I am not a conservative, but the first paragraph really turned me off to reading the remainder of this article by asserting that "conservatives and chauvinists" tend to endorse the notion that there is an under-representation of women in management because "they are not capable."
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
"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.
>> 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..
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] bhauer|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mblack68|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pessimizer|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrchucklepants|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freyr|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lmg643|12 years ago|reply
"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?
[+] [-] lazyjones|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdonis|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
Yes, and so are cautious men, and nice guys, and pretty much every other kind of guy.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nairteashop|12 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] rglovejoy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aestra|12 years ago|reply
"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)
[+] [-] RougeFemme|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephencanon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jakarta|12 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] kokotko|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|12 years ago|reply
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..
[+] [-] Toenex|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] s_baby|12 years ago|reply
1.https://www.google.com/search?q=women+prefer+male+bosses
[+] [-] parennoob|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SeanLuke|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] diydsp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smacktoward|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pullo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaimebuelta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeldidit|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dnautics|12 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] nawitus|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnal943|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meangeme|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] koshatnik|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodcanadian|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pgopalan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ojbyrne|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap22213|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj700|12 years ago|reply
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.