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.

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.

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.

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.

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.