Book Review: Incompetent Men Leaders

I love Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s new book, ‘Why do so many Incompetent Men become Leaders’. Actually, I was already sold before even opening it, as I’ve long thought the skills and attitudes required for today’s leaders are more likely to be held by women than men. In ‘The Social Organization’ I note that I personally expect to see a fairly rapid reversal in the pay gap and that we will soon need to start thinking about how we keep men’s pay at something close to that received by women. (I also suggest that we should expect to see business start to look and feel a lot more like HR, and for similar reasons, that we don’t have to worry about dressing up ‘soft skills’ as something more masculine.)

But there’s plenty of additional thinking and evidence around women’s leadership roles in TCP’s book.

Firstly, I do agree that we’re starting from a very low base. TCP notes that most people would struggle to name one famous business leader - other than Siri and Alexa apparently! (and isn’t it interesting that the deepest thinking business AI, Watson, is named after a man).

I also agree that we’re misinterpreting the traits we need in leaders today (that’s my argument in TSO too). We miss negatives like overconfidence and self-absorption or misread them as something like charisma. And we don’t realise that whilst women are busy developing others, men are focusing on advancing their own careers. “The result is a pathological system that rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence.”

TCP singles out two clear problems which all affect men most - narcissism and psychopathy.

However, there are more nuanced issues too. In particular, we assume confidence indicates competence. I’m rather conflicted on this. I tend to think that confidence, and even over confidence helps, not just to get a job but to do that job too. It expands opportunities, allowing people to take on more projects and get more experience, and in a range of situations helps them to perform better too. Eg TCP notes that overconfident CEOs can often attract more suppliers and investors and their firms have lower employee turnover. Their aura of success creates a new reality around the because people believe in them. Well, that’s OK - that’s largely what leadership is about. TCP’s examples of dentists and airplane pilots don’t really relate here. I’m not fussed at all about my dentist’s confidence levels, but I don’t want a nervous CEO. And yes, overconfidence may just hide insecurity, but I think we all suffer from imposter syndrome to a large extent. And projecting confidence makes us feel more confident internally too. It’s often a good thing when we’re more confident than our actual competence would suggest.

TCP also takes a swipe at Brexit, suggesting that David Cameron suffered from a typically masculine over confidence in his ability to gain a stay vote in the referendum. Actually, I think that was fine - I believe in democracy and he gave the country a chance to say what it wanted. But since the referendum we’re suffered from a crisis of under confidence, with Theresa May capitulating to the EU (eg not arguing forcefully for the need to discuss withdrawal and future trade agreement together which could have negated the need for a backstop) and being unwilling to promote and argue for a direction in her cabinet, government or parliament, rather than just bunkering down and waiting for time to run out. Personally I’d have preferred Cameron, or even Boris Johnson, or possibly even Donald Trump to run the negotiations. Or Andrea Leadsome, Penny Mordaunt, or Liz Truss. Or, of course, Margaret Thatcher. (Please note I’m not a fan of Donald Trump but I suspect that in this particular case, he might have achieved a better outcome for the UK than Theresa May. Though it’s interesting that whilst TCP seems very careful in stating he is not calling Elon Musk a narcissist, he doesn’t bother flagging this in his discussions on Donald Trump. Or Steve Jobs, or especially Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi.)

Possible TCP’s best argument on over confidence is that whilst men often only need to appear confident to succeed, women have to confident, competent and caring. In fact, we can be put off confident women - just as we can by friendly, empathetic and agreeable men. But that just means we need to be more robust about applying the right criteria, and consistently selecting people against them.

We also need to ensure that confidence is complemented by competence, which can be difficult to assess, and can often be confused with having had good luck. So we also need good feedback, and not just on our strengths. “In fact, negative feedback - feedback that highlights a deficit in potential or performance - is the most useful type.” TCP also criticises the recent trend to eliminate negative comments from performance reviews. “This trend turns the performance review into a futile exercise ingratiation where the best that employees can hope for is the ability to read between the lines to gauge what their managers want from them.”

