Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?(blogs.hbr.org)
blogs.hbr.org
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/08/why_do_so_many_incompetent_men.html
129 comments
I am a woman, 45 years old, building websites for a living.
After 13 years, I still prefer to sit down and disappear into the screen and build things. I have natural leadership ability, I have a big personality when required, but I just don't feel motivated by money or rewards to take on the responsibility of leading a team.
I watch my colleagues get promoted, all male. And then I watch them try to balance wife, kids, and life. Without their wives, they tend to do poorly at life maintenance. They get fat, or pot-bellies at least, their hair falls out (probably just genetic but still) and after a few years the stress has broken them. The factors of leading means your reward depends on others whom you are unable to really control. So they spend time playing head games with people and taking work home that others can't or won't complete.
The handful of women I know in leadership positions also have a stigma attached. Their ego leads just like the males, but the women are considered "too aggressive" and get labeled as such.
So with minimal reward (I require double my income to ruin my life), management/leadership is just not an option for me, regardless of my abilities. I suppose living up to my capabilities should be reward enough, but it isn't.
Until I get a wife and/or make enough money to pay for the easy leisure and lack of worry I have now, I don't care about the prestige of leadership.
Chauvinistic or not, I truly believe if the reward were there, our society would have more women in leadership positions.
My personal life has a higher "fee" than men for living and breathing my job. Pay me that fee, I will make a go of it.
After 13 years, I still prefer to sit down and disappear into the screen and build things. I have natural leadership ability, I have a big personality when required, but I just don't feel motivated by money or rewards to take on the responsibility of leading a team.
I watch my colleagues get promoted, all male. And then I watch them try to balance wife, kids, and life. Without their wives, they tend to do poorly at life maintenance. They get fat, or pot-bellies at least, their hair falls out (probably just genetic but still) and after a few years the stress has broken them. The factors of leading means your reward depends on others whom you are unable to really control. So they spend time playing head games with people and taking work home that others can't or won't complete.
The handful of women I know in leadership positions also have a stigma attached. Their ego leads just like the males, but the women are considered "too aggressive" and get labeled as such.
So with minimal reward (I require double my income to ruin my life), management/leadership is just not an option for me, regardless of my abilities. I suppose living up to my capabilities should be reward enough, but it isn't.
Until I get a wife and/or make enough money to pay for the easy leisure and lack of worry I have now, I don't care about the prestige of leadership.
Chauvinistic or not, I truly believe if the reward were there, our society would have more women in leadership positions.
My personal life has a higher "fee" than men for living and breathing my job. Pay me that fee, I will make a go of it.
I'm not sure precisely how to interpret your comment. It sounds like your personal observations but does not offer a conclusion. (And we're so conditioned to assume people only share stories in order to make a point!)
When you say...
> Chauvinistic or not, I truly believe if the reward were there, our society would have more women in leadership positions.
Specifically, what is the reward you are describing and how does it differ from the reward available for men? Are you saying you believe the reward to incent women to management would need to be greater (putting aside the uncertainty about how to define "greater") than the rewards that sufficiently incent men?
When you say...
> Chauvinistic or not, I truly believe if the reward were there, our society would have more women in leadership positions.
Specifically, what is the reward you are describing and how does it differ from the reward available for men? Are you saying you believe the reward to incent women to management would need to be greater (putting aside the uncertainty about how to define "greater") than the rewards that sufficiently incent men?
Legitimate question. But it is a trap. I'm under a new user name here, but I used to post here years ago. Every answer I give will get me closer to hell-banning. :)
I will think about it. If I can find a way to present my position more clearly without social Hacker News repercussions, I will.
edit: funny, how I do the same in real life, with my career, etc. I withhold strong positions, and give watered down expressions, to survive. Kinda sad. Lack of real anonymity means I also have to moderate expressions. Any future employer finding me here will hold everything I say here against me.
I will think about it. If I can find a way to present my position more clearly without social Hacker News repercussions, I will.
edit: funny, how I do the same in real life, with my career, etc. I withhold strong positions, and give watered down expressions, to survive. Kinda sad. Lack of real anonymity means I also have to moderate expressions. Any future employer finding me here will hold everything I say here against me.
I understand. I was merely curious, and I don't ask you to put yourself in a position where your professional or personal integrity is in jeopardy! If there is more to share anonymously elsewhere, just let me know. :)
Nobody has ever found a connection between baldness and stress or lifestyle choices.
> They get fat, or pot-bellies at least, their hair falls out (probably just genetic but still)
What "but still"? What is it about that that still supports your point, even if it is entirely out of ones hands if your hair falls out? If it is indeed mostly/totally genetic, why continue to look at it as a symptom of "letting oneself go"? That's just a stigmatizing attitude to hold on too (if it is indeed mostly genetical).
What "but still"? What is it about that that still supports your point, even if it is entirely out of ones hands if your hair falls out? If it is indeed mostly/totally genetic, why continue to look at it as a symptom of "letting oneself go"? That's just a stigmatizing attitude to hold on too (if it is indeed mostly genetical).
Getting fat is also stigmatized. Sigh. I know.
Bald men and short men have hurdles, too.
Bald men and short men have hurdles, too.
You still haven't answered my question.
Getting fat is for many a lifestyle issue (a bad lifestyle is what you alluded to in the first place). It may be partly genetic in that some people only have to start worrying about their waistline in their thirties while some have to do so in their teens. It is not clear at all that baldness is a lifestyle issue.
Noone mentioned short men.
Getting fat is for many a lifestyle issue (a bad lifestyle is what you alluded to in the first place). It may be partly genetic in that some people only have to start worrying about their waistline in their thirties while some have to do so in their teens. It is not clear at all that baldness is a lifestyle issue.
Noone mentioned short men.
>>If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children. You're not giving their point of view any legitimacy.
I don't want to turn this into a political debate, but the conservative ideology does lack legitimacy for the most part. The reason the term "conservative" is used is because the person is resistant to alternative points of view as well as information that contradicts their perspective. This is why those who reject climate change are conservatives: they are rejecting or ignoring scientific evidence because it doesn't fit their worldview.
I don't treat conservatives as children. That does children a huge disservice. Children by their nature are curious and they want to learn new things. Conservatives in contrast are stuck in certain mindsets (that revolve around Just-World Fallacy) and are scared of change in general.
I don't want to turn this into a political debate, but the conservative ideology does lack legitimacy for the most part. The reason the term "conservative" is used is because the person is resistant to alternative points of view as well as information that contradicts their perspective. This is why those who reject climate change are conservatives: they are rejecting or ignoring scientific evidence because it doesn't fit their worldview.
I don't treat conservatives as children. That does children a huge disservice. Children by their nature are curious and they want to learn new things. Conservatives in contrast are stuck in certain mindsets (that revolve around Just-World Fallacy) and are scared of change in general.
I don't mean this as hostile as it will unfortunately likely come across, but, do you not see a hint of irony here?
I do see a hint of irony. I'm open to changing my opinion on what conservatism is if I encounter enough data that overwhelmingly points in the other direction: that conservatives are very accepting of new ideas and viewpoints. So far, I have not.
Of course conservatism isn't very accepting of new ideas and viewpoints. Nothing political you can slap a label on, and that includes any of the left-wing varieties, is very accepting of new ideas and viewpoints. Otherwise, the label itself would be meaningless. (That's not to say the meanings of these political labels don't change at all, but it takes a hell of a long time.)
When individuals decide to accept new ideas and viewpoints, this creates conflict with the label they've chosen to apply to themselves. Enough new ideas, and they simply start call themselves something else. A conservative open to too many new ideas will stop calling themselves conservative, and a liberal open to too many new ideas will stop calling themselves liberal. This happens all the time, in both directions - it's the people that change, not the labels.
When individuals decide to accept new ideas and viewpoints, this creates conflict with the label they've chosen to apply to themselves. Enough new ideas, and they simply start call themselves something else. A conservative open to too many new ideas will stop calling themselves conservative, and a liberal open to too many new ideas will stop calling themselves liberal. This happens all the time, in both directions - it's the people that change, not the labels.
Very well.
As another anecdote, I have met many conservatives who are willing to discuss and debate ideas. None of these conservatives I have met has acted or said anything that suggests they believe women are incapable of management.
I have met chauvinists and I have met conservatives. I don't see a whole lot of correlation.
As another anecdote, I have met many conservatives who are willing to discuss and debate ideas. None of these conservatives I have met has acted or said anything that suggests they believe women are incapable of management.
I have met chauvinists and I have met conservatives. I don't see a whole lot of correlation.
There's a huge difference between being willing to discuss and debate ideas, and being actually open to changing one's opinions on the subject.
I suppose. But those two notions are related, and I think appealing to an interest to discuss and debate honestly without fear of jumping to name-calling is a peaceful way to go about changing minds. I absolutely will never change minds if I belittle my adversary.
If there's any difference between the conservative and liberal positions on women's rights or capabilities in comparison to men's, the conservative position tends towards the restriction of women's rights and a characterization of women as having less capability in decision making or leadership.
That the conservative position has liberalized over time to meet the liberal position in a lot of places and on a lot of subjects is good. That doesn't change the fact that when the conservative position differs from the liberal position, it differs by offering some sort of biological or religious defense of discrimination against women.
>If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children.
I don't think that observation is controversial, or that children are the ones who either originate or maintain these beliefs in society. Also, I don't think that you should pick your beliefs about reality based on their marketing potential rather than observation and the historical record.
That the conservative position has liberalized over time to meet the liberal position in a lot of places and on a lot of subjects is good. That doesn't change the fact that when the conservative position differs from the liberal position, it differs by offering some sort of biological or religious defense of discrimination against women.
>If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children.
I don't think that observation is controversial, or that children are the ones who either originate or maintain these beliefs in society. Also, I don't think that you should pick your beliefs about reality based on their marketing potential rather than observation and the historical record.
