Persistent Rise of Bad Bosses – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #953

Persistent Rise of Bad Bosses – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #953

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #953 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to aq.pharmaveterans@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Pavel Danilyuk

Credit: Tima Miroshnichenko

Credit: Yan Krukau

This blogpost is based on a talk of Lucia Rahilly of McKinsey with Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of ‘Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix it) (HBR Press 2019).

It is common observation that too many incompetent men rise to leadership positions, which is serious, and in many cases, devastating issue. True, that men also suffer the consequences of bad leadership, but the damage to people and organizations may be much bigger. 

Tomas says their research was focused on abilities, competencies, interests, and personalities, but they also collected data on age, gender, and socio-economic status. They found a remarkable gap whereby gender was one of the strongest predictors of who will reach leadership roles through hiring, nomination, or selection.

Tomas says it doesn’t really matter whether the person in charge identified as male or female; the important thing is that when they are competent, we all benefit, we are more productive, more engaged, and less likely to engage in antisocial behavior. Many competent men are overlooked for leadership roles because they have these qualities – empathy, self-awareness, integrity, and humility – that ultimately make them better leaders, but they don’t really make them leaders to begin with. Only, if you succeed at playing within the current rules of the game, you are going to get further. But if you don’t, you may never be selected.

Women vs Men in Leadership Roles

One of the interesting pieces of research is that women, on the whole, have a similar IQ to men but have higher EQs (emotional intelligence), although the difference in no more than 15 percent. This may help explain why there are fewer women in leadership. There may also be a large number of men who are competent, who have high EQs, who are nice guys, and who may not rise to the top.

There is a lot of antimeritocratic and implicit positive discrimination going on that favors not just men but overconfident, narcissistic, and incompetent men when it comes to leadership roles. If we made leadership selection gender blind and only focused on the traits that have proved to lead to more effective leadership styles and approaches, we would end up with more women in leadership roles. The paradox is that since most leaders are male, probably women are not naturally predisposed to being good leaders; research proves it wrong.

Often, when women are appointed to very senior leadership roles, it isn’t because people have embraced what they bring to the table in terms of EQ – self-awareness, self-control, integrity, humility, people skills etc. Rather it is because they go for a profile who may be biologically female but is more male than real males. This is a queen bee or Margret Thatcher phenomenon that we see in many countries of the world which are run by women who look more alpha male than their male counterparts. The point, therefore, is not to have more biological women in charge, but to have better leaders in charge. 

Role of Technology

It is true that gen AI commoditizes knowledge and access to knowledge. And so, there is a much weaker case for selecting people for leadership based on what they know. It used to be about knowing answers to a lot of question, now, it is more about asking the right questions. The leaders of today, and especially of the future, will be chosen based on their ability to inspire, to motivate, to connect with others at an emotional level, and to understand people on a human and humane level.

When you talk to people about AI and its connection to recruitment, people think it is going to introduce bias to human society; instead, AI exposes these biases. When companies try to use gen AI to select leaders and they find out that the algorithm nominates men 80 percent of time and women 20 percent, it is not the algorithm of the AI that is sexist. It is the system that is providing training data for the AI to learn from – and replicate what has succeeded in the past – that is sexist.

The opportunity to use AI more broadly may remove some of the biases and flows on intuitive human thinking that have led us to where we are today. “It is not that I have a lot of confidence in AI, rather I am very aware of human stupidity, which gives me some confidence in AI”, Tomas remarks. 

Competence and Capital

Three kinds of capital are mentioned in research.

Intellectual capital is your knowledge, your expertise, and your experience – the stuff that you might report on your résumé or your LinkedIn profiles. It includes your titles, capabilities, languages, etc.

Social capital is interesting, as now it may be likened to ‘nepotism’. People said in the ‘50s and the ‘60s that “contacts mean contracts”; the more people you know, the more successful you are. It is important that we develop our networks, but at the same time, social capital is conflated with privilege. It also means, “I can speak to this person, they will get me a job,” even though systems are in place to make things more equal and meritocratic. Social capital still matters.

Psychological capital means your learning ability, curiosity, grit, resilience, self-control, EQ, empathy, and integrity. Those traits are normally distributed in the population; you may have more or less of these, irrespective of where you were born or what you actually know. It is in the interest of the any organization to focus more on that part and less on the others.

Three Steps Forward

Tomas recommends three basic steps.

The first is to get leaders to show how they know that the current leadership is actually adding the most amount of value. In most organizations, there is a discrepancy between individual or personal career success on the one hand and value added to the organization on the other hand. Companies should start to decrease that.

Second is to focus on the business case. Leaders should be committed to elevating the quality of leadership, because it is good for revenues, profitability, innovation etc.

Third is to make leadership selection gender blind. The best gender diversity intervention is done by focusing on talent, rather than gender. If you focus on gender, you may or may not increase the quality of your leaders, but if you focus on talent, you will likely increase the competence and quality of our leaders, as well as increase gender representation. 

Measuring change and evaluating impact are really important because there are a lot of well-meaning interventions that do not necessarily translate into good outcomes. 

Sum Up

Is any organization doing it properly yet? No one is, at least not to the point where it starts mattering. 

Meanwhile, narcissistic, toxic, bad bosses continue to rise, and destroy the organizations and their people.

Concluded.

Disclaimers: Pictures in these blogs are taken from free resources at Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Google. Credit is given where available. If a copyright claim is lodged, we shall remove the picture with appropriate regrets.

For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intention to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, however, it happens unintentionally, I offer my sincere regrets.

References:

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/Why-so-many-bad-bosses-still-rise-to-the-top?cid=other-eml-shl-mip-mck&hlkid=f5a7c5bd9067443cb1abab6a3ac55932&hctky=2208791&hdpid=67441882-b8b0-4792-aadb-3d733b5a7fa4