📅 Thought for today:
‘Unsurprisingly, the mythical image of a “leader” embodies many of the characteristics commonly found in personality disorders, such as narcissism, psychopathy, histrionic or Machiavellian personalities.’
— Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
#thoughtfortoday #leadership #leaders #management #personality
In his Harvard Business Review article “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?”, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, sets out a case that our imagined leadership traits are biased towards women, and that most good and competent managers and leaders do not exhibit these traits.
In other words, we believe our own myths about management and leadership, focus on high-profile, self-centred figures we call good leaders and don’t bother to actually check what their leadership success and failure rate looks like.
The fairy tale leaders we idolise exhibit a wide range of psychological conditions we wouldn’t normally find acceptable, yet somehow we think this is what success looks like.
And worse, the “ideal” traits are selected by men about men.
This is the argument against simple meritocracy towards a more balanced evaluation of what leadership success is really about – the people who work for (or are led) by the leaders.
We need to ask, “What does success look like?”.