It appears "children" was too specific a choice of word. Perhaps a better fit would have been "simpleton."
The point being that when we engage those of opposite views by dismissing their views out of hand, we usually make ourselves feel righteous in doing so by rationalizing that they are simpletons. They are beneath our level of understanding and any attempt we make to sway them is hopeless.
I don't mean to imply that the author was trying to persuade the opposition's point of view. Rather merely that the introductory paragraph exhibits the hallmarks of a closed mind, and unfortunately one that disingenuously feigns being open. I find that particularly disappointing.
These labels we assign to political points of view are so broad that I find it distracting to dwell too much on historical associations of each word. Historical perspective cannot be dismissed, but if the present and past differ, I'd rather consider the present.
On this subject, what do conservatives think now about women in leadership and management positions? I honestly cannot say with a straight face that modern conservatives think women are incapable of management. In fact I feel perpetuating that myth only serves to diminish whatever progress they have made toward our point of view, as if we're moving the goal posts and sneering at them for even trying. It seems like petty politics and not genuine effort to improve matters.
The point being that when we engage those of opposite views by dismissing their views out of hand, we usually make ourselves feel righteous in doing so by rationalizing that they are simpletons. They are beneath our level of understanding and any attempt we make to sway them is hopeless.
I don't mean to imply that the author was trying to persuade the opposition's point of view. Rather merely that the introductory paragraph exhibits the hallmarks of a closed mind, and unfortunately one that disingenuously feigns being open. I find that particularly disappointing.
These labels we assign to political points of view are so broad that I find it distracting to dwell too much on historical associations of each word. Historical perspective cannot be dismissed, but if the present and past differ, I'd rather consider the present.
On this subject, what do conservatives think now about women in leadership and management positions? I honestly cannot say with a straight face that modern conservatives think women are incapable of management. In fact I feel perpetuating that myth only serves to diminish whatever progress they have made toward our point of view, as if we're moving the goal posts and sneering at them for even trying. It seems like petty politics and not genuine effort to improve matters.
"If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children."
Also, It is a chauvinistic position to claim that about conservatives as it seems to make an assumption that conservative=male.
I personally would not class myself as conservative as I tend to disagree strongly with their policies, however I do not think that people like Thatcher or Widdicombe believe that women are not capable of leadership and it would be hard to claim that they are not conservatives.
Also, It is a chauvinistic position to claim that about conservatives as it seems to make an assumption that conservative=male.
I personally would not class myself as conservative as I tend to disagree strongly with their policies, however I do not think that people like Thatcher or Widdicombe believe that women are not capable of leadership and it would be hard to claim that they are not conservatives.
Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who was distracted by that sentence. I barely skimmed the rest of the article.
Except, of course, when they do:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10244637/Ukip-...
You heard here first: Stuart Wheeler, some old bean counter in the UK, speaks for all conservative ideology.
> In fact, most leaders — whether in politics or business — fail.
There's a sentiment here that leading a complex organization (or even a team of complex humans) would be easy, if only all leaders were competent.
In my experience, there just aren't that many people who stand out in high-stakes leadership roles. People at the top make mistakes. But I rarely look around at the people below and think, "man, if only they were in charge." The people leading often represent the best options on hand.
Are aggressive, over-confident males overrepresented in leadership roles? Probably, but it's not a man vs. woman issue. It's an overconfident person vs. everybody else issue. It's as much a problem for non-overconfident men as it is for non-overconfident women.
There's a sentiment here that leading a complex organization (or even a team of complex humans) would be easy, if only all leaders were competent.
In my experience, there just aren't that many people who stand out in high-stakes leadership roles. People at the top make mistakes. But I rarely look around at the people below and think, "man, if only they were in charge." The people leading often represent the best options on hand.
Are aggressive, over-confident males overrepresented in leadership roles? Probably, but it's not a man vs. woman issue. It's an overconfident person vs. everybody else issue. It's as much a problem for non-overconfident men as it is for non-overconfident women.
1) my favorite quote on leadership is from ben horowitz:
"Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong. [...] If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22."
2) Clearly the only solution for our incompetent leader problem is for everyone to go to HBS, right?
"Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong. [...] If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22."
2) Clearly the only solution for our incompetent leader problem is for everyone to go to HBS, right?
You can minimize the risk of failing by not risking much. Do such people make the best leaders? They will probably not even manage to become leaders, except if they are appointed by others based on their skills, not their actions. That happens neither in politics, nor (typically) in business.
The people leading often represent the best options on hand.
Only if you first assume that there has to be a "leader"--that a single person at the top has to "run things". In fact, it makes no sense at all for the allocation of huge amounts of resources to be dependent on a single person's decision--or the decision of an extremely small percentage of the people affected, for that matter. Do people just not understand the concept of a single point of failure?
Only if you first assume that there has to be a "leader"--that a single person at the top has to "run things". In fact, it makes no sense at all for the allocation of huge amounts of resources to be dependent on a single person's decision--or the decision of an extremely small percentage of the people affected, for that matter. Do people just not understand the concept of a single point of failure?
Unfortunately, if the organization is succeeding, people see a single point of success, not a single point of failure. And if the leader is actually a poor leader, people don't recognize that the organization is succeeding in spite of of the leader. . .and probably because of some "heroes" further down in the organization.
Are aggressive, over-confident males overrepresented in leadership roles?
Yes, and so are cautious men, and nice guys, and pretty much every other kind of guy.
Yes, and so are cautious men, and nice guys, and pretty much every other kind of guy.
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Having worked at a couple of large companies where, unfortunately, incompetent managers were the norm, I'd wondered quite a bit as well how incompetent people get into positions of power.
I think one explanation is that the ability to rise within an organization (political skill) is orthogonal to the ability to be competent at your job role (technical skill). So you see a lot of VPs of engineering who have absolutely no clue how to build a product, and have never built anything of value, who rose through the ranks and got there because they know how to "work the system". Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare.
This is of course no different from the reason why politicians are generally so terrible at their job. (Why Todd Akin, of "Legitimate Rape" fame, is on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology, for example.)
I think one explanation is that the ability to rise within an organization (political skill) is orthogonal to the ability to be competent at your job role (technical skill). So you see a lot of VPs of engineering who have absolutely no clue how to build a product, and have never built anything of value, who rose through the ranks and got there because they know how to "work the system". Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare.
This is of course no different from the reason why politicians are generally so terrible at their job. (Why Todd Akin, of "Legitimate Rape" fame, is on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology, for example.)
Akin is on the Science, Space and Technology committee because it is not a very good committee to be on. It doesn't oversee much funding, so it gets filled with hacks placed there by the House leadership. Any representative with ambition and talent is going to want to be on the good committees, such as Armed Services or Ways and Means, which have huge responsibilities and the attention of lobbyists.
Unfortunately Akin was on the House Budget and Armed Services committees as well (a subcommittee on the latter, but still). I just picked Science because it was the most ridiculous assignment of the three, but I would be very surprised if he was actually really good at the other two.
Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare.
They might not be rare if more organizations had a smarter idea about the actual job a VP of technology needs to perform.
One of the best VPs of technology that I ever worked for saw it as his job to use his considerable abilities at playing politics to guarantee that no tech person below him had to deal with any political BS. He himself had no ability to work with technology, and everyone knew it. But he knew who did and enabled them to do their job.
Every technical person in that organization understood and valued this about him. As he moved from company to company, they would voluntarily seek him out. And now that he founded his own company, the fact that people who have worked for him wanted to work with him again proved to be one of his biggest assets.
They might not be rare if more organizations had a smarter idea about the actual job a VP of technology needs to perform.
One of the best VPs of technology that I ever worked for saw it as his job to use his considerable abilities at playing politics to guarantee that no tech person below him had to deal with any political BS. He himself had no ability to work with technology, and everyone knew it. But he knew who did and enabled them to do their job.
Every technical person in that organization understood and valued this about him. As he moved from company to company, they would voluntarily seek him out. And now that he founded his own company, the fact that people who have worked for him wanted to work with him again proved to be one of his biggest assets.
> He himself had no ability to work with technology... But he knew who did
Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engineering, your job is indeed to build a great engineering team and then protect them from the inevitable politics.
However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. IMO you can't do this well if your background is in, say, finance. (Similar to how a great engineer would probably make a terrible CFO.)
The incompetent VPs I've had to deal with weren't stupid, in fact many were quite smart, and of course politically astute. But they just didn't know enough about the technology to know who to trust to actually deliver a great product as a team.
Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engineering, your job is indeed to build a great engineering team and then protect them from the inevitable politics.
However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. IMO you can't do this well if your background is in, say, finance. (Similar to how a great engineer would probably make a terrible CFO.)
The incompetent VPs I've had to deal with weren't stupid, in fact many were quite smart, and of course politically astute. But they just didn't know enough about the technology to know who to trust to actually deliver a great product as a team.
However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing.
This is where you're wrong.
You don't need to understand the technology. You just need to have someone that you can trust who does. And said trust can be based on past experience, not current. Furthermore trust is to some extent transitive. If you trust person X and they say that person Y is competent at tech, odds are that person Y is smarter than your average bear. Couple with a sample project or two, and you're on your way to having another person whose opinion you can lean on for tech matters.
What can't be outsourced is judgement of people.
This is where you're wrong.
You don't need to understand the technology. You just need to have someone that you can trust who does. And said trust can be based on past experience, not current. Furthermore trust is to some extent transitive. If you trust person X and they say that person Y is competent at tech, odds are that person Y is smarter than your average bear. Couple with a sample project or two, and you're on your way to having another person whose opinion you can lean on for tech matters.
What can't be outsourced is judgement of people.
Todd Akin isn't the only one saying stupid things about rape.
"Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." - Stephen F. Freind (Pennsylvania House of Representatives)
"In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits, where a woman can get cleaned out." - Jodie Laubenberg (Texas House of Representatives)
"I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape." — Chuck Winder (Idaho Senate)
"Well, bad weather is like rape: if it's inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it." — Clayton Williams (Texas Gubernatorial Candidate) (this comment was a "joke")
"Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman." - Douglas Henry (Tennessee State Senate)
"Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." - James Leon Holmes (Federal Judge)
"The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant" - Henry Aldridge (North Carolina House of Representatives)
"Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." - Stephen F. Freind (Pennsylvania House of Representatives)
"In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits, where a woman can get cleaned out." - Jodie Laubenberg (Texas House of Representatives)
"I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape." — Chuck Winder (Idaho Senate)
"Well, bad weather is like rape: if it's inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it." — Clayton Williams (Texas Gubernatorial Candidate) (this comment was a "joke")
"Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman." - Douglas Henry (Tennessee State Senate)
"Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." - James Leon Holmes (Federal Judge)
"The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant" - Henry Aldridge (North Carolina House of Representatives)
I was taught the "rape prevents conception" myth in my liberal condoms-on-bananas high school health class, and I suspect others were too.
I have no idea if it was part of the curriculum or just an off the cuff remark from a misinformed teacher, but the idea came from somewhere, and it can't be exclusive to Republican politicians.
I really do suspect other people had been taught this, but pretended they'd never heard it so they could lash out with more righteous indignation and outrage, rather than accept some people honestly believe wrong things they were taught.
I have no idea if it was part of the curriculum or just an off the cuff remark from a misinformed teacher, but the idea came from somewhere, and it can't be exclusive to Republican politicians.
I really do suspect other people had been taught this, but pretended they'd never heard it so they could lash out with more righteous indignation and outrage, rather than accept some people honestly believe wrong things they were taught.
Another gender-neutral, oldie-gut-goodie explanation. . .the Peter Principle. . .rising to your level of incompetence. . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
I assume that Akin is on that committee because his party recognizes that he's bonkers and tucked him away on an unimportant committee where he can't screw anything up too publicly.
There are many paths to leadership:
a) Suppose I want to startup a company because I like coding and spending 40hours in a cubicle sucks. Out of dumb luck my company strikes it big and the planets align for a little while so I can execute and in 3 years I'm the leader of a $250m/yr company. I was able to execute when opportunity presented itself, but I have no idea how to generate opportunity, or find it.
b) Same story as above, except this time it's me and four of my beer buddies, except I'm loud and domineering in business decisions and they're all introverts. One guy quits because he doesn't like how things went, the rest make me de facto leader and when corporate paperwork comes around I put myself as CEO. The others are quiet about which I spin into a kind of legitimacy. From there on out I try and bounce around CEO and President positions. I have no other qualifications than being domineering and subversive.
c) I worked my tootsie off and made it through a Harvard MBA program. Boom, I'm immediately picked up as a Jr. VP in a large and powerful, but old and crusty megacorp. I stick it out for 4 years while all my of senior leadership retires, next thing you know I'm a Senior Executive VP at Big&Crusty MegaCorp Inc. I can't seem to figure out how to navigate the politics to make it higher, so after 5 years at Big&Crusty MegaCorp I strike out. I find an executive recruiter who finds me some CEO positions to shoot for with some medium sized $50-100m/yr copmanies. I interview, and one of them has the right mix of board members to think that a young and energetic "shooting star" is just what they want to kick their revenue in the rear. Regardless of how the company does, I now have a resume that shows all kinds of good bullet points: Harvard MBA, upwardly mobile as a executive, CEO experience. I can now bounce around CEO and President positions for a while...spending a year or two at each place, strike enough good compensation deals to make me rich and eventually buy myself into a few choice board positions. Note I barely have any actual work experience at this point, I've only shown boundless ambition and a willingness to wait for senior people to retire so I can take their position. The only thing I know how to do after 15 years is navigate the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy.
d) I start in the mailroom and work my way up through a mix of competency and and ambition. A few times my competency damns me and I end up stuck in my progression, but I follow a strict up or out policy. Over the years I notice that I've forgotten many of the skills I used to have in the lower levels, I have to locally optimize my brain I tell myself. I'm working 40-60hr weeks trying to be competent in my current job, I simply don't have time to remember what I did 5 years and 2 jobs ago -- but it bothers me that I'm now functionally incompetent for a job that I used to be among the best at. Eventually, I work my way into a Senior Exec VP at a growing company. I'm really good at the job I'm in, but I rapidly lose qualifications for jobs I used to be in. At the Senior Exec VP level I've simply forgotten what it's like to be in the trenches, I try to be sympathetic, but it's so hard to relate...just as hard for me to relate to the Senior Exec VP when I was in the trenches. Am I a competent leader?
e) etc.
I'm specifically not addressing gender in these scenarios (as the article is discussing) because what I'm trying to say is that regardless of gender any of these scenarios might put somebody into position as an "incompetent" leader. The path to leadership (incompetent or otherwise) in my mind is distinct from the social and psychological issues related to gender arriving in those leadership positions. In scenario a and b), there is nothing in gender that prevents women from starting up their own companies. You see it all the time, there are tons of businesses started and run by intelligent and driven women. c & d might still be tougher, there's lots of entrenched power structures that still make it difficult for women to arrive into the top jobs. In d) the person also had enough opportunity to not be guided into a progressing, but dead-end career path.
Anecdotally, I think it's very hard for women to be accepted into leadership positions. If she's too tough she's marked as an "angry bitch" and will get rejected, if she's not perfectly competent in areas far outside of her job function, she'll be marked as "stupid" and get rejected, etc. etc. Cultivating authority, for a woman, requires a degree of careful presentation and balance that is very hard to do and most men don't have to deal with. I've worked for some very good women bosses and a women CEO and I admired their ability to find that balance and presentation style that gave them command without them appearing as an "angry bitch" or "stupid".
I've also worked with some women that couldn't find that balance, they weren't really doing anything a reasonably competent man wouldn't do, but were marked with gendered epithets and eventually driven from their job. Afterwards, I spoke to some of them personally, they felt unbelievably rejected and worthless -- one suffered from depression and dropped out of work for a year. Their job models didn't do anything different, but their models were all men -- so they couldn't figure out what happened and what got them rejected...but the truth is they were simply playing by different rules and weren't able to navigate the environment well enough to figure out what those rules were.
a) Suppose I want to startup a company because I like coding and spending 40hours in a cubicle sucks. Out of dumb luck my company strikes it big and the planets align for a little while so I can execute and in 3 years I'm the leader of a $250m/yr company. I was able to execute when opportunity presented itself, but I have no idea how to generate opportunity, or find it.
b) Same story as above, except this time it's me and four of my beer buddies, except I'm loud and domineering in business decisions and they're all introverts. One guy quits because he doesn't like how things went, the rest make me de facto leader and when corporate paperwork comes around I put myself as CEO. The others are quiet about which I spin into a kind of legitimacy. From there on out I try and bounce around CEO and President positions. I have no other qualifications than being domineering and subversive.
c) I worked my tootsie off and made it through a Harvard MBA program. Boom, I'm immediately picked up as a Jr. VP in a large and powerful, but old and crusty megacorp. I stick it out for 4 years while all my of senior leadership retires, next thing you know I'm a Senior Executive VP at Big&Crusty MegaCorp Inc. I can't seem to figure out how to navigate the politics to make it higher, so after 5 years at Big&Crusty MegaCorp I strike out. I find an executive recruiter who finds me some CEO positions to shoot for with some medium sized $50-100m/yr copmanies. I interview, and one of them has the right mix of board members to think that a young and energetic "shooting star" is just what they want to kick their revenue in the rear. Regardless of how the company does, I now have a resume that shows all kinds of good bullet points: Harvard MBA, upwardly mobile as a executive, CEO experience. I can now bounce around CEO and President positions for a while...spending a year or two at each place, strike enough good compensation deals to make me rich and eventually buy myself into a few choice board positions. Note I barely have any actual work experience at this point, I've only shown boundless ambition and a willingness to wait for senior people to retire so I can take their position. The only thing I know how to do after 15 years is navigate the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy.
d) I start in the mailroom and work my way up through a mix of competency and and ambition. A few times my competency damns me and I end up stuck in my progression, but I follow a strict up or out policy. Over the years I notice that I've forgotten many of the skills I used to have in the lower levels, I have to locally optimize my brain I tell myself. I'm working 40-60hr weeks trying to be competent in my current job, I simply don't have time to remember what I did 5 years and 2 jobs ago -- but it bothers me that I'm now functionally incompetent for a job that I used to be among the best at. Eventually, I work my way into a Senior Exec VP at a growing company. I'm really good at the job I'm in, but I rapidly lose qualifications for jobs I used to be in. At the Senior Exec VP level I've simply forgotten what it's like to be in the trenches, I try to be sympathetic, but it's so hard to relate...just as hard for me to relate to the Senior Exec VP when I was in the trenches. Am I a competent leader?
e) etc.
I'm specifically not addressing gender in these scenarios (as the article is discussing) because what I'm trying to say is that regardless of gender any of these scenarios might put somebody into position as an "incompetent" leader. The path to leadership (incompetent or otherwise) in my mind is distinct from the social and psychological issues related to gender arriving in those leadership positions. In scenario a and b), there is nothing in gender that prevents women from starting up their own companies. You see it all the time, there are tons of businesses started and run by intelligent and driven women. c & d might still be tougher, there's lots of entrenched power structures that still make it difficult for women to arrive into the top jobs. In d) the person also had enough opportunity to not be guided into a progressing, but dead-end career path.
Anecdotally, I think it's very hard for women to be accepted into leadership positions. If she's too tough she's marked as an "angry bitch" and will get rejected, if she's not perfectly competent in areas far outside of her job function, she'll be marked as "stupid" and get rejected, etc. etc. Cultivating authority, for a woman, requires a degree of careful presentation and balance that is very hard to do and most men don't have to deal with. I've worked for some very good women bosses and a women CEO and I admired their ability to find that balance and presentation style that gave them command without them appearing as an "angry bitch" or "stupid".