However, for feedback to work, we also need to ensure people are aware of their weaknesses and have a realistic sense of their limitations.  So we also need to select for self-awareness, especially as experts and clueless people often have simile self perceptions of their abilities.”The most inept individuals will also make the last accurate evaluations of their talents, grossly overestimating where they stack up against their peers. Meanwhile, the most competent people will exhibit much self-criticism and self-doubt, especially relative to their expertise.” (The graph is from TCP’s presentation at AHRI last time I was speaking there.) Once again, I’m a bit conflicted on this. Eg I think our tendency to enhance our egos rather than accept a brutal reality check is generally a positive characteristic (especially as so much of how people see our performance will be distorted anyway), though this can obviously be overdone.

So, for me, we should continue to fake it till we make it, and in fact I often work with (mainly women) HR groups to get better at this.…

The book also includes an interesting chapter on charisma, which I’m not going to review as I’ve already gone on long enough, but I draw a similar conclusion to the above - we need to avoid confusing charisma for broader leadership performance, but again, charisma is a generally useful thing. TCP notes companies with charismatic CEOs often have inflated market values - that’s not a basis for sustainable success, but it’s a nice enabler. And he also suggests charisma often links with being highly connected within the organisational network, which again is a very positive enabler for leadership roles (see notes on organisational networks in ‘The Social Organization’). We just need to assess connection, not use ‘charisma’ as a sloppy substitute.

There are some other interesting sections in the book too, eg suggestions all of with which I agree that potential is more important than talent, and on the importance of intellectual capital, and especially social capital - which I think should also be seen as an important aspect of leadership potential. And also on the link of leadership to culture - “There is as much variability in groups’ and organisations’ cultures as there is in individuals’ values.”

Putting all of this together, TCP recommends that we focus less on diversity programmes aimed at placing more women at the top of business and instead change the competencies we use, which will have the supplementary benefit of selecting more women.

I don’t go that far - I think diversity programmes are really helpful and deserve a key place. I do agree though that their purpose shouldn’t be to help women emulate men - eg I’ve never thought ‘Lean In’ was a particularly good idea. (TCP seems to suggest this may have contributed to a rise in narcisstic women.)

 
Importantly, this isn’t about training leaders - some characteristics like leadership are hard to change, and leadership development isn’t working (see another slide from AHRI). “Bad leaders are unlikely to turn into talented, inspirational, or high performing leaders”. Good coaching does work, but I still think TCP is right to emphasise the need to select leaders based on appropriate criteria that treat confidence and charisma with care, and especially don’t favour narcissists and psychopaths. And formal assessment mechanisms which assess people appropriately against these criteria.

Or, as I often summarise it, we should never recruit or promote anyone into leadership unless they are interested in people, and competent and committed to lead them.

This may require organisation changes too. My favourite option in many firms is a dual career stream.

If not this, there are increasing opportunities for self management. Or we should get people to vote for their own leaders (more simply, project based organisations may be able to allow people to just select their own individual line managers).

If these options don’t work, I think the time may be coming for HR to take over and start to line manage everyone in the business, allowing incompetent men (and women) just to manage the performance of these people on projects. Since HR is mainly populated by women, that might be another way of getting more competent women into leadership positions too?

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Let's stop the 'generation blah' blah

One of my most fun pastimes on Twitter is tweeting about generations.

I don't know if it's just the people who follow me but I always attract a couple of responses complaining of over generalisation and stereotyping.

People do make too much of generation differences and often misrepresent the research.   My favourite worst example of this was a presentation in Saudi Arabia using generic suggestions about generations from the USA.  If you understand that generational differences are based upon very different experiences people have in their lives, particularly whilst they were teenagers and their brains for rapidly changing, then you'll recognise that's nonsense.

