Do you work for leaders that are incompetent? Do you think our political leaders are incompetent? If either is true for you, read on and find out from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – why do so many incompetent men become leaders? This 9 min Ted talk is hilarious, eye-opening, and actionable.
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders – A summary
I have probably watched this Ted talk 5 times in the last few weeks. The facts he share are true and frustrating. Each of us is still contributing to helping incompetent men become leaders. Here are the three aspects of why so many incompetent men become leaders. This unfortunately also applies to incompetent women leaders.
- Confidence instead of Competence: The gender difference I see is most women will not feel or project confidence until we are competent. While we see plenty of men project confidence without substance. This is one of the core reasons we mistake confidence for competence and thus end up with incompetent men as leaders.
- Charismatic instead of Humble: Why are we so attracted to people who are charming and entertaining? I guess it’s because we equate that again to competence. We even think we need to be charming and entertaining ourselves to climb the leadership ladder. Many of my blog readers have reached out to ask me how to be more funny in their presentations. That question probably stems from this belief. The reality however is some of the best leaders we admire are humble or perhaps even boring.
- Narcissistic instead of Empathetic/Have Integrity: Trump is a textbook narcissist and the American people unfortunately are paying with their lives due to his incompetent leadership. If you don’t believe me, then just read Fortune, Forbes, and the Financial Times
What Can We Do About it – 3 Recommendations
Only the first of these three recommendations was mentioned in the TED talk. I believe the other two are just as important.
1: Be better judges of who would be a good leader. Instead of choosing leaders who are confident, charismatic, and narcissistic, make sure we judge based on whether they are competent, humble and have integrity.
- Distrust our instincts – use intellectual logic instead – our instinct naturