Finding a(nother) new Leader: UK PLC

An old friend of mine, a chartered occupational psychologist by training, used to have an adage that ‘the best measure of job performance is job performance.’ He’d say this with a twinkle in his eye, aware we were paying him large sums of money to deploy a range of assessment techniques to answer this very question on behalf of our clients and he was therefore undermining his own work.

But the underlying truth is that if you want to know how someone is going to perform in a job, then give them the job. And secondly, that every other way of finding out is going to be less than perfect – including and perhaps especially asking 80,000 random strangers to vote and choose between two candidates, as recently attempted by the Conservative Party in choosing a new leader.

Interestingly there is a correlation between your ideologies and your psychological makeup – in a recent piece from a theme of research entitled ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’, the authors (Zmigrod et al, 2021)(1) found that?‘Conservatism and nationalism were related to greater caution in perceptual decision-making tasks and to reduced strategic information processing, while dogmatism was associated with slower evidence accumulation and impulsive tendencies’.?So perhaps we should not be surprised when dogmatic ideologues turn out to be capricious or whimsical in their political decision making.

Of the dozen or so key competencies that we often consider comprise a leadership role, one often stands out more than the others – judgment – “the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions”(2). ?In his seminal book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’(3) Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between intuitive thinking which he describes as fast, automatic and emotional – full of cognitive bias, and rational thinking which is slow, deliberate and systematic.

We can all recognise moments when we’ve deployed intuitive thinking, disguised as rational. And there is plenty of evidence that most business decision making, even and perhaps especially at Board level, is irrational. Kahneman cites robust evidence of parole decisions in Israel being more lenient by Judges after they had had a decent lunch break. So perhaps eating before making a major life decision is indeed one useful takeaway here.?

Intuition, argues Kahneman, is often similar to a form of expert pattern recognition – as we become highly adapted to a particular environment we are able to spot patterns early and respond quickly, in a way that we recognise as intuitive. It is easy enough to spot the patterns that define how many of our political leaders are educated and prepared for leadership, for instance and therefore to recognise why many potentially excellent leaders may never be given that opportunity. These patterns might be 3D and longitudinal - changing over the years, and requiring a level of managing complexity beyond all but a small group of highly capable individuals.

As an avid – probably addicted – speed chess player, I recognise this in a literal sense of pattern spotting on the Board, sensing dangers in given positions. However, for our political leaders who have used the word ‘unprecedented’ more times than I can throw a pair of slippers at the radio in recent months and years, there are fewer patterns to rely on. The world is unpredictable and fast changing – and therefore its leaders need to apply more rational ‘slow’ decision making. So perhaps finding another Prime Minister within a week is yet another mistake in the making.

Peering back into a candidate’s past often gives us plenty of opportunity to evaluate their judgment skills, from their choices in higher education to their life choices, career choices and their business decisions. Unlike investments where past performance may have no bearing on future performance, with humans the opposite is usually true.

Bearing in mind the constraints that many people have faced in their lives over some of these areas – especially the leaders we see emerging in the Global South at OxfordHR – sometimes good judgment also needs a little good luck as well. When Harold Macmillan was asked what might knock his Government off course his famous response, ‘Events, dear boy, events’ feels as relevant today as it did at the time.

If we want to see great leaders emerging in our society we need to move away from our intuitions on leadership and our past patterns of behaviour in promoting them based on their schooling, class, gender, self-confidence or ideology and instead embrace people who show that they can make good decisions, for the right reasons, on a regular basis. Easy enough? Clearly not.

David Lale

October ‘22

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1.???????Zmigrod, Leor et al. “The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences vol. 376,1822 (2021): 20200424. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0424

2.???????Tichy, Noel M. and Warren G Bennis. Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. New York, Portfolio, 2007.

3.???????Kahneman, D. (2011).?Thinking, fast and slow.?Farrar, Straus and Giroux.