the company’s revenues and transformed the brand into a household name, he eventually stepped down from that job in response to declining sales as well—a repeat of the Gap story.

Although Drexler’s story is unique, it also shares something with all other leadership case studies: it is impossible to draw conclusions from a sample size of one person. And, whether a leadership fable is a success or a failure depends on where you put the ending.

More precisely, traits such as confidence, narcissism, psychopathy, and charisma advance individuals’ careers without improving the success of the groups they lead. Clearly, we would be better off if we sifted out individuals with such traits, as opposed to rewarding them. The success of teams and organizations is more important than an individual’s personal success, especially when individual victory harms the rest of the group.

A comprehensive review spanning seventy-five years of research shows that height is as strong a predictor of who will become a leader as IQ is—for both men and women.

The group members knew their leader’s reputation and could accurately judge other members’ talent and potential for leadership. In addition, these groups were extremely democratic and tended to elect leaders by consensus. As we would expect, this approach led to a high standard of leadership competence, with most chiefs leading through example, reason, and peaceful persuasion. Moreover, these small hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, with minimal power differences between men and women and many key duties shared between the sexes.

Leadership, the process that enables individuals to work together in the pursuit of a common goal, has been a critical resource throughout the evolution of humankind. Every significant accomplishment in human history—the use of fire, the invention of writing, the mapping of the human genome, and so on—sprang from collective action that could not have occurred without leadership.

As this book has tried to show, organizations can take concrete steps both to improve the performance of their leaders and to increase the representation of women in leadership. They can stop interpreting displays of overconfidence, narcissism, psychopathy, and charisma as signs of leadership potential. They can also acknowledge the importance of EQ, which should be a core competency in any data-driven model of leadership potential. Paying more attention to EQ would augment both the quality of leaders and the number of female leaders, increasing the overall levels of personal effectiveness, self-awareness, and transformational leadership in organizations.

Putting more women in leadership roles does not necessarily improve the quality of leadership, whereas putting more talented leaders into leadership roles will increase the representation of women.

...any deliberate attempt to introduce formal quotas for an underrepresented group will inevitably convey the impression that such a group is less capable. Why would they need help otherwise? This incorrect assumption is based on the illusion that current systems are meritocratic. We have to challenge this assumption by acknowledging and tackling the politics and nepotism that corrupt the selection of leaders rather than by using positive discrimination.

To improve the quality of leadership, then, we cannot simply focus on merit. We need to be clearer about the leadership qualities we are looking for: emotional intelligence, intellectual capital, social capital, and psychological capital.

Doing so [taking a critical look at a company’s leadership] will create the collateral benefit of boosting the proportion of women in leadership. Incidentally, this path will also increase the representation of competent men in leadership roles, as men too are currently disadvantaged by the same toxic criteria that stop talented women from becoming leaders.

Their [Frank Dobbin and Jiwook Jung] results showed that although adding more women to boards did not change the firms’ performance, it led to a decrease in the firms’ stock valuation. These findings highlight an alarming reality: irrespective of the actual performance differences between men and women, people—and, in this case, investors—are unlikely to change their beliefs, and beliefs drive decisions.

But even more critically, we must put in place much bigger obstacles for the disproportionate glut of incompetent men who are so adept at becoming leaders, to everyone’s peril.