Sorry but a Saudi teenager has a very different teenage experience from one in the States, particularly if they're a woman.  Indian teenagers will have had a different experience again.  It makes no sense to extrapolate from one (usually the US) to another.

Here's a good summary of the issue.

At TechHR it's happened twice (actually several responses to two tweets).  Once in response to a tweet about someone else's presentation and comment, and once a retweet of an HR magazine article about graduates.  Well sorry the presenter was talking about generations and the article was about graduates.  What can I do?  Particularly in 140 characters.

As well as being vaguely annoying the responses are unhelpful for two other reasons.

Firstly we have to be able to talk and tweet about things,  You might not agree with what I or another speaker are saying but its important I'm able to state it without snarky responses.

Secondly - and again, you might not agree - but generation differences are real.  It's just that they're not the only difference which exists.  People of different genders are different, different national cultures are different.  So are people of different religions, experiences, perspectives, orientations and all sorts of different things.

Actually you put all of that together and the only way to respond to people and their differences is to treat each person as an individual.

That doesn't mean it's wrong to try to disentangle the differences between gen y and baby boomers, or men and women etc etc.  So let's just not do the generation blah blah thing.  Please.

Photo credit - Satya Sinha

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#ATD2016 #LeadLikeAGirl

One of my favourite sessions yesterday was with DDI’s CEO Tracy Byham on women in leadership.  As Tacy suggested, women in leadership is a business issue, not a women's issue.  However given the low number of attendees in the room it doesn't seem to stand out  as a men's issue - which might, of course, be part of the reason for the problem?  As Tacy suggested, this should be something which concerns mentors, leaders, fathers of this generation of women and the next.

We started with the #LikeAGirl video and then looked at some of the evidence for why this type of sterotyping is a problem in leadership as well.  Eg Barclays find that in the bottom 20% of businesses by financial performance just 19% of leaders are women.  In the top 20% 37% are women.  DDI and the Conference Board found that in the bottom 20% 16% of hi-pos are women.  In the top 20% 28% are women.  How re we going to populate the ranks of leadership if don’t change our high potential pools?  Companies receiving investments in the Shark Tank (the US Dragon's Den) do better when they're led by women rather than by men.  There's also the pay gap with the World Economic Forum suggesting it will take 118 years for the gap to be closed  -and we're currently receding from closing it.  (See my posts / TV interviews on this as well.)

Have we reached the turning point or is the glass ceiling a thing of the past? (loud 'no!' from audience).

In the Fortune500 just 5% of CEOs are women.  There are more CEOs named John than are women.  But there are a higher proportion of women than men in the general workforce, they're just not progressing up to the top.

We then moved onto skills with Tacy asking what women are better than men at… (a loud ‘everything!’ from the audience).  Or not - DDI's research suggests there are no differences in skills between men and women.  I'm not convinced by that.  There are certainly differences between men's and women's behaviours.  Perhaps that's what Tacy was getting at when she said there are differences in application - women are better at putting their heads down and focusing and men are better at throwing themselves into challenges which help them grow and develop. 

It's about confidence - men say they got a new job because they earned it, women will say it’s because they got lucky.  One stat Tacy shared with us was from Carnegie Mellon University and is that 57% of men but just 7% of women negotiate their first job salaries.  And the impact of this is going to ripple up through men's and women's careers.  There's also the findings from HP men apply for their next job when they have 60% of the required skills, women only when they have 100%

DDI's advice for women in correcting this imbalance is for women to:

• Declare yourself
• Radiate confidence
• Fail forward
• Super-power your network.

All good stuff though I'm still left with a slight concern, about like with Leaning In, that actually what we really need, from an organisational and societal perspective at least, is for business leaders to act more like women than the women to act like men.

Tacy suggested DDI's advice isn't about getting women to act like men, it's about how we all become the best version of ourselves - especially as the attributes of the best leaders  are about EQ not IQ - things which can be developed.

