ASSESSING PERFORMANCE
What Science Tells Us About
Leadership Potential
By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
SEPTEMBER 21, 2016
Although the scientific study of leadership is well established, its key
discoveries are unfamiliar to most people, including an alarmingly large
proportion of those in charge of evaluating and selecting leaders.
This science-practitioner gap explains our disappointing state of affairs.
Leaders should drive employee engagement, yet only 30% of employees are
engaged, costing the U.S. economy $550 billion a year in productivity loss.
Moreover, a large global survey of employee attitudes toward management
suggests that a whopping 82% of people don’t trust their boss. You only need
to google “my boss is…” or “my manager is…” and see what the
autocomplete text is to get a sense of what most people think of their
leaders.
Unsurprisingly, over 50% of employees quit their job because of their
managers. As the old saying goes, “people join companies, but quit their
bosses.” And the rate of derailment, unethical incidents, and
counterproductive work behaviors among leaders is so high that it is hard to
be shocked by a leader’s dark side. Research indicates that 30%–60% of
leaders act destructively, with an estimated cost of $1–$2.7 million for each
failed senior manager.
Part of the problem is that many widely held beliefs about leadership are
incongruent with the scientific evidence. As Mark Twain allegedly noted, “It
ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for
sure that just ain’t so.” For example, it is quite common for people to believe
that leadership is largely dependent on the situation, that it’s hard to predict
whether someone will be a good (or bad) leader, and that any person can be
a leader. In reality, some people have a much higher probability of becoming
leaders, regardless of the context, and this probability can be precisely
quantified with robust psychological tools.
What do we really know about the measurement of leadership potential?
Here are some critical findings:
Who becomes a leader? Although leaders come in many shapes, a few
personality characteristics consistently predict whether someone is likely to
emerge as a leader. As the most widely cited meta-analysis in this area
shows, people who are more adjusted, sociable, ambitious, and curious are
much more likely to become leaders. (53% of the variability in leadership
emergence is explained by these personality factors.) Unsurprisingly, higher
levels of cognitive ability (IQ) also increase an individual’s likelihood to
emerge as a leader, though by less than 5%. Of course, emergence doesn’t
imply effectiveness, but one has to emerge in order to be effective.
What are the key qualities of effective leaders? The ultimate measure of
leader effectiveness is the performance of the leader’s team or organization,
particularly vis-à-vis competitors. Leadership is a resource for the group, and
effective leaders enable a group to outperform other groups. While the
samepersonality and ability traits described above help leaders become more
effective — they are not just advantageous for emergence — the best leaders
also show higher levels of integrity, which enables them to create a fair and
just culture in their teams and organizations. In addition, effective leaders are
generally more emotionally intelligent, which enables them to stay calm
under pressure and have better people skills. Conversely, narcissistic
leadersare more prone to behaving in unethical ways, which is likely to harm
their teams.
How will the person lead? Not everyone leads in the same way. Leadership
style is largely dependent on personality. Ambitious, thick-skinned leaders
tend to be more entrepreneurial, so they are focused on growth and
innovation. Curious, sociable, and sensitive leaders tend to be
morecharismatic, though charisma often reflects dark side traits, such as
narcissism and psychopathy. Studies also highlight gender differences in
leadership styles, with men being more transactional and women more
transformational. However, gender roles are best understood as a
psychological and normally distributed variable, as people differ in
masculinity and femininity regardless of their biological sex.
Are leaders born or made? Any observable pattern of human behaviors is
the byproduct of genetic and environmental influences, so the answer to this
question is “both.” Estimates suggest that leadership is 30%-60% heritable,
largely because the character traits that shape leadership — personality and
intelligence — are heritable. While this suggests strong biological influences
on leadership, it does not imply that nurture is trivial. Even more-heritable
traits, such as weight (80%) and height (90%), are affected by environmental
factors. Although there is no clear recipe for manipulating the environment in
order to boost leadership potential, well-crafted coaching interventionsboost
critical leadership competencies by about 20%–30%.
What is the role of culture? Culture is key because it drives
employeeengagement and performance. However, culture isn’t the cause of
leadership so much as the result of it. Thus leaders create the explicit and
implicit rules of interaction for organizational members, and these rules
affect morale and productivity levels. When people’s values are closely
aligned with the values of the organization (and leadership), they will
experience higher levels of fit and purpose.
How early can we predict potential? Any prediction is a measure of potential
or the probability of something happening. Because leadership is partly
dependent on genetic and early childhood experiences, predicting it from an
early age is certainly possible. Whether doing so is ethical or legal is a
different question. However, most of the commonly used indicators to gauge
leadership potential — educational achievement, emotional intelligence,
ambition, and IQ — can be predicted from a very early age, so it would be
naïve to treat them as more malleable. Perhaps in the future, leadership
potential will be assessed at a very early age by inspecting people’s saliva.
Does gender matter? Less than we think. The fact that so many leaders are
male has much more to do with social factors (people’s expectations, cultural
norms, and opportunities) than actual gender differences in leadership
potential, which are virtually nonexistent. In fact, some studies have shown
that women are slightly more effective as leaders on the job, but this may be
because the standards for appointing women to leadership positions are
higher than those for appointing men, which creates a surplus of
incompetent men in leadership positions. The solution is not to get women
to act more like men, but to select leaders based on their actual competence.
Why do leaders derail? We cannot ignore the wide range of undesirable and
toxic outcomes associated with leadership. It is not the absence of bright side
qualities, but rather their coexistence with dark side tendencies, that makes
leaders derail. Indeed, as Sepp Blatter, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Bernie
Madoff demonstrate, technical brilliance often coexists with self-destructive
and other destructive traits. This is just one reason why it is so important
forleadership development and executive coaching interventions to highlight
leaders’ weaknesses, and help them keep their toxic tendencies in check.
Although these findings have been replicated in multiple studies, a skeptic
could ask, “Now that we’re (allegedly) living in an era of unprecedented
technological change, could some of these findings be outdated?”
Not really.
Leadership evolved over millions of years, enabling us to function as group-
living animals. It is therefore unlikely that the core foundations of leadership
will change. That said, the specific skills and qualities that enable leaders and
their groups to adapt to the world are certainly somewhat context
dependent. For example, just as physical strength mattered more, and
intellectual ability less, in the past, it is conceivable that human
differentiators such as curiosity, empathy, and creativity will become
more important in a world of ever-growing technological dependence and
ubiquitous artificial intelligence.
In short, the science of leadership is well established. There is no real need to
advance it in order to improve real-world practices. We should focus instead
on applying what we already know, and ignoring what we think we know that
isn’t true.