“Look around your office. Turn on the TV. Incompetent leadership is everywhere, and there’s no denying that most of these leaders are men,” reads the provocative blurb on a new book about leadership.
Released this month in hardcover by Harvard Business Review Press, the book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It), Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks two powerful questions: Why is it so easy for incompetent men to become leaders? And why is it so hard for competent people–especially competent women–to advance?
Marshaling decades of rigorous research, Chamorro-Premuzic points out that although men make up a majority of leaders, they underperform when compared with female leaders. In fact, most organizations equate leadership potential with a handful of destructive personality traits, like overconfidence, narcissism, and low emotional intelligence. In other words, these traits may help someone get selected for a leadership role, but they backfire once the person has the job.
When competent women—and men who don’t fit the stereotype—are unfairly overlooked, we all suffer the consequences. The result is a deeply flawed system that rewards arrogance rather than humility, and loudness rather than wisdom.
There is a better way. With clarity and verve, Chamorro-Premuzic shows us what it really takes to lead and how new systems and processes can help us put the right people in charge.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, co-founder of personality assessment firm deepersignals.com, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. ♠️