The Fundamental Succession Error That’s Clogging Your Leadership Pipeline

One of the first psychological principles I learned in Psych 101 was the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). It’s the logical fallacy that when we attempt to explain the behavior of others, we are more likely to attribute it to stable characteristics of the person like personality or disposition. Meanwhile when explaining the reasons for our own behaviors, we’re more likely to attribute them to situational or environmental factors.

I see a man shouting obscenities at the barista in a coffee shop. I conclude that he’s yelling because he’s an entitled jerk. Individual characteristic (i.e., he’s probably always like this).

The next day I find myself shouting angrily at the same poor barista. However, my explanation for my own outburst is that I just lost my job and I’m temporarily unable to control my emotions. Environmental forces (i.e., I’m normally not like this).

This small but omnipresent psychological bias matters when it comes to talent in the C-suite, but before I make that connection, there’s another layer to the FAE.

It matters whether the behavior being explained is positive or negative. For others, we tend to explain their negative behavior with personal characteristics (e.g., personality), while explaining their positive behavior with environmental forces. But when we’re explaining our own behavior, the whole thing reverses. We tend to attribute our own negative behavior to the environment, while explaining our own positive behaviors to our virtuous characteristics.

The simple table below takes the barista example and contrasts angry shouting (negative behavior) with giving a huge tip (positive behavior).

Like all of human psychology, the rules have exceptions, and the FAE is no different. These are general tendencies and won’t explain or predict every behavior, but they do happen regularly. I’ve seen the FAE in action many times in succession conversations with boards, CEOs, and business leaders who are trying to determine if and when emerging leaders will be ready for critical executive roles.?

Quite simply, senior executives tend to believe (without realizing it) that developing others is much harder than developing themselves. Why? It’s the fundamental bias of the FAE. We tend to believe that others’ development needs (like negative behavior) are associated with their stable characteristics (e.g., he lacks business savvy because he’s not strategically minded so it’s too risky to give him that BU assignment). Meanwhile we tend to believe that our own development needs are associated with situational factors (e.g., I just haven’t had a good business assignment yet but when I get one, I’ll develop my business savvy very quickly).

So, in the boardroom the FAE becomes the FSE (Fundamental Succession Error), and if not monitored, the pipeline of leadership growth can become clogged by the apprehension of senior leaders who see less possibility on the bench than there actually is. As a result, emerging leaders receive fewer “stretch” assignments and tend to grow more slowly than the business requires. Senior leadership regards most as?"not ready yet,"?resulting in widespread stagnation of leadership skill development.

But the FSE need not paralyze your pipeline. Like most cognitive biases, knowing of their existence can help to mitigate decision errors. But there’s more that can be done to unfreeze the minds of senior executives and spark more active imagination and experimentation with the growth of leadership.

In a word, data is your friend – objective, future-oriented assessment data about the capabilities that leaders may be able to demonstrate if given the right assignments.

And to be clear, 360s (multi-perspective surveys) are not future-oriented. While they play a useful role in understanding how leaders are going about their current assignments, they tend not to illuminate areas of new possibility or ways in which leaders could be stretched beyond their current spheres. Simulations and business-driven interview approaches that place leaders directly into scenarios with which they have little or no experience are far more effective in producing insight that is useful in developing the bench for the business challenges that are on the horizon.

As senior management reviews findings from these more aspirational assessments, surprising discoveries about people are common, which in turn spark new considerations about how to engage leaders in assignments that help the business and accelerate growth at the same time.

A chief marketing officer in the chemical sector recently remarked on his experience:?"Using better assessment made me much bolder in developing my people. I know now that if you have the right data, you can give people the ball, and they will almost always surprise you with how far they run with it.” He is regarded as the company’s single best leader in developing great talent.

So, whether it’s your barista or your next candidate for senior vice president, it’s worth keeping the FAE and FSE in mind. Check the attributions of the decision makers and bring great data to the conversation. The results are sure to elevate leadership growth beyond expectations.

I hope you and your barista are on good terms this week and always. Leave them a tip and leave your thoughts?with us here.