Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1552

What's to Be Learned from Ousted Leaders?

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is by all accounts a mensch. And what people used to call a stitch. When you meet him — for me it was at a BankInter-hosted gathering of scientists, business innovators, and policy experts in Madrid — you're struck by his no-nonsense style and gruff Brooklyn charm. No matter your age, Trachtenberg is likely to address you as "kid." The straight-talking President emeritus of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. is the son of working-class, New York Jews who seems never to have forgotten where he came from.

Trachtenberg is a lawyer by training who earned degrees at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard. He did a stint in the Johnson administration before becoming an exceptionally successful university president. From early days, he was a scrappy leader. A Jesuit friend of mine at neighboring Georgetown once told me, with admiration, how for years Trachtenberg outfoxed the rival school in everything from strategy to marketing to real estate acquisition, and in the process transformed underdog GW into a national powerhouse.

At some point in his nearly two decades at George Washington (he retired in 2007), Trachtenberg must have noted that he was beating the odds on tenure. Meanwhile, for his peers in US higher education, those odds are only getting worse. From 2006 to 2011, presidents' average length of service dropped from eight and a half years to seven, continuing a long-term trend.

A few years ago, Trachtenberg, together with Gerald B. Kauvar (a research professor and expert in Victorian literature) and former university chancellor E. Grady Bogue, undertook to discover how it is that seemingly competent leaders so often find themselves out on the street. The series of interviews they conducted turned into Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It (Johns Hopkins University Press). It's a book with relevance far beyond academe.

Some of the case studies put forth by Trachtenberg, Kauvar, and Bogue yield straightforward lessons. Their basic words to the wise? If you don't want to fail as a university president, 1) always meet your business objectives; 2) communicate clearly; 3) never stop tending to your key constituencies; and 4) be resilient. The last, referring to the ability to adapt to the unexpected and recover quickly from setbacks, is particularly hard to master. I have also heard General David Petraeus call it the single most important aspect in running a counterinsurgency (which some university presidents might sometimes feel called on to do).

The derailed presidents in the 16 case studies assembled here all stumbled badly in one or more of the above-mentioned areas. Sometimes a divided or misguided board contributed to their derailment. The book is spiced with anecdotes, although in most instances the authors seek to protect the identity of those involved.

But beyond these basic rules, there's also a valuable reminder throughout the book that durable, effective leadership is an "intricate dance," as the authors put it, too nuanced to be explained by one-size-fits-all formulas.



Case in point. Trachtenberg thinks a university has to be run like a business. Bills have to paid, money has to be respected, he told me in a recent email. Yet the book also emphasizes that the academic enterprise is unique. An institution of higher education, with its hearts-and-minds mission and its complex blend of stakeholders — students, faculty, parents, trustees, alumni, donors, state and local authorities and community — is hardly a business pure and simple. (The same, by the way, can be said about newspapers. So I hope Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who just acquired the Washington Post, will add Presidencies Derailed to his reading list.)

Incidentally, Trachtenberg has his critics — any strong leader does. But he's a guy rooted in something, who seems to be comfortable in his own skin. After meeting him, I also looked into his last book, Big Man on Campus, a memoir. It's good storytelling, with pearls of wisdom enclosed in vignettes that make you laugh out loud. Or at least chuckle. Like the occasion when Trachtenberg bumps into a desperate student who borrows a few bucks to get himself through the weekend. The student, without knowing whom he's dealing with, tries to give the president an unsigned check as reimbursement.

My own takeaway from reading both books is this. Great leadership seldom results from a focus on ROI über alles. And it is possible to discern patterns in the successes and failures of leaders. But no great leader's accomplishment can be wholly described by the few lessons that are transferable from enterprise to enterprise or across different fields and industries. The central and most fascinating pieces of the leadership puzzle are judgment, wisdom, character, and emotional intelligence. So simply stated. So elusive time and again.

How do you train a leader to be a mensch?

CIOs: Scenario Planning Can Save Your Job

It's the rare CIO who applies scenario planning to the business of IT. Yet, in a function driven by innovation and the uncertainties surrounding the application and implication of future technologies, not using scenarios is tantamount to management malpractice.

