When it comes to using AI in recruitment, the technology has not got an especially good reputation, with accusations of bias and discrimination commonplace.  Might it do a better job at gauging how leaders are perceived by their teams?

That’s the question posed by research from Carnegie Mellon, which explored over 6,600 well-known leaders to understand common traits and attributes associated with the most effective leaders.

“Classic methodological approaches to studying leadership are costly and slow, and they can only be applied to relatively few leaders and dimensions of evaluation,” the researchers say. “We developed a new methodological approach that can analyze and predict perceptions of leadership in an automated way on a very large scale to estimate how people judge the leadership ability of individuals mentioned in books, news, and social media.”

What makes a leader?

The researchers began with the notion that we probably have a common and shared understanding of the various traits that make up good leadership, and these are then used to help us judge whether someone has the potential to be a good leader.

They hypothesized that well-known leaders tend to be mentioned alongside the traits that make them so effective.  As such, by analyzing the frequency with which famous people were mentioned alongside certain traits, the researchers could develop a semantic representation of each person, which in turn allows us to predict how they are perceived in terms of their leadership abilities.

The researchers trained a machine learning algorithm on a huge body of news articles alongside survey ratings of various well-known figures to understand and predict what kinds of people were more likely to be perceived as effective leaders.  This model was then tested on over 6,600 famous people to see who was regarded as a good leader.

Liberal leaders

Often, those regarded as good leaders were liberators, such as Abraham Lincoln, while explorers were also highly regarded.  The model revealed that celebrities, however, were seldom regarded as good leaders.

The findings of the model were then compared with the survey responses of a few hundred volunteers who were asked to rate the leadership skills of around 300 famous people.  The model compared favorably with the results from the panel, even when things like gender, ethnicity, and political affiliation were considered.

“Our method does more than simply predict people’s judgments of leadership effectiveness,” the researchers say. “The conceptual map we generated can also help uncover the particular traits and concepts that underlie those judgments.”

“Scholars of leadership can use this approach to advance and accelerate their research, while practitioners–including people who advise leaders—can use it to better monitor how leaders are perceived, for example during an election campaign or following a scandal.”