I've also worked with some women that couldn't find that balance, they weren't really doing anything a reasonably competent man wouldn't do, but were marked with gendered epithets and eventually driven from their job. Afterwards, I spoke to some of them personally, they felt unbelievably rejected and worthless -- one suffered from depression and dropped out of work for a year. Their job models didn't do anything different, but their models were all men -- so they couldn't figure out what happened and what got them rejected...but the truth is they were simply playing by different rules and weren't able to navigate the environment well enough to figure out what those rules were.
> Over the years I notice that I've forgotten many of the skills I used to have in the lower levels
I manage a team of incredibly talented programmers and I have to work hard to keep up technically in order to make informed decisions when needed. Even with all this effort, I have no illusion I could be as competent a programmer as they are without a lot of work.
edit: I was tempted for a moment to say "I lead" but they need less my leadership than my management. One leads from within and I write very little code these days. I offer some technical advice derived from my experience (mostly the "don't do that, because that will be hard to maintain" kind of advice). What I do, hopefully well, is shield them from external interference so they have a developer-friendly environment where they can better contribute with their skills. It's devilishly hard.
I manage a team of incredibly talented programmers and I have to work hard to keep up technically in order to make informed decisions when needed. Even with all this effort, I have no illusion I could be as competent a programmer as they are without a lot of work.
edit: I was tempted for a moment to say "I lead" but they need less my leadership than my management. One leads from within and I write very little code these days. I offer some technical advice derived from my experience (mostly the "don't do that, because that will be hard to maintain" kind of advice). What I do, hopefully well, is shield them from external interference so they have a developer-friendly environment where they can better contribute with their skills. It's devilishly hard.
This is what I used to do until I forced myself back into an engineering position (at another company).
I apologize in advance for the digression.
>>What I do, hopefully well, is shield them from external interference so they have a developer-friendly environment where they can better contribute with their skills.
I'm not a programmer, but I work closely with them. I'm responsible for demonstrating and supporting the products they build, as well as finding new areas in which those products can be used.
What I noticed is that the teams that are the most shielded produce the highest quality code, but - and this is a huge BUT - the product itself ends up being the most short-sighted and limited in terms of good user experience. The reason is that "shielding developers from external interference" inevitably equates to shielding them from a real understanding of how the end-users actually use it.
I don't mean that as a derogatory comment. But, as someone who is on the "business" side of things, when I work with products developed by shielded teams, often times I find myself wondering, "Holy shit... what the hell were they thinking??" The features and functions work, and they work well - but they are not terribly relevant to what the customer actually wanted.
>>What I do, hopefully well, is shield them from external interference so they have a developer-friendly environment where they can better contribute with their skills.
I'm not a programmer, but I work closely with them. I'm responsible for demonstrating and supporting the products they build, as well as finding new areas in which those products can be used.
What I noticed is that the teams that are the most shielded produce the highest quality code, but - and this is a huge BUT - the product itself ends up being the most short-sighted and limited in terms of good user experience. The reason is that "shielding developers from external interference" inevitably equates to shielding them from a real understanding of how the end-users actually use it.
I don't mean that as a derogatory comment. But, as someone who is on the "business" side of things, when I work with products developed by shielded teams, often times I find myself wondering, "Holy shit... what the hell were they thinking??" The features and functions work, and they work well - but they are not terribly relevant to what the customer actually wanted.
You're right.
This shielding has to be limited in scope. Perhaps the most difficult part is distinguishing between what's good input that will improve the product and what's noise and teaching our product team how to do it by themselves.
That and dealing with power grabs ;-)
This shielding has to be limited in scope. Perhaps the most difficult part is distinguishing between what's good input that will improve the product and what's noise and teaching our product team how to do it by themselves.
That and dealing with power grabs ;-)
This is what a HN top comment should look like. Adds value in a lot of great places, augments the article.
Please, less nitpicky top comments, and more of this. :)
(arguably this is a worthless comment, but maybe highlighting more of the great comments publicly can stop the trolls / righteous indignation peddlers?)
Please, less nitpicky top comments, and more of this. :)
(arguably this is a worthless comment, but maybe highlighting more of the great comments publicly can stop the trolls / righteous indignation peddlers?)
Here's one I think happens fairly often...
e) I'm a career manager with a nice-looking, but superficial set of credentials in the form of education, speaking engagements, articles and the like. I'm not competent or aggressive enough to really scare of offend anyone and fine points of political maneuvering are lost on me.
The real players in my organization are perfectly comfortable and wield huge influence from their VP-level roles. They need an insulator and a fall guy. They orchestrate my promotion and work me like a puppet from a distance. Their success is my success, my success is their success and any of our failures will be mine.
e) I'm a career manager with a nice-looking, but superficial set of credentials in the form of education, speaking engagements, articles and the like. I'm not competent or aggressive enough to really scare of offend anyone and fine points of political maneuvering are lost on me.
The real players in my organization are perfectly comfortable and wield huge influence from their VP-level roles. They need an insulator and a fall guy. They orchestrate my promotion and work me like a puppet from a distance. Their success is my success, my success is their success and any of our failures will be mine.
> fine points of political maneuvering are lost on me.
Tangentially, how do you fix this? Googling 'corporate politics' leads to a bunch of useless magazine articles and leaves me feeling like I'm in Office Space: "I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are, googling office politics".
Tangentially, how do you fix this? Googling 'corporate politics' leads to a bunch of useless magazine articles and leaves me feeling like I'm in Office Space: "I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are, googling office politics".
The best (and bluntest) book I know of in this area is Career Warfare http://www.amazon.com/Career-Warfare-Building-Successful-Bat...
>"Tangentially, how do you fix this?"
I feel it's something that's best learned by example, watching and learning from someone who's skilled in the art. I certainly can't claim to have mastered it, but I definitely think I've learned a lot about it over the years. I’d say more than anything it’s about empathizing, understanding the motivations of others and putting that knowledge to use.
I think technical people often demonstrate a complete misunderstanding and/or disregard for the subject. Yes, "politics" can be a nice way of referring to blatant corruption or cronyism, but it can also be a rationalization for social ineptitude.
It’s easy for an engineer to think that he’s being held back for refusing to play politics when he really just lacks the grace to understand and convince rather than prove and demand.
There’s more to being effective than technical excellence.
I feel it's something that's best learned by example, watching and learning from someone who's skilled in the art. I certainly can't claim to have mastered it, but I definitely think I've learned a lot about it over the years. I’d say more than anything it’s about empathizing, understanding the motivations of others and putting that knowledge to use.
I think technical people often demonstrate a complete misunderstanding and/or disregard for the subject. Yes, "politics" can be a nice way of referring to blatant corruption or cronyism, but it can also be a rationalization for social ineptitude.
It’s easy for an engineer to think that he’s being held back for refusing to play politics when he really just lacks the grace to understand and convince rather than prove and demand.
There’s more to being effective than technical excellence.
> I think technical people often demonstrate a complete misunderstanding and/or disregard for the subject. [...] it can also be a rationalization for social ineptitude.
I guess, but I personally find it hard to really wrap my head around the political landscape at various jobs and have found myself in the path of the lawnmower blade more than a few times.
This is, from what I can tell, because there's not really a rhyme/reason from an observer's perspective to the politics at play. Any given meeting has several options for outcomes, and the optimal one depends on what today's politics look like instead of the obvious "what's good for the company/good for customers/etc." You can really mess yourself up good advocating for a position that seems reasonable when the current is, sometimes unbeknownst to you, flowing a different direction.
> There’s more to being effective than technical excellence.
I agree, but there's more to being politically savvy than just being nice & sociable.
I guess, but I personally find it hard to really wrap my head around the political landscape at various jobs and have found myself in the path of the lawnmower blade more than a few times.
This is, from what I can tell, because there's not really a rhyme/reason from an observer's perspective to the politics at play. Any given meeting has several options for outcomes, and the optimal one depends on what today's politics look like instead of the obvious "what's good for the company/good for customers/etc." You can really mess yourself up good advocating for a position that seems reasonable when the current is, sometimes unbeknownst to you, flowing a different direction.
> There’s more to being effective than technical excellence.
I agree, but there's more to being politically savvy than just being nice & sociable.
> Anecdotally, I think it's very hard for women to be accepted into leadership positions. If she's too tough she's marked as an "angry bitch" and will get rejected
In my experience, the women bosses I've had that would be called "bitch" would be called "asshole" if they were male. I've worked for bitches and assholes, and neither make work life pleasant or productive. This line of reasoning gets repeated often, and I would hate for young women to think that you need to be a bitch to be good leader.
In my experience, the women bosses I've had that would be called "bitch" would be called "asshole" if they were male. I've worked for bitches and assholes, and neither make work life pleasant or productive. This line of reasoning gets repeated often, and I would hate for young women to think that you need to be a bitch to be good leader.
I think you're right about there being nothing fundamental that prevents women from being leaders, but I also think there are relevant differences between the genders. The stereotypical role of the male sex and gender is to protect. The stereotypical role of the female sex and gender is to nurture. A good leader will embody both characteristics as an example for the people he or she leads to look up to and follow.
Great comment. The way this ends up gendered (and race-influenced) in a) & b) is in the same way that it gets that way in c), only you're in front of potential investors (or trying to get in front of potential investors), and/or people that you're trying to get to work for free in return for future promises, rather than board members.
Wow. Thank you so much.
http://www.icahnreport.com/report/2008/06/about-ceos.html
Icahn on CEOs:
"The way CEOs become CEOs in America is a travesty. This is one of our major problems. I use the anti - Darwinian metaphor. The survival of the unfittest.
If you remember if you were in college the fraternity president was always there for you. When you had nothing to do or when you were a little depressed. Feeling down. You go to the club and the fraternity president would always be there. You wondered when he had time to study which he probably didn’t do very much of in school. He was there to sympathize with you if your girlfriend didn’t show up or didn’t call you back and you obviously sort of liked the guy because the fraternity president was usually a likeable guy.
