Over the years, a number of interesting studies have explored just what it is we expect from leaders. For instance, a study from a few years go set out to explore what it is that helps to define a leader, and whether the characteristics that do so are also helpful in other walks of life.
The authors suggest that we appear to be unduly influenced by the physical appearance of the leaders we choose, although this is often a reflection of the circumstances we are in, with peaceful times delivering very different leaders to tumultuous ones.
The paper suggests however that our preference for particular appearances is not simply rooted in the circumstances, but also our perceptions of social conflict.
Perceptions of leadership
The perception of leadership is one that has perplexed organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic for several years. A few years ago he wrote a provocative article for HBR where he argued that the challenge of getting more women into leadership positions could be helped if we shifted our perception of what leaders actually need to be. The problem was less one of not selecting enough female leaders, but that we pick too many utterly hopeless male ones.
It’s a thesis that he expanded upon in a recently published book, in which he calls out the numerous examples of poor leadership, and suggests that the solution is to have much higher expectations of our male leaders than we do today.
He argues that we typically associate leadership with masculine features, which in turn causes us to regard female leaders (who don’t display such features) negatively. This is highlighted in studies showing that despite actual behavior being identical between male and female employees, we still tend to promote men into leadership roles more than women.
He believes that in many ways, women are better suited to the challenges of modern leadership, as they are often better at managing people (whereas men are better at managing tasks), which fits into a modern world that requires strong people management skills to work alongside technology that has automated many of the more routine and task-based jobs. In a world where things like creativity and emotional intelligence are key, then female leaders should be coming to the fore.
Objective assessment
Whilst there have been numerous attempts to get more representative leadership therefore, he argues that until we are able to create a world in which leaders are evaluated objectively rather than subjectively, our perceptions of what leaders should look and act like will tend to trump the reality of what we need our leaders to be.
This is compounded by leadership development programs that still too often seek to encourage women to emulate the leadership behaviors of men. We expect them to get better at promoting themselves and taking credit for the achievements of their team. We hope that they’ll blame others for their mistakes and focus on their own career rather than the success of their team and their organization.
In such a scenario, even if more women do make their way into leadership, he argues that they will do so only by ‘out-maling’ men, and the quality of leadership will be no better than it is now. Just as we don’t want incompetent men to scale the leadership heights, nor should we strive to enable incompetent women to do so either.
Far better is to encourage a world in which we have a healthier perception of what leaders should be, and therefore do away with a culture that seems to encourage and prefer incompetent men to lead our teams and organizations.