Scenarios can help IT organizations create more resilient plans, practice for business climate changes, and better drive innovation. IT often falsely believes that once a vision is set, a single narrative must dominate its future. But that belief leads to misalignment as the future unfolds contrary to the assumptions underlying the vision. IT leaders should acknowledge that they need to develop a way of sensing directional shifts early, so that they're not caught flat-footed by the next thing that will disrupt the foundations of their business or their infrastructure.

Creating More Resilient Plans

Any IT professional who believes that their intuition or logic about a future will prove accurate hasn't worked long in IT. Scenarios help IT create more resilient plans by providing a new testing mechanism for everything from portfolio management to the consumerization of IT to employing cloud services.

Let's consider the last example: many organizations are making a big bet on cloud services. This decision brings with it a range of threats, along with new opportunities. Threats range from periodic, temporary outages, to catastrophic failure from the dissolution of the provider, to a merger or acquisition that requires rethinking existing relationships and perhaps renegotiating existing service contracts. Opportunities might include reducing portfolio complexity, driving down costs, and shifting talent from tactical to strategic work. These threats and opportunities require a clear way to test how they will play out against various social, technological, and economic assumptions.

The way threats and opportunities play out will affect talent needs, in-house infrastructure investments, security models, and the deployment of mobility solutions, just to name a few implications. For IT professionals, scenarios help them create a deeper, richer view of the potential futures.

Practice for Business Climate Changes

Building resilient IT plans that take into account future uncertainties in the technological realm is just the start. For IT to deliver its best value to the business, it must test its assumptions about applications, business needs, even its own roll in the business, against the larger context of the business climate.

Much of the fall-out of the Great Recession was exacerbated by the failure of organizations, public and private, to understand how technology and automation would perform under the stress of unusual circumstances. Those organizations did not effectively use tools like scenarios to help them imagine what could happen, let alone establish technological contingencies for mitigating the impact of systemic failures like the dissolution of Lehman Brothers or averting automated trading cascades in various markets.

For many industries, technology has become the transformative force. Often that technology does not directly arise from existing information technology, but IT will be called upon to integrate, leverage, and ensure service levels and communications to support the business transformation. Scenarios can play a strategic role in helping both the business and IT understand how these new technologies might evolve, what information technology support they may require, and where the risks may lie.

Scenarios and Innovation

Many organizations look to IT to help innovate products, processes, and business models. But there is a problem: there is no data about the future. IT cannot foretell which technologies or vendors will dominate in the future. But if IT leaders document uncertainties and create scenarios, they can provide better-informed guesses, and more importantly, monitor the uncertainties to determine which of their imagined futures is most likely to unfold.

As CIOs strive to provide more strategic value, scenarios can offer a tool to help facilitate business transformation. IT, perhaps more than any other individual function, faces mounting uncertainties that affect how the CIO's organization is run, but also how well the organization as a whole adapts to a more technologically enabled future. As marketing, for instance, takes up its own technological destiny with online and mobile ads, app development, marketing automation, and the deployment of digital experience, IT owes the organization guidance and governance on these developments--and they owe their business partners a robust way to help them mitigate the risks and maximize the opportunities.

Today's CIOs who want to prosper in tomorrow's tumultuous business climate need to embrace scenarios as a framework that will infuse their leaders with strategic perspective and meaningful doubt, and offer tools for working through both. The best of tomorrow's IT leaders will help their entire organizations recognize the impact of uncertainty, and force them to grapple with its implications in every decision they make.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right
IT Doesn't Matter (to CEOs)
The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer
Google's CIO on How to Make Your IT Department Great

Beware the Sirens of Management Pseudo-Science

Management is not an exact science, they say. And I guess most things that involve the study of human behavior cannot be. But I sometimes wonder if that is the reason — or the excuse — that the business sections at airport bookshops are so full of nonsense.

Quite often these books are written with panache. And the authors — aspiring "management thinkers" and "gurus" (never scientists) — have an excellent sense of the pulse of the business public. They are neither crooks nor charlatans; they write what they believe. But that doesn't make their beliefs right. People can believe vigorously in voodooism, homeopathy, and creationism.

A common formula to create a best-selling business book is to start with a list of eye-catching companies that have been outperforming their peers for years. This has the added advantage of creating an aura of objectivity because the list is constructed using "objective, quantitative data." Subsequently, the management thinker takes the list of superior companies and examines (usually in a rather less objective way) what these companies have in common. Surely — is the assumption and foregone conclusion — what these companies have in common must be a good thing, so let's write a book about that and become rich.