When the elections came up you would always vote for him. He had a couple qualities - the fraternity president. Politically, he was a survivor and he never made many waves. He did not promote controversy. Therefore when he went out into corporate America he was able to move up the ladder fairly quickly. Remember he survived, he didn’t make waves, and he wasn’t a threat. He kept moving up and up.
Eventually he becomes the assistant to the CEO. The CEO had the same qualities. He’s a survivor. He’d never employ anyone underneath him who might be a threat. The boards like these guys… this type of CEO. The boards generally don’t own any stock (another problem with our system). The boards don’t really care to hold CEOs accountable. Remember it’s a symbiotic relationship. These guys pay the boards very well – they give the boards perks. The boards don’t care to hold them accountable because that might endanger the perks they love so much.
When the CEO retires the assistant becomes the CEO. And remember what I told you. He’s a survivor. He would never have anyone underneath him as his assistant that’s brighter than he is because that might constitute a threat. So therefore, with many exceptions, we have CEOs becoming dumber and dumber and dumber. We can all see where this is going. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t such a threat to our ability to compete and to our economy in general."
"The way CEOs become CEOs in America is a travesty. This is one of our major problems. I use the anti - Darwinian metaphor. The survival of the unfittest.
If you remember if you were in college the fraternity president was always there for you. When you had nothing to do or when you were a little depressed. Feeling down. You go to the club and the fraternity president would always be there. You wondered when he had time to study which he probably didn’t do very much of in school. He was there to sympathize with you if your girlfriend didn’t show up or didn’t call you back and you obviously sort of liked the guy because the fraternity president was usually a likeable guy.
When the elections came up you would always vote for him. He had a couple qualities - the fraternity president. Politically, he was a survivor and he never made many waves. He did not promote controversy. Therefore when he went out into corporate America he was able to move up the ladder fairly quickly. Remember he survived, he didn’t make waves, and he wasn’t a threat. He kept moving up and up.
Eventually he becomes the assistant to the CEO. The CEO had the same qualities. He’s a survivor. He’d never employ anyone underneath him who might be a threat. The boards like these guys… this type of CEO. The boards generally don’t own any stock (another problem with our system). The boards don’t really care to hold CEOs accountable. Remember it’s a symbiotic relationship. These guys pay the boards very well – they give the boards perks. The boards don’t care to hold them accountable because that might endanger the perks they love so much.
When the CEO retires the assistant becomes the CEO. And remember what I told you. He’s a survivor. He would never have anyone underneath him as his assistant that’s brighter than he is because that might constitute a threat. So therefore, with many exceptions, we have CEOs becoming dumber and dumber and dumber. We can all see where this is going. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t such a threat to our ability to compete and to our economy in general."
This doens't only apply to America, and I wish more people understood that actually the same concept was the reason "communism" (state capitalism really) failed in Europe, possibly also in Russia - the same mechanism were in place, strengthened by fear. The stakes were higher, you were looking at a catastrophic effect on your and your family's place in society if you got on some higher-ups hit list. Super stupid and incompetent people have risen to the top, and often are still near - in every sector.
I think this is why a no-stakes system should be strived for. You shouldn't have to live in fear due to losing your job or pissing someone off. Basically it should not matter whether you still have a job or not.
I think this is why a no-stakes system should be strived for. You shouldn't have to live in fear due to losing your job or pissing someone off. Basically it should not matter whether you still have a job or not.
>> The boards generally don’t own any stock (another problem with our system). The boards don’t really care to hold CEOs accountable.
wait what? That's not right. I would think the opposite case is true here... The boards own stock, and thus the pressure to get that value up for next quarter..
wait what? That's not right. I would think the opposite case is true here... The boards own stock, and thus the pressure to get that value up for next quarter..
On the public company side board ownership of stock is often trivial
The survival of the unfittest.
A similar proposition is the Peter Principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle] which basically states that because it is often easier to promote less able staff out of the way, people are said to rise to the level of their incompetence. Seems to fit the data all too often.
A similar proposition is the Peter Principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle] which basically states that because it is often easier to promote less able staff out of the way, people are said to rise to the level of their incompetence. Seems to fit the data all too often.
Actually, the Gervais Principle explains it much better. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
The Peter principle actually states that in a meritocratic organization people will rise as long as they're competent, then stagnate once they reach the limit of their competence.
Edit: The one you're thinking of is rather the Dilbert principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle].
Edit: The one you're thinking of is rather the Dilbert principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle].
The implication being typical women leaders aren't incompetent? By all accounts female bosses are just as incompetent as their male counterparts if not more-so. In polls, employees prefer having a male boss over a female one. This effect is particularly pronounced when the polls ask female workers.[1]
1.https://www.google.com/search?q=women+prefer+male+bosses
1.https://www.google.com/search?q=women+prefer+male+bosses
IMHO, The first step towards getting competent people (of any gender) into positions of power would be to stop this blatant, generalizing sexism while doing the analysis. Imagine an article that said something like of "Why Do So Many Incompetent Women Become Fashion Designers?" That would be considered massively sexist.
So is this. Justifying it by saying "But it is meant to help women" doesn't help anyone, really. Most men reading this will bridle, seeing yet another "incompetent men" article on the Internet, and sexism will grow yet more entrenched.
So is this. Justifying it by saying "But it is meant to help women" doesn't help anyone, really. Most men reading this will bridle, seeing yet another "incompetent men" article on the Internet, and sexism will grow yet more entrenched.
I want to hijack this discussion to bring up a personal gripe I have about this all being called "leadership". It is a very PHB term.
With the exception of a few outlying examples, no job being discussed in this article is a leader. A leader has followers, and he can convince them to follow him through his sheer force of will and inspirational ability. Examples of leaders: Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Manson, Jaime Escalante, Joseph Smith, Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mao Zedong.
The people and job titles being discussed here are not leaders. They are managers. The difference is that people don't do what a manager says because he has inspired them to do so. People do what he says because they are paid to do so. That is, managers don't have followers. They have underlings.
Managers are of course needed. To work in groups effectively, a roughly fixed-arity hierarchy has many advantages, and in a hierarchy someone has to be a non-leaf node. The goal of a manager is to manage his underlings in such a way as to meet or optimize certain organizational goals. In general this is a very different set of skills than those found in the best leaders.
This isn't to say that certain leadership skills aren't helpful for management: obviously it's helpful if a manager can apply some powers of persuasion to his immediate underlings. But leadership skills are not necessary to management: there are plenty of reasonable managers with few or no apparent persuasive skills whatsoever (I'll be kind and not name names).
Persuasion is also not restricted to management: it's helpful in practically any job involving human relationships. This includes teachers, salespeople, hostage negotiators, lawyers, and magicians.
But few other career paths imagine themselves as "leaders". Teachers don't go to leadership seminars or buy ridiculous low-rigor books on leadership. This seems to be a cult special to the management community. Why do so many managers imagine themselves to be something they are not? I think it's for two reasons. First, they have power, and leaders have power, and so they have mistaken one for the other. Second, and more importantly, I think management is an awful and thankless life choice. Managers don't make anything or really contribute anything tangible to society. The Dilbert Principle is very valid here. And so managers try to imagine that their jobs ("leadership!") are more important than they really are, simply out of ego boosting.
I think that leadership is so valuable a skill, and so rare and powerful a force, that we should actively fight to prevent the management community from co-opting the term to describe the daily task of collating TPS reports.
With the exception of a few outlying examples, no job being discussed in this article is a leader. A leader has followers, and he can convince them to follow him through his sheer force of will and inspirational ability. Examples of leaders: Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Manson, Jaime Escalante, Joseph Smith, Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mao Zedong.
The people and job titles being discussed here are not leaders. They are managers. The difference is that people don't do what a manager says because he has inspired them to do so. People do what he says because they are paid to do so. That is, managers don't have followers. They have underlings.
Managers are of course needed. To work in groups effectively, a roughly fixed-arity hierarchy has many advantages, and in a hierarchy someone has to be a non-leaf node. The goal of a manager is to manage his underlings in such a way as to meet or optimize certain organizational goals. In general this is a very different set of skills than those found in the best leaders.
This isn't to say that certain leadership skills aren't helpful for management: obviously it's helpful if a manager can apply some powers of persuasion to his immediate underlings. But leadership skills are not necessary to management: there are plenty of reasonable managers with few or no apparent persuasive skills whatsoever (I'll be kind and not name names).
Persuasion is also not restricted to management: it's helpful in practically any job involving human relationships. This includes teachers, salespeople, hostage negotiators, lawyers, and magicians.
But few other career paths imagine themselves as "leaders". Teachers don't go to leadership seminars or buy ridiculous low-rigor books on leadership. This seems to be a cult special to the management community. Why do so many managers imagine themselves to be something they are not? I think it's for two reasons. First, they have power, and leaders have power, and so they have mistaken one for the other. Second, and more importantly, I think management is an awful and thankless life choice. Managers don't make anything or really contribute anything tangible to society. The Dilbert Principle is very valid here. And so managers try to imagine that their jobs ("leadership!") are more important than they really are, simply out of ego boosting.
I think that leadership is so valuable a skill, and so rare and powerful a force, that we should actively fight to prevent the management community from co-opting the term to describe the daily task of collating TPS reports.
You've got good points, but I think you're sometimes over-equalizing "performing tasks" with "following a leader." You're right about managers not doing the same work, i.e. tasks and activities. However, at a higher, more abstract level of accomplishing the organization's goal, e.g. reliably performing a service, leadership connects everyone from the customer relations up to the CEO, down to the layers of task-doers. This leadership is less about everyone, e.g., debugging at the same time, and more about everyone _paying_attention_ to the same activity, customer, project, mega-task at the same time.
