How to make better hiring decisions about leaders

There's a real Catch-22 in the hiring decisions many organisations make about their senior leaders: when the wrong kinds of leaders make it to the top and are then responsible for hiring the next generation, we end up caught in a continuous loop we can't escape.

In this newsletter, I'm focusing on why and how we can make better hiring decisions about current and future leaders of organisations.

Firstly, why does the quality and competence of leaders matter? It has significant effects on culture, performance and productivity so the consequences of poor quality decision-making are enormous.

The four big consequences of promoting the wrong leaders

I’ve been writing about the ease with which we can promote the wrong people into leadership roles. What we think looks leader-like, isn’t. Our stereotype of the leader contradicts actual on-the-job effectiveness. I’m frankly puzzled by the prevalence of this .

Getting leadership right, getting the right people into the right roles, has a big impact on organisational success.

Getinet Haile’s research found that an increase in leadership quality by one standard deviation increased organisational performance and worker job satisfaction significantly (by 0.27 and .073 standard deviations respectively).

It also led to a fall in worker job anxiety levels of 0.13 standard deviations.

Quality of leadership matters, because leadership roles impact widely on others.

In their recent article on leadership emergence, Benjamin M. Galvin, Katie Badura ?and colleagues unpack some very important differences between leader emergence and leadership effectiveness. The distinction is important in avoiding promotion of the wrong people into leadership roles. It matters a lot, because of the impact that leaders have on teams and organisational performance.

I love the categories they identify –

?? Congruent emergence – having talent and being recognised for it

?? Congruent non-emergence – not having the talent for leadership roles which is appropriately recognised

?? Over-emergence – being recognised as leader-like but without having the requisite talent

?? Under-emergence – having the requisite talent yet not being recognised for it

We’ve all seen plenty of evidence of great talent that never seems to be recognised, or ordinary if not bad behaviour that seems mysteriously to rise to the top. There’s still a lack of recognition and understanding of why this is so.

This great article draws together almost a century of research findings on leadership and helps better our understanding.

Over-emergence arises from an assessment of leadership talent based on faulty, but often prioritised, instrumental attributes – agentic orientation, narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy.

?? agentic orientation means dominant, assertive, ambitious, confident and many think this is what leadership is

?? narcissistic individuals are mistaken as leader-like because they have high self-esteem, are socially dominant and are bold: that looks great, but isn’t

?? Machiavellian and psychopathic individuals tend to be bold and charming until they become destructive

The authors highlight some very important consequences if we identify the wrong people as leaders.

There are consequences for the ‘over-emerged’ leader.

If you can’t meet job expectations this will likely erode self-esteem and agency. If someone has been wrongly promoted because they are agentic, narcissistic, Machiavellian or psychopathic, they are like to blame others for their predicament, and unlikely to take responsibility for their performance failures. Strain, decreased satisfaction and lower organisational commitment result.

There are consequences for those who have leadership capability, yet who are not seen as promotable.

‘Under-emerged’ leaders miss out on important development opportunities as well as promotions, and their engagement and satisfaction is likely to decrease. They may feel a sense of injustice, lose confidence and feel decreased commitment.

There are consequences for followers. Decreased effectiveness, engagement and satisfaction are most likely.

When leaders and teams are performing below par, then organisation performance suffers.

Culture takes a hit in a number of ways. People may, indeed should, question the idea of meritocracy. Lost development opportunities means talent is lost. Working with toxic leaders burns out workers, and we have seen the incidence of this rise in recent years.

Work doesn’t get done to the standard it should, and that can become a contagion from one team to the next as standards and deadlines aren’t met.

?This should be the motivation we need to rethink the way leaders emerge in organisations, and what attributes we rely to make our assessments about who to promote.

What’s one thing your organisation is doing to make sure it promotes the right leaders?

The 12 proven attributes of the right kinds of leaders

If we want leaders who not just appear to be leader-like, but who are actually effective once they get the gig, we need to focus on two types of attributes: Generative and Latent-expressive. Doing this will increase congruent emergence (we pick the right people for leadership jobs) and decrease over-emergence (we choose people who seem leader-like but who are not good at leading).

Generative attributes are:

? Etxraversion – take charge and socialize with others

? Emotional stability – calm under pressure, positive

? Core self-evaluations – high self-esteem and self-efficacy

? Conscientiousness – proactive and persistent

? Openness to experience – insightful, creative, take risks

? Intelligence – solve complex problems and meet complex task demands

? Political skill – understand broader context, read the room

? Agreeableness – trusting and build positive relationships

? Emotional intelligence – deal with own and others’ emotions

? Self-monitoring – manage self well

Latent-expressive attributes are:

? Communal orientation – warm, nurturing, friendly

? Stereotyped demographic attributes – holding membership in a ‘protected’ group such as gender or race

Latent-expressive attributes are very interesting because they are the opposite of the Instrumental attributes, and which tend to lead to mistaking people as leader-like when they in fact are not.

Whereas Instrumental attributes tend to fracture relationships with the team, Latent-expressive attributes contribute to strong relationships, higher satisfaction and motivation.

Despite the relationship between communal traits/behaviors and effectiveness in leadership roles ... communal attributes hinder leader emergence.

Latent-expressive attributes are described in this way as they tend to mean that people with these attributes are not seen as potential leaders – being like this has traditionally disadvantaged leadership emergence - despite being more strongly associated with effectiveness.

Which of these attributes are your strengths??

Finally, Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic provides a list of nine science-based questions that clearly distinguish between over-emerged leaders and those whose emergence is congruent. In short, these questions reliably measure arrogance and overconfidence. Surprisingly, those who are arrogant and overconfident don't mind answering yes to questions such as 'Do you have an exceptional talent for leadership?' or 'Are you able to achieve anything you want, just by putting your mind to it?' Using these questions renders identifying the people who shouldn't be promoted into leadership roles relatively simple.

What's less straightforward is why organisations don't use these questions to sort out leadership talent. As Chamorro-Premizic says 'It's not that these traits are difficult to measure, but that we appear to not want them as much as we say.'

If you do want good leadership, these questions will help you to make better hiring decisions, and promote effective leaders.

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