In Search of Excellence and Built to Last, to name a few classic examples, followed that formula — including the getting rich bit. One piece of advice to come out of such tomes, for instance, has been to create a strong, coherent organizational culture, like most of high-performing firms studied. However, we now know from academic research that a strong culture is often the result of a period of high performance, rather than its cause. In fact, a very coherent culture can even be a precursor of what is called a competency trap, where firms get stuck in their old beliefs and ways of doing things. Not coincidentally, the list of superior companies frequently starts unravelling when the book is still at the printer's.

Another formula is to introduce a new and fashionable management practice, such as Six Sigma, Lean, or the ancient Total Quality Management and ISO9000. The book not only describes the practice but also introduces us to the success stories of early adopters, in the form of awe-inspiring interviews and case studies.

However, nowadays, we know from academic research on such practices that in the long run they usually do not create any value, that early adopters are motivated to exaggerate their benefits, that they can stifle long-term innovation and that in the process of popularizing the practice, the original version (which might have worked for the company that developed it) becomes distorted, oversimplified, or just plain ineffectual. Most of them go out of fashion after a while, and some years later get smirkingly referred to as a fad.

But the books continue to sell, new lists of excellent companies emerge, and fads resurface. And that is perhaps no wonder, because it is only human to be susceptible to the beguiling songs of Sirens that bear the promise of prosperous times. But sometimes it makes sense to do what Odysseus instructed his men to do, when the Sirens were in sight: plug your ears with beeswax and just sail past.

Emerging from a Bad Mood into a Good Mood Can Make You More Creative

People who were plunged into bad moods by being asked to write about distressing experiences, but were then put into good moods by being asked to write about joyful events, were subsequently better at imagining creative ideas for improving university teaching than people who had been in positive moods all along, says a team led by Ronald Bledow of Ghent University in Belgium. For example, their average originality score by independent raters was 4.12 on a 7-point scale, versus 3.53 for the others. An episode of negative mood can lay the foundation for high creativity at a later point in time, the authors say.

How To Choose The Next Head of the Fed

As allies of Larry Summers and Janet Yellen, the two candidates for chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, are busy "waging behind-the-scenes efforts" (in the words of The Washington Post), it might be useful to provide an independent notion of how the decision should be made.

At the moment, there seems to be little consensus on just how the two differ and which differences matter most. The New York Times recently published a 2000-word article trying to divine the likely policies of Summers versus Yellen. Googling Yellen vs. Summers nets some 12.5 million results. The Economist observed:

The low tone of the debate is disappointing. Not enough attention is being paid to the candidates' economic views. In a 2003 study of past Fed chairmen Christina Romer and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley, reckon that a candidate who subscribes to a "sound" framework of basic monetary principles is most likely to do well.

We think relative monetary policy expertise is far from the key factor that should bias us toward one over the other.



Recent scrutiny of the U.S. financial services industry has mainly focused on two issues: the corruption and malfeasance of financial institutions (money laundering, betting against their own clients, etc.), and the transfer of business risk from "too big to fail" institutions to taxpayers, leading to a "heads I win, tails you lose" relationship between the finance and the rest of the economy. The debate has been about enforcement and regulation of the industry. Both valid points, but both miss the crucial issue.

The deeper question concerns the function of the financial sector within the macro economy. Here also there are two issues. The financial industry accounts for about 8% of GDP, but about 32% of corporate profits. These excess profits are extracted from the real economy — consumers and businesses — and constitute a drag on non-financial growth. The recent suit against Goldman Sachs for running aluminum ingots back and forth among warehouses, inflating the price to OEMs and thus consumers, is a stark example.

But worse, the financial sector no longer serves its proper purpose: to enable productive real-sector investment. The credit tightening, despite huge spreads, of the last four years offers broad evidence. Instead the industry has become a mechanism for the systematic concentration of income and wealth. It is to a great extent through the activities of finance that the increase in national income of the past three decades has been distributed in large part to the owners of financial firms and assets, rather than to the middle class.