Bad managers do foment underlings. They don't care when or how a task is done as long as it is checked off. Good managers, however, keep everyone focused. They know how to direct people so that their work is more than an isolated task... it leverages the momentum of everyone else's activity, creating a continuous end-to-end flow of information and materials in, through people, and back out to customers. The care and dedication for the customer are communicated in parallel all the way from the customer to the last person to touch the code or material.
I like to think about a combustion engine as a useful metaphor. It will work a little bit if timing is within a certain tolerance. It works best when the timing is correct. And it can be optimized for excellent performance. The imcompetence and ego-boosting you're describing are EXACTLY the hallmarks of poor leadership described in the FA. We definitely all need to learn to recognize and refuse to yield to, false confidence.
Bad managers do foment underlings. They don't care when or how a task is done as long as it is checked off. Good managers, however, keep everyone focused. They know how to direct people so that their work is more than an isolated task... it leverages the momentum of everyone else's activity, creating a continuous end-to-end flow of information and materials in, through people, and back out to customers. The care and dedication for the customer are communicated in parallel all the way from the customer to the last person to touch the code or material.
I like to think about a combustion engine as a useful metaphor. It will work a little bit if timing is within a certain tolerance. It works best when the timing is correct. And it can be optimized for excellent performance. The imcompetence and ego-boosting you're describing are EXACTLY the hallmarks of poor leadership described in the FA. We definitely all need to learn to recognize and refuse to yield to, false confidence.
HN: the only place on Earth where Elon Musk would appear on the same list as Napoleon and Mao Zedong.
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A good definition that has helped me distinguish between these two terms is that, "Leaders change the status quo. managers do not." there will be overlapping tasks and skills for these roles, but one definitely is not the other.
+1000 My thoughts exactly. It's not the same a leader than a manager (or a boss)...
Managers are a necessary component of any sizable enough team, sure. The problem these days is that middle management doesn't really do it's job, and instead does the opposite by imposing their will and by getting in the way as they fight to maintain territory and climb the ladder themselves. It only takes a short while before middle management becomes this corrupt and worthless layer, especially if you hire them from the outside (already corrupted). Middle management also tends to suck due to lack of training and due to conversion from an individual contributor to manager being seen as a promotion and a path to executive leadership. The skills required of a manager and those required of someone in an individual contributor role are usually very different, and also the skills required of an exec are different from those required of a manager, so what's present are three separate paths that should be prepared for and climbed separately, but that often gets lumped together.
Better training would yield better middle management, so would a breaking out of this long held notion of territory and holding your employees down. I'm almost convinced that all managers care about are climbing the ladder, holding their employees back (to not lose them, to not have to deal with a threat of someone better, and to be able to take credit for everything the employee produces), buffering against lawsuits, and protecting their territory. That's it.
Sure there are some common threads among all career paths, but that is to be expected. The problem is that the individual contributor to middle manager role change isn't a promotion but a career change, and so is the change from middle manager to executive.
It's also a shame, because by the time most individual contributors are done climbing through the middle management ranks whatever energy, passion, naive ambition, and leadership ability they had is probably long gone (beaten out of them), and what's left is nothing more than the same old thing. This is especially bad if they also had grand visions of what the future could be, but by the time they are done climbing the ranks, they are just another bean counter looking for the next headcount trimming and for a way to meet this quarter's goals at the expense of the long term.
It's always easy to tell what happened to the good players that got beaten down while climbing the ranks, because the originally corrupted will play that good guy's misfortune as though it happened to them. They just love taking what they've done to other people, then playing it back as though it happened to them, not other people. Just listen to the excuses and "sob stories" of a corrupted management, and you'll get a good idea of what they'll do to you if you enter the race with any form of talent, potential, or ambition.
There should be a path for those that want to remain individual contributors, for those that want to be middle managers, and for those that want to end up in a leadership/executive role straight out of school. I understand the lack of incentives that a split among these roles would create (who would want to just be a middle manager with no path to senior leadership?), but that's something to be worked through. Someone can leave the individual contributor ladder and begin on any of the other ladders, but they should understand that this is a career/direction change and not a promotion. This animal needs to be turned on it's head.
And since there isn't one, anyone becoming a manager against their will, or as a stepping stone to executive leadership, needs to keep in mind and constantly remind themselves of what their true ambitions are, because if they don't, then after 8 or so years in middle management, they'll become absolutely worthless and probably corrupt. They also have to fight to hold on to their ability to craft a cohesive vision and making it happen, instead of mismanaging the ambition/vision of their superiors, because otherwise, they'll be ass out pulling the same dubious shit other worthless executives pull, and they'll be beating down star employees (to protect their own skin), rather than creating an environment in which they can get out of the way, and let those employees flourish.
Better training would yield better middle management, so would a breaking out of this long held notion of territory and holding your employees down. I'm almost convinced that all managers care about are climbing the ladder, holding their employees back (to not lose them, to not have to deal with a threat of someone better, and to be able to take credit for everything the employee produces), buffering against lawsuits, and protecting their territory. That's it.
Sure there are some common threads among all career paths, but that is to be expected. The problem is that the individual contributor to middle manager role change isn't a promotion but a career change, and so is the change from middle manager to executive.
It's also a shame, because by the time most individual contributors are done climbing through the middle management ranks whatever energy, passion, naive ambition, and leadership ability they had is probably long gone (beaten out of them), and what's left is nothing more than the same old thing. This is especially bad if they also had grand visions of what the future could be, but by the time they are done climbing the ranks, they are just another bean counter looking for the next headcount trimming and for a way to meet this quarter's goals at the expense of the long term.
It's always easy to tell what happened to the good players that got beaten down while climbing the ranks, because the originally corrupted will play that good guy's misfortune as though it happened to them. They just love taking what they've done to other people, then playing it back as though it happened to them, not other people. Just listen to the excuses and "sob stories" of a corrupted management, and you'll get a good idea of what they'll do to you if you enter the race with any form of talent, potential, or ambition.
There should be a path for those that want to remain individual contributors, for those that want to be middle managers, and for those that want to end up in a leadership/executive role straight out of school. I understand the lack of incentives that a split among these roles would create (who would want to just be a middle manager with no path to senior leadership?), but that's something to be worked through. Someone can leave the individual contributor ladder and begin on any of the other ladders, but they should understand that this is a career/direction change and not a promotion. This animal needs to be turned on it's head.
And since there isn't one, anyone becoming a manager against their will, or as a stepping stone to executive leadership, needs to keep in mind and constantly remind themselves of what their true ambitions are, because if they don't, then after 8 or so years in middle management, they'll become absolutely worthless and probably corrupt. They also have to fight to hold on to their ability to craft a cohesive vision and making it happen, instead of mismanaging the ambition/vision of their superiors, because otherwise, they'll be ass out pulling the same dubious shit other worthless executives pull, and they'll be beating down star employees (to protect their own skin), rather than creating an environment in which they can get out of the way, and let those employees flourish.
I think this article is very dangerous. By and large, the reason why women don't become leaders is because they don't ask to. 1) It's not a feasible social model for everyone sitting around being humble, expecting to become a leader "because they have the right personality profile for it". 2) to be effective, realistically leaders need to have a level of expertise to critically judge the project - leaving it to advisors to make the lion's share of those decisions can lead to serious derailment (which is why the MBA culture is seriously flawed).
"Lean in" may be a bit extreme, but we DO have a problem where for whatever reason women don't ASK to be leaders, and when they do they don't NEGOTIATE for more power or pay. For whatever sociocultural reason, we seem to be in the business of shielding women from the emotional risk of failure. This is deeply ingrained in our culture: although both are changing, on the centuries-old social dance floor men ask women for dances, men ask women for dates. The head of the institute where I work famously owns a Tesla Model S, and this high school intern is somewhat obsessive about the Teslas, and I told her, "go ask him for a ride around the block", and all I got were nine months of excuses not to.
To be sure, it takes a modicum of narcissism to ask for a position of leadership, just as it takes some narcissism to ask for a dance on the dance floor (I deserve to dance with this person) or ask for a date (I deserve to go on a date). Labelling narcissism in and of itself as a bad is dangerous, what is dangerous is excessive narcissism to the exclusion of humility and reason.
Anecdotally, I don't think it's hard for women to accepted as leaders. When I worked for one, it was not a problem, I seriously had a lot of respect for her. Ok. So maybe I did once think of her as "crazy" - but it was only on the day when she hyperbolically threatened to kill the grad students if they used the wrong pipette, and they sort of deserved to hear it, their performance and lack of intellectual introspection was unacceptably low. However, I do work in academic science where positions of leadership are more often than normal (but I would not say a majority of the time) earned through directly relevant achievement. In the "normal" case, it might be easier to shrug off an incompetent or perceived incompetent leader. I do sometimes wonder, though, if whether or not I and others respected her, if she wasn't still self-conscious about it.
"Lean in" may be a bit extreme, but we DO have a problem where for whatever reason women don't ASK to be leaders, and when they do they don't NEGOTIATE for more power or pay. For whatever sociocultural reason, we seem to be in the business of shielding women from the emotional risk of failure. This is deeply ingrained in our culture: although both are changing, on the centuries-old social dance floor men ask women for dances, men ask women for dates. The head of the institute where I work famously owns a Tesla Model S, and this high school intern is somewhat obsessive about the Teslas, and I told her, "go ask him for a ride around the block", and all I got were nine months of excuses not to.
To be sure, it takes a modicum of narcissism to ask for a position of leadership, just as it takes some narcissism to ask for a dance on the dance floor (I deserve to dance with this person) or ask for a date (I deserve to go on a date). Labelling narcissism in and of itself as a bad is dangerous, what is dangerous is excessive narcissism to the exclusion of humility and reason.
Anecdotally, I don't think it's hard for women to accepted as leaders. When I worked for one, it was not a problem, I seriously had a lot of respect for her. Ok. So maybe I did once think of her as "crazy" - but it was only on the day when she hyperbolically threatened to kill the grad students if they used the wrong pipette, and they sort of deserved to hear it, their performance and lack of intellectual introspection was unacceptably low. However, I do work in academic science where positions of leadership are more often than normal (but I would not say a majority of the time) earned through directly relevant achievement. In the "normal" case, it might be easier to shrug off an incompetent or perceived incompetent leader. I do sometimes wonder, though, if whether or not I and others respected her, if she wasn't still self-conscious about it.
This article would be considered sexist if the genders were reversed. In today's political correct discussion it's okay to glorify women and make negative blanket statements about men.
Negative stereotypes are supposedly okay if they're directed at men, but not women.
The real reason so few women become men is that a) women are less interested and b) there are more men at the both ends of the Bell Curve in all kinds of abilities.
Negative stereotypes are supposedly okay if they're directed at men, but not women.
The real reason so few women become men is that a) women are less interested and b) there are more men at the both ends of the Bell Curve in all kinds of abilities.
Read this please: http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/laurie-penny/men-sexism
Then to see where that leads, read this: http://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/1kszxu/my_22f...
Horriby misandrist article that presents no solution, only another voice in the "men accept rape by existing" crowd.
Let's not forget equating conservatives with chauvinists.
Overconfidence bias is very real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
Try asking people to guess a bunch of #s with 90% confidence intervals and see how often they are wrong. (Examples: Population of the US, Circumference of the Earth...)
What does this mean for leadership?
The very thing we are looking for (confidence) undermines good decisions.
So how should less confidence people inspire? That's the tough question. Some of the best professors I've had (in terms of both research production and teaching quality) have been amongst the most humble. Corporate leaders - perhaps less so. Though when you do follow a leader with humility, the strength that they project comes from a deeper place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
Try asking people to guess a bunch of #s with 90% confidence intervals and see how often they are wrong. (Examples: Population of the US, Circumference of the Earth...)
What does this mean for leadership?
The very thing we are looking for (confidence) undermines good decisions.
So how should less confidence people inspire? That's the tough question. Some of the best professors I've had (in terms of both research production and teaching quality) have been amongst the most humble. Corporate leaders - perhaps less so. Though when you do follow a leader with humility, the strength that they project comes from a deeper place.
"It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
- Douglas Adams
I would like to offer a counter point. In military officer training (I haven't done it, but I have friends who have), you are taught that the wrong decision NOW is better than the right decision LATER. The reason for this is because hesitation leads to people dying.
Now think about evolutionary timescales, a leader was primarily needed for dangerous situations such as hunting dangerous prey and warfare. The same logic applies; hesitation results in death. Blind confidence is a necessary trait to make such quick decisions, to not hesitate, and to not second guess yourself. This may be why we are wired to prefer the "confident" over the "competent."
Now, obviously, this is less appropriate in corporate leaders where the stakes are not so immediately life and death, where there is time to research and to examine alternatives. But, we are creatures of our evolution, so it is perhaps not so surprising that is the sort of person we prefer to be our leaders. I think it is important to recognize and remain aware of our biases because that is the only way we have of fighting against them when appropriate.
Now think about evolutionary timescales, a leader was primarily needed for dangerous situations such as hunting dangerous prey and warfare. The same logic applies; hesitation results in death. Blind confidence is a necessary trait to make such quick decisions, to not hesitate, and to not second guess yourself. This may be why we are wired to prefer the "confident" over the "competent."
Now, obviously, this is less appropriate in corporate leaders where the stakes are not so immediately life and death, where there is time to research and to examine alternatives. But, we are creatures of our evolution, so it is perhaps not so surprising that is the sort of person we prefer to be our leaders. I think it is important to recognize and remain aware of our biases because that is the only way we have of fighting against them when appropriate.
A more useful article would be to drop the gender and ask Why Do So Many Incompetent People Become Leaders?
I kind of agree. I completely agree that confidence/arrogance is a male-associated trait and so we see more male incompetent managers, but it isn't a "woman" problem that they are incompetent and bad, it's an everbody-but-the-arrogant-ones problem. I'm not convinced you can solve it "for woman"; solve it in general and the gender problem will resolve itself.
Cheer up! There are plenty of confident, incompetent women too, and they're starting to get their chances. One relative works for one, another did.
Women Don't Ask by Linda Babcock is well worth reading if you're interested in this sort of thing. One particularly striking result was that MBA graduates differences in pay between men and women was around $4,000 in favour of men - which, IIRC, she claimed could be accounted for by the fact that 57% of men chose to negotiate as compared to 7% of women. Those who negotiated, regardless of gender, tended to receive around $4,000 more than those who did not.
I think it very plausible that a lot of this sort of thing comes down to wanting to be fair, not wanting to be pushy - that sort of thing. Which generally works well with other women, but not necessarily so well if your boss is a man and prefers to communicate in a different style. Especially when your access to that style is limited by there being few gender-relevant role models; a man's aggressive he's a go-getter, a woman's aggressive she's an irrational bitch.
I think it very plausible that a lot of this sort of thing comes down to wanting to be fair, not wanting to be pushy - that sort of thing. Which generally works well with other women, but not necessarily so well if your boss is a man and prefers to communicate in a different style. Especially when your access to that style is limited by there being few gender-relevant role models; a man's aggressive he's a go-getter, a woman's aggressive she's an irrational bitch.
The first thought I had was "because of Harvard Business School." Irony.
Easy question to answer -- narcissism. Fortunately, the article addresses this issue.
In my experience, the types of people who generally become leaders are those who seek out to be leaders. And those are types tend to have overly optimistic views of themselves (and some desire to control others).
Or they just want more money than everybody else (ie it's not good enough to earn 200k when everyone else is earning 200k as well..) and they will stop at nothing to get another rung up on that latter...
also because people, not just men, who become leaders are psychopaths, so any damage they do is just a fun bonus, not something they'll sweat, a nice addition to the money, sex and power they get. And yes, sex too - power turns women on and powerful women turn men on too. e.g. I don't really consider JFK a rapist - he just never had to ask... any of his hundreds of conquests.
Homer Simpson : ...before the weight of the world broke my spirit.
Seems to have happened to me too. If it were possible to disable my conscience I would probably opt for it. Where's Dick Fuld now, eh?? Employed.
Homer Simpson : ...before the weight of the world broke my spirit.
Seems to have happened to me too. If it were possible to disable my conscience I would probably opt for it. Where's Dick Fuld now, eh?? Employed.
But are you seriously referring to sexual intercourse that men initiate as "conquests" or was that non-serious?
There are two questions here. One is why are the men who become leaders incompetent. I think it has nailed that one. The other is why men become leaders and women don't. I think it found one contributing factor, but not a cause.
Read http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ceo-archetyp... for insight into other factors that contribute to men having a significant advantage in the hierarchy over men.
Read http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ceo-archetyp... for insight into other factors that contribute to men having a significant advantage in the hierarchy over men.
I've met A LOT of incompetent leaders. So, I asked myself this question a million times. And I think I have found a logic answer...
The secret here is "incompetent". Being incompetent means these people have a hard time holding on to a job. Because they get no raise, no promotion and no special treatment. Heck, they don't even feel part of the team. Cause they're just the guy who does an OK job. Naturally, these people are often out of a job. And since every job quickly gets complicated for them, they tend to start their own little startup.
Contrast that to competent people. Chances are, they'll get hired to do something they love and be offered a comfortable salary. Therefore mitigating (in most cases) the need to create a startup.
Now the fun part, here are some examples of incompetent leaders I've known: - A web agency owner, who was the initial web developer for years, but writes HORRIBLE, INCREDIBLY VULNERABLE code. - A head sales representative who can't write properly in his maternal language. - A web agency owned and run by someone who doesn't know anything about technology. He calls jQuery "iPhone compatible technology". - The best, a boss who couldn't even speak in front of his mere dozen employees. I wonder how he negotiates his contracts.
The secret here is "incompetent". Being incompetent means these people have a hard time holding on to a job. Because they get no raise, no promotion and no special treatment. Heck, they don't even feel part of the team. Cause they're just the guy who does an OK job. Naturally, these people are often out of a job. And since every job quickly gets complicated for them, they tend to start their own little startup.
Contrast that to competent people. Chances are, they'll get hired to do something they love and be offered a comfortable salary. Therefore mitigating (in most cases) the need to create a startup.
Now the fun part, here are some examples of incompetent leaders I've known: - A web agency owner, who was the initial web developer for years, but writes HORRIBLE, INCREDIBLY VULNERABLE code. - A head sales representative who can't write properly in his maternal language. - A web agency owned and run by someone who doesn't know anything about technology. He calls jQuery "iPhone compatible technology". - The best, a boss who couldn't even speak in front of his mere dozen employees. I wonder how he negotiates his contracts.
While the author makes a good case that 'confidence' and 'ability to impress' are key drivers of the tendancy to promote incompetent individuals to leadership roles, another dynamic may be that some leaders who fear exposure of their own incompetence tend to surround themselves with 'yes' men/women who themselves aren't particularly competent or skilled in anything other than making the master feel superior.
In such a situation, when the incompetent leader exits, all those who are next in line are these incompetent 'yes' people, increasing their chances of being considered for and granted promotion.
This dynamic exists in some institutions in contrast to the 'surround yourself with people smarter/better/more competent than you' philosophy of leadership. Jim Collins talked about these approaches in Good To Great, comparing Bank of America's 'weak general' promotion culture with Wells Fargo's approach of getting the most talented people into the highest organizational positions possible. You could argue selection bias, but it's interesting to compare the financial performance of the two banks over the last 10 years or so.
In such a situation, when the incompetent leader exits, all those who are next in line are these incompetent 'yes' people, increasing their chances of being considered for and granted promotion.