But it is.  If women start to think more like men, they'll start to act more like men as well.  And if more women start doing power poses and stop apologising it's not going to have a helpful impact on our organisations.  Businesses are already far too confident about their own futures.  We need more questioning, not less.

But the biggest issue for me is about 'We' and 'I'.  DDI want women to say 'I' rather than 'we' to make themselves more powerful.  But actually if we're serious about teaming and collaboration, we all need to get a lot more focused on 'we'.  Not the royal we that Brene Brown was suggesting people use to avoid accountability, but the real we that suggests we recognise our performance isn't solely informed through our own performance.  That recognises, as Simon Sinek suggested, that none of us are smarter than all of us.

That's not just about our words, but the words are an indication of our thinking.  And the thinking has to change.  See for example my post on 'what's in it for us?'.

It's a difficult one, and I'm not suggesting that women shouldn't follow DDI's suggestions.  I encourage my wife and daughters to use some of this and if I was working in an organisation I'd encourage my female colleagues to do so too.  I just don't think it's the end of the story.

It's a bit like HR's challenge in the business too - HR needs to act more like the rest of the business to gain credibility but a more important goal is to change the business, to be a bit more like HR (see my previous posts on Simon Sinek and Dan Pontefract for more explanation on this).

Women need to learn from how men progress in organisations.  But we need to make our organisations more adaptive to traditionally female behaviours as well.

See my post on the feminisation of work too.

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BBC World interview on Equal Pay

I've been back on BBC World talking about the gender pay gap and equal pay.

The context was Equal Pay Day, set up 20 years ago by Bill Clinton, and Hillary's support for its continuation in Glassdoor's panel event.

I talked about Glassdoor's economic research confirming that there is a real gender pay gap, but that most of this is explained (or as Hillary suggested, explainable but not justificable) ie that we need to find a way to ensure that society doesn't divert women away from high paid to low paid jobs and get in the way of their progression.  I think it might even be deeper than this ie that some of the high paying jobs are only high paying because they relate to the sort of activities which men tend to value.  In a fairer world, jobs based on caring, service and education might be better paid, and those in casino banking a bit less.  That's not to say more women wouldn't benefit and be engaged from finding jobs in STEM, technology and other areas, but I do think the jobs that women currently tend to take deserve being more highly valued too.

However about a third of the gap can't be explained like this, is a result of real unequal pay, and more direct bias, conscious or unconscious, within the workplace.  The results matter because Glassdoor has used the actual salaries entered by people in its site, so this is a much more granular and therefore accurate analysis than we've ever had before.

I enjoyed the interview though I was a bit disappointed in not finding an opportunity to talk about pay transparency particularly as I followed on from discussion around Bob Dudley's rather obscene pay levels, tax avoidance, corporate greed and an interview with Dr Kim at the World Bank noting that transparency isn't going to go away.  Glassdoor's findings show that employees believe this will be an important means to move towards equality.

I also regretted not being able to get to see Iris Bohnet speak at the LSE as she also covers a lot of great research around gender equality.  Did you know for instance that politically correct language helps both men and women in a team to perform.  That's one reason why Isabel Hardman was right to call out the UK MP who called her the totty.

I also think Bohnet's ideas about nudging organisations to reduce the impact of bias are very sound eg women are more likely to give a good speech if they see a picture of Hillary rather than Bill Clinton, and are less likely to go into computing if this is promoted through pictures of Luke Skywalker.  I'm not sure how Princess Leia relates.

You may also be interested in some of my other BBC interviews for Glassdoor, eg:

• Best country in Europe to get a job
  

• Zero hour contracts (interview on BBC Breakfast)

• The gender pay gap (interview on BBC Radio 4 Today programme) and Gender pay gap in bonuses (interview on BBC News Channel)

• Pay transparency - on Glassdoor and in your organisation too

• Why men won't ask for Shared Parental Leave (interview on Sky Breakfast)

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Pay Transparency in Talent Management

I posted towards the end of last month about my issues with today's pay differentials, included in the ATD's new Talent Management Handbook (in which I wrote the chapter about Reward).