This question — the drag on the productive economy and on who participates in growth — affects every individual in the society. And it will influence the long-term future of the U.S. economy. History shows that concentration of wealth to the 1% and the 0.1% cannot continue indefinitely. Though it's hard to imagine financial executives and regulators being marched to the guillotine, the protests of the Occupy movement and the one-day strikes of minimum wage workers are certainly signals of discontent. But "revolution" — in the sense of a shift of power and influence away from those who currently hold it — could come at a much grander scale, through the loss of faith in global market capitalism within the developing world. Malaysia's suspension of currency conversion to lock out speculators during the 1997 "Asian Contagion" is a precedent, when Prime Minister Mahathir putting Malaysians' interests above those of holders of Malaysian bonds. Parts of Africa already see more advantage in allying with China than with the West.

Financial reform should not be perceived as a zero-sum struggle between financiers and their regulators, though it is the outcome of this struggle that the Summers vs. Yellen bout centers on. It should be drawn as a question of growth strategy and economic policy, ensuring that Western companies retain their license to operate in the future global economy. And in the long run the West's financial sector will be better off as a result.

Let the Justice Department enforce the money laundering and fraud laws; let the Secretary of the Treasury ensure that trading risks are the responsibility of traders. But as for the Chair of the Fed? The President should choose the person who best understands that the financial system should serve the economy and the society, not the other way around.

The Rise of the Megacorporation

An interview with Richard Adelstein, professor of economics at Wesleyan University and author of The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1864-1914.

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by August 30.

Closing the Chasm Between Strategy and Execution

Setting strategy is elegant. It's a clean and sophisticated process of collecting and analyzing data, generating insights, and identifying smart paths forward. Done at arm's length in an academic fashion, tight logic is the only glue needed to hold ideas together. The output is a smooth narrative in a professional-looking document made up of Venn diagrams, 2x2 matrices, and high-level plans of attack. Jettison this business. Focus efforts here. Build up this organizational capability. Executives buy into the plan. The strategists, confident in their intellectual prowess, quietly recede into the background.

Then the trouble starts. Execution is a minefield. The clean and elegant logic of strategy gets dirty in the real world. Agendas compete. Priorities clash. Decisions stall. Communication breaks down. Timelines get blown. It's never a question of if these problems will happen; it's a question of when and to what degree. Managing these challenges takes street smarts and muscle. Overwhelming success means you take a few punches, but still make the plan happen. The process is always a little ugly. The executors' dirt-in-the-fingernails view on the ground is much different from the strategists' high-minded view from the air.

The implication is obvious — strategists and executors must work together better to bridge these two worlds. It's common sense. Unfortunately, it's far from common practice. What typically happens is an awkward hand-off between the two. In the worst cases the strategists adopt an elitist, disconnected mindset: We're the idea people, someone else will make it happen. They don't bother to truly understand what it takes to implement the ideas. They don't engage the executors early and ask, "How will this actually work?" The executors contribute to the trouble as well. Often they don't truly understand the thinking behind the strategy. They take it at face value and don't ask enough tough questions.

When things fall apart, each points a finger at the other side.

The easy solutions for this divide are the process solutions: better project management, clearer rules of engagement, and tighter operating policies. The tougher (and more powerful) solutions are the cultural solutions: getting each side to actually care about what the other side is doing. Not just from a lip-service perspective, but from a fundamental-belief-that-my-success-is-inextricably-tied-to-your-success-so-I-better-engage-with-you perspective.

Strategy and execution is a false dichotomy, unnaturally sheared apart in order to divide labor in increasingly complex organizations. It's an efficient approach. Alone, the shearing isn't a problem. The problem is that both sides don't see it as their responsibility to intelligently pull the two sides back together again. They leave a chasm, hoping that it will miraculously close on its own. It never does. Things just fall through it.

The best strategists and executors don't see a hand-off between strategy and execution. They see an integrated whole. They continuously hand ideas back and forth throughout all phases of a project, strengthening them together. They fight to bring each other closer. Over the years, I've noticed that the best strategists and executors believe certain things that drive their success — things that the mediocre strategists and executors don't believe.

The best strategists believe:



If I can't see and articulate how we're actually going to make this strategy work, it probably won't work. Smart strategists know that there are a lot of gaps, holes, and challenges in their strategies. They tirelessly keep a critical eye on the viability of their plans and stay curious — continuously asking themselves and others, how will this really work? When they find issues, they team up with the executors and get out in front of them.