This dynamic exists in some institutions in contrast to the 'surround yourself with people smarter/better/more competent than you' philosophy of leadership. Jim Collins talked about these approaches in Good To Great, comparing Bank of America's 'weak general' promotion culture with Wells Fargo's approach of getting the most talented people into the highest organizational positions possible. You could argue selection bias, but it's interesting to compare the financial performance of the two banks over the last 10 years or so.
Leadership requires people to have confidence in your abilities and be willing to follow you. And the semi-sexist bullshit the article has about scientific evidence that women have "more effective leadership strategies" is moot if, as the article contends, they do not appear confident.
Even if the article is correct, it's fundamentally conflating leadership with management and the two are not the same.
Even if the article is correct, it's fundamentally conflating leadership with management and the two are not the same.
The Peter Principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
Because human social competence does not fit as something evolution and natural selection can deal with.
We still don't live in a world where society comes first, which is something which is more happening in Asia.
I don't think the quote "evil prevails where good men fail to act" is always true, but there is no formula for success, there is only domination. You don't become a leader because you know how to make the world a better place, you become a leader because people trust you how to lead, and leading is about making choices and decisions.
Leaders did not invent technologies, but they were important into making them viable in business terms, which is as much important.
But nobody should forget true inventors are not as much valued as good leaders. A good leaders will be a leader who has a minimal technological knowledge, but also understand its compromise.
For example, Tesla would not be viable without introducing the high end tesla roadster, which is a classical business model inventors will have a hard time dealing with.
We still don't live in a world where society comes first, which is something which is more happening in Asia.
I don't think the quote "evil prevails where good men fail to act" is always true, but there is no formula for success, there is only domination. You don't become a leader because you know how to make the world a better place, you become a leader because people trust you how to lead, and leading is about making choices and decisions.
Leaders did not invent technologies, but they were important into making them viable in business terms, which is as much important.
But nobody should forget true inventors are not as much valued as good leaders. A good leaders will be a leader who has a minimal technological knowledge, but also understand its compromise.
For example, Tesla would not be viable without introducing the high end tesla roadster, which is a classical business model inventors will have a hard time dealing with.
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I've worked in many organizations. The managed are always of the universal opinion that the leaders are incompetent. "How can he be so stupid?" is commonly heard.
When those become leaders in turn, they make just as bad if not worse managers. I remember one canonical example who, in a voice dripping with contempt, told me how I was an unbelievable screwup in how I ran my business. Some years later, she left the corporate life and invested her life savings in her own startup, and lost everything.
Being a good leader is a much, much harder job than it looks like. (No, I'm not going to pretend I'm very good at it, either.)
I suppose it's like democracy - it's the worst possible system, except for all the others.
When those become leaders in turn, they make just as bad if not worse managers. I remember one canonical example who, in a voice dripping with contempt, told me how I was an unbelievable screwup in how I ran my business. Some years later, she left the corporate life and invested her life savings in her own startup, and lost everything.
Being a good leader is a much, much harder job than it looks like. (No, I'm not going to pretend I'm very good at it, either.)
I suppose it's like democracy - it's the worst possible system, except for all the others.
"In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women."
While this view may hold true for the majority, I think the complete opposite is true. The people I have learned the most from, and who are the most competent (some of them in CEO positions, most in leadership), take the exact opposite approach. Always willing to admit fault, and imperfections, and always "looking for a better way to do X".
While this view may hold true for the majority, I think the complete opposite is true. The people I have learned the most from, and who are the most competent (some of them in CEO positions, most in leadership), take the exact opposite approach. Always willing to admit fault, and imperfections, and always "looking for a better way to do X".
I'm not really competent but not really confident either, I guess I'm screwed...
I clicked on the link, expecting a discussion on why do so many incompetent men become leaders, only to find a discussion on why do so many incompetent men become leaders.
I was disappointed.
I was disappointed.
Was interested, but I stopped reading at "Freud argued."
Law of averages, there are lots of incompetent people. Our social structures (and humans themselves) are atrocious selectors for competence.
We also notice/remember/celebrate (and attribute to competence rather than happenstance) the people at right place, right time and people at wrong place, wrong time. While ignoring the vast numbers of actually mildly competent and mildly incompetent people in the middle of the bell curve.
We also notice/remember/celebrate (and attribute to competence rather than happenstance) the people at right place, right time and people at wrong place, wrong time. While ignoring the vast numbers of actually mildly competent and mildly incompetent people in the middle of the bell curve.
Two separate questions conflated together:
1) Why aren't there more women in positions of authority? 2) Why are the majority of people in authority incompetent?
The answer to the second is probably that people get promoted exactly one level above their ability. The answer to the former is the real problem, and I suspect that if you solve that you'd still have a world run by a bunch of idiots, it's just that 50% of them would be female.
1) Why aren't there more women in positions of authority? 2) Why are the majority of people in authority incompetent?
The answer to the second is probably that people get promoted exactly one level above their ability. The answer to the former is the real problem, and I suspect that if you solve that you'd still have a world run by a bunch of idiots, it's just that 50% of them would be female.
The former is not a real problem for anyone except college feminists. As soon as they graduate and have kids then paying the bills will be become a real problem. Women not being in exactly 50% or less positions of authority will be quickly forgotten.
Seeing that HN is a tech site: competent tech women will get a hold of tech jobs on their skill level. Incompetent women will either not do tech or be discriminated in to the job.
Seeing that HN is a tech site: competent tech women will get a hold of tech jobs on their skill level. Incompetent women will either not do tech or be discriminated in to the job.
They're not being conflated, the claim is that they share a common cause (men are good at faking competence).
It's simple. They are rotten to the core and showed there was no limit to how low they'd go to rise to the top. They also kissed a lot of ass, and played on the stupidity of those around them.
Remember to do your part to stem the tide of this phenomenon by not hiring or promoting these idiots. Not just the people you dislike, but people who are genuinely like this. If you stop promoting them, then they'll go away.
The power is yours.
Remember to do your part to stem the tide of this phenomenon by not hiring or promoting these idiots. Not just the people you dislike, but people who are genuinely like this. If you stop promoting them, then they'll go away.
The power is yours.
It's 1950. You want to go to the moon. Find ten competent aerospace experts and line them up. Ask them what the moon is made of.
Nine of them answer ditheringly: "I'm not sure," or "we don't really know yet," etc.
The tenth confidently steps up, displays "alpha male" body language, and says: "it's made of green cheese."
That person is now in charge of the space program.
The entire world works that way.
Nine of them answer ditheringly: "I'm not sure," or "we don't really know yet," etc.
The tenth confidently steps up, displays "alpha male" body language, and says: "it's made of green cheese."
That person is now in charge of the space program.
The entire world works that way.
But the alphas did get us to the moon, right?
Leadership carries importance for organizational goals as mentioned in this thread. Those who lead can inspire and aspire others to follow an idea or cause. It has been through my experience of empowering through knowledge that I have lead many peers to acheive great things on their own. Anyone can lead by being inspirational to others. My proposal to this thread: What work inspires you?
I enjoy that this hit Hacker News the same time Microsoft announces Steve Ballmer's retirement, and I wonder if it is not a coincidence.
This sounds exactly like the main point of many Dilbert comics and books (a dozen or so of which I own). Scott Adams explains it as nature's way of moving incompetent people out of the way of the competent people. Having an incompetent person on your team is most likely way more obstructive than having an incompetent manager.
I'm not sure that's the point of Dilbert, although it is a recurring joke. PHB causes way more misery and obstruction than Wally. Your manager can steer your whole team/organization onto the rocks.
To me the problem is within the system. If there were a VP promoting a manager to hiring one, they'd make sure that the manager didn't outshine them. I've seen this at play many times. Incompetent people like to hire & promote other incompetent people so they don't look bad in contrast.
The Press should also take some of the blame. I would wager narcissists make far more outrageous claims about their ability and their companies ability. This gives these leaders the "rock star" status thus propagating all that is wrong with leadership as described in the post.
Because intelligence is detrimental to survival: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16297-intelligent-sold...
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The thesis here is that some men who are confident but not competent become leaders. But, while there are incompetent people who are confident, isn't confidence always a requirement for good leadership?
this isn't complicated. people who hunger for power push for leadership - stupid people don't understand how involved that is and so will go for it before they are ready. to top it off we have a culture of upwards failing and poor interviews.
it is so 'un-pc' to criticise or fire anyone that after being pushed out for screwing everything up you get a nice mark on your CV saying you had a job as X even though you effectively failed as hard as possible.
it is so easy to blag an interview by ticking the standard boxes as well...
it is so 'un-pc' to criticise or fire anyone that after being pushed out for screwing everything up you get a nice mark on your CV saying you had a job as X even though you effectively failed as hard as possible.
it is so easy to blag an interview by ticking the standard boxes as well...
This would have been a decent article if Freud wasn't sourced.
The Peter Principle?
Because they kiss the right asses! I've seen this in large
organizations. In small companies, or companies started
with friends, the leaders are usually the most "well
rounded" person in the room. A small business needs a
person who can get the most out of everyone, in an innate
way. They are usually the first born, and male.
Speaking as a non-conservative, I find the implication that conservatives believe women to be incapable of management offensive. I believe conservatives would say that there is no single and simple answer to the question but that it has do with the differing career and life goals between men and women--the priorities and decisions that men and women use to guide their decision-making. This is how conservatives explain the wage gap, and the same logic would be applied to the management gender gap. As a non-conservative, dismissing their argument about the wage gap (which boils down to, "You're telling me I could pay $0.72 on the dollar for equal skill? Why in the world would I ever hire men?") out of hand is isolating yourself from a genuine criticism. I believe this introductory paragraph attempts to isolate its argument from genuine criticism by similarly dismissing viable counter-arguments as unworthy before it even begins.
I also find the article's juxtaposition of "conservative" alongside "chauvinists" a particularly underhanded and obvious attempt to imply that there is a great deal of overlap between these two groups.
If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children. You're not giving their point of view any legitimacy.