However changing differentials isn't the only action that's needed, we also need to be more transparent about the differentials we have.

This is particularly relevant in the UK given recent reporting that the gender pay gap for women in full-time senior employment is now higher now than it was in 2005.

It'll be interesting to see whether the introduction of mandatory gender pay gap reporting in the UK next year will tackle this and even more importantly whether it will start to increase broader transparency at all.

Here is this section from the Handbook...

Increased Pay Transparency

Most organizations encourage people to keep their reward secret as people tend to judge the worth of other people by focusing on what they can see people doing rather than the real challenges in a job which tend to be more intangible, meaning that pay levels can be hard to justify.  However we are living and working in an world where people are easily able to share information with each other and more importantly, there is a greater expectation that things will be shared.  Given this increasing level of transparency, trying to maintain secrecy around reward or anything else is increasingly unsustainable.

Transparency is also increasing externally as well as internally, particularly with the growing popularity of sites like Glassdoor and increasing amounts of legislation  around external pay reporting.

However the main reason that pay transparency may be needed is that it is difficult to ask people to trust pay systems when they are opaque, particularly when trust is already low, and also when pay is going to be increasingly person rather than job based in future.

In any case, pay transparency tends not to be a major issue in countries where all or some of the salaries are made public.  Also we in the HR / Talent Management function already know and accept people’s salaries and there is no good reason to think we can handle this information but that other people cannot.

One of the businesses promoting pay transparency is Buffer which emphasizes how transparency breeds trust and leads to better teamwork.  Supporting its ‘open salaries’ approach the company has published how it calculates salaries, bonuses and equity payments and also provides the amounts all its staff receive.

Also see:

• Pay transparency - on Glassdoor and in your organisation too

• Gender pay gap in bonuses

• Glassdoor findings on the gender pay gap

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Gender Pay Gap in Bonuses

I’ve been back on BBC News discussing some of the highlights of Glassdoor’s latest Employee Confidence Survey as well as some earlier research by XpertHR and CMI.

Firstly, the research broadly supports the government’s Labour Market Statistics released this week, with generally very positive employment figures.  Glassdoor’s respondents also seem generally positive although there are concerns about the ability of unemployed people to find work, and of potential redundancies

I talk about these findings in this article in HR Grapevine.

 

Secondly, the research also supports the LMS findings on pay with the UK receiving a 3% pay rise over the last year as Glassdoor respondents are also generally positive about receiving a pay rise over the next 12 months.  However once again there are concerns as this splits into 44% of men but just 28% of women thinking that they’re going to get a rise.

This quarter, Glassdoor also asked about bonus payments and their seems to be a gender pay gap here too.  44% of men vs just 29% of women have access to a bonus programme and for women 37% of that programme is connected to company vs individual results, as against this being the case for just 27% of men.  Maybe partly because of this only 61% of women think they’ll actually get a bonus payment, compared to 75% of men.

I’m not really very sure what lies behind this.  Is there a stereotyped assumption that men will be more motivated by individually focused bonuses whereas women will be more interested in making broader contributions?  Or do men push harder for more individually focused bonuses? 

There are differences in male and female brains and differences in our expectations of and reactions to bonuses as well as pay rises may be due in some part to our distinct roles as hunters and carers in our evolutionary history.  However the bigger factor is almost certainly the way boys and girls are socialised differently during their development in childhood and beyond.  So even in the working environment, adult women can be seen as pushy if they ask for an individually focused bonus when similar behaviour in men can be labelled more positively as things like ambition or assertiveness.

However this works, it contributes to the broader lack of fairness in pay, and may mean employers are missing out on ways to keep women motivated and perhaps even retained and progressing within their organisations.

I talk about these findings in the BBC interview and my comments about them are also quoted in this article in the Evening Standard.

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