While it's painful to integrate execution planning into my strategizing, it's even more painful to watch my strategies fail. Most strategists dislike execution planning. It's a tedious process for someone who likes to think about big ideas. But good strategists understand that they have unique insights into the strategy that executors will miss, usually to disastrous ends. So they stay engaged.

Sounding smart is overrated. Doing smart is where the real value lies. Effective strategists aren't full of themselves. They realize their ideas are just that — ideas. They know that if they're not executed well, their strategies are nothing more than daydreams.

I'm just as responsible for strong execution as the executor is. Is this actually true? Likely not. But it's a powerful mindset to hold. The best strategists see themselves as leaders, not merely thinkers. They feel their job is to deliver results, not just ideas.

The best executors believe:



I need to be involved in the strategy process early — even if that means I have to artfully push my way into it. It'd be easy if executors naturally had a seat at the strategy table. Unfortunately, they often don't. Many still receive strategies as a hand-off. Smart executors don't take this sitting down. They figure out how to get into the strategy process early.

I need to be perceived as relevant and valuable to the strategy process. Smart executors know that they must earn a seat at the strategy table by actually adding value. They must move things forward by providing relevant and thoughtful considerations that strengthen the strategy. They can't show up and "just listen" in strategy meetings or else they won't be invited back.

I need to know the "whys" behind the strategy. Smart executors want to know the intent behind the strategy. They want to know the thinking that drove certain choices. They know that this knowledge is crucial to making tough judgment calls when circumstances change down the implementation road (as they inevitably do).

I'm just as responsible for strong strategy as the strategist is. Again, is this actually true? Probably not. But that's irrelevant. The best executors see themselves as leaders, not merely implementers. They feel their job is to deliver strategic advantage for the organization, not just a project.

You can see a clear thread of responsibility running throughout all the beliefs above. Not responsibility for a given task, but rather responsibility for the not-given tasks — the messy spots in the middle where it's not clear who should own something. The best strategists, executors, and leaders stand up and say, "I'm responsible for it" even if it isn't in their job description. It's doubly powerful when both strategists and executors do this, meeting in the middle. That's true collaborative leadership. When these spots go unwatched, un-owned, and unaddressed, they bring down projects and eventually whole companies.

IT Governance is Killing Innovation

Recent CEB research shows that work has become much more interdependent — employees increasingly need to tap a broader array of internal and external colleagues and partners to be successful in their jobs. The emergence of this new work environment has significant implications for how IT should enable business growth and, more specifically, for the kinds of investments IT should be making to support employees.

Unfortunately, when it comes to IT's ability to allocate investments in response to the new work environment, traditional governance processes prove grossly outdated. Some of the key challenges:

Companies don't identify the very best ideas for investment because most capital allocation processes start with business partners' existing ideas about projects to fund. As we've noted in our previous blog, senior business partners might not be that knowledgeable about what actually drives productivity on the front lines.

Companies allocate capital to the wrong investments because our traditional emphasis on ROI-based business cases undermines IT's ability to invest in high-return-but-hard-to-measure areas like improving knowledge worker productivity.

Companies tend to spread their capital allocation bets too thinly across business groups or functions, often for political reasons. This practice helps 'keep the peace' but means that often the most transformational opportunities get short-changed.

Across our year of research into this problem, we have identified a select group of companies that are rethinking their governance and investment processes to circumvent the problems outlined above.

Expand First, Filter Second

Most CIOs will tell you that they have no shortage of ideas to invest in — the hard part is whittling down to the right ones. Push that a bit further and what most CIOs say is that those ideas are in the form of project requests from business partners. The problem is that these "bottom-up" project requests often miss the big picture as too many are incremental or uninspiring. Yes, while most of these requests are vetted for alignment with corporate strategy, what's often missing is how these requests fit within a broader context of how the business overall generates value. Furthermore, this lack of context prevents organizations from identifying other investment ideas that have high potential but haven't bubbled up organically through project requests.

To address this challenge, a global transportation company we spoke with is using a strategic lens to expand the list of project ideas to find the ones with the highest potential corporate value, before filtering them. They start with a map of the company's critical business capabilities — those concrete business activities that are vital to meeting a strategic goal (e.g. rapid new product roll-out). Then, they look at the health of the information available to business leaders who manage those capabilities. They find this leads them into all sorts of overlooked opportunities and provides them with a good proxy for where IT investment can have significant business impact, which can better inform prioritization decisions.

Prioritize Capabilities, not Projects

The currency of most IT project prioritization meetings is the ROI-based business case. As mentioned above, this measure works very well for comparing projects that deliver hard benefits, but undermine the ability to invest in critical capabilities that have a long-term payoff horizon or highly innovative capabilities where the payoff is uncertain.



A global high-tech equipment provider is taking a different approach. Similar to the transportation company mentioned earlier, they start with a top down view of critical business capabilities and pillars required to support long-term business strategy. Then, using customer preference measurement methodologies like conjoint analysis, they survey senior business leaders to determine the relative criticality of each of these pillars. Based on this — and before any projects are even discussed — they are able to map out the relative level of IT investment each capability should receive. So, if the business leadership agrees that capability A is twice as important to realizing their goals as capability B, capability A is targeted for twice as much investment. Projects can then be assessed on contribution to the needs of that pillar, rather than purely on financial metrics like ROI.

CIOs are being asked to arm employees with the capabilities required for success in a new, much more integrated and interdependent work environment. But to do that requires more than capital: it requires a different approach to making decisions and, specifically, rethinking traditional IT project-centric approaches to identifying and funding capital investment opportunities.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right
IT Doesn't Matter (to CEOs)
The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer
Google's CIO on How to Make Your IT Department Great

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women. In line, Freud argued that the psychological process of leadership occurs because a group of people — the followers — have replaced their own narcissistic tendencies with those of the leader, such that their love for the leader is a disguised form of self-love, or a substitute for their inability to love themselves. "Another person's narcissism", he said, "has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own... as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind."



The truth of the matter is that pretty much anywhere in the world men tend to think that they that are much smarter than women. Yet arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent — the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams, and to inspire followers to set aside their selfish agendas in order to work for the common interest of the group. Indeed, whether in sports, politics or business, the best leaders are usually humble — and whether through nature or nurture, humility is a much more common feature in women than men. For example, women outperform men on emotional intelligence, which is a strong driver of modest behaviors. Furthermore, a quantitative review of gender differences in personality involving more than 23,000 participants in 26 cultures indicated that women are more sensitive, considerate, and humble than men, which is arguably one of the least counter-intuitive findings in the social sciences. An even clearer picture emerges when one examines the dark side of personality: for instance, our normative data, which includes thousands of managers from across all industry sectors and 40 countries, shows that men are consistently more arrogant, manipulative and risk-prone than women.

The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male managers to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are actually responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people.

Unsurprisingly, the mythical image of a "leader" embodies many of the characteristics commonly found in personality disorders, such as narcissism (Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin), psychopathy (fill in the name of your favorite despot here), histrionic (Richard Branson or Steve Ballmer) or Machiavellian (nearly any federal-level politician) personalities. The sad thing is not that these mythical figures are unrepresentative of the average manager, but that the average manager will fail precisely for having these characteristics.

In fact, most leaders — whether in politics or business — fail. That has always been the case: the majority of nations, companies, societies and organizations are poorly managed, as indicated by their longevity, revenues, and approval ratings, or by the effects they have on their citizens, employees, subordinates or members. Good leadership has always been the exception, not the norm.

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to "lean in" has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?

Most of the character traits that are truly advantageous for effective leadership are predominantly found in those who fail to impress others about their talent for management. This is especially true for women. There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men. Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of "transformational leadership"), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated.

In sum, there is no denying that women's path to leadership positions is paved with many barriers including a very thick glass ceiling. But a much bigger problem is the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men, and the fact that we tend to equate leadership with the very psychological features that make the average man a more inept leader than the average woman. The result is a pathological system that rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence, to everybody's detriment.

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center





Educate Everyone About Second-Generation Gender Bias
Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace
A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions
Solving the Law Firm Gender Gap Problem

Groups Grow Disappointed with Extroverts Over Time

Upon joining a group, extroverts are perceived as having high status. But in an online experiment involving imagined scenarios, extroverts' perceived status slipped from 4.37 to 3.87 on a 7-point scale as the group came to consider their assertiveness and talkativeness less valuable and to suspect that they were motivated by self-interest, say Corinne Bendersky of UCLA and Neha Parikh Shah of Rutgers. To retain their status, extroverts must contribute at especially high levels to counter growing negative perceptions of them, the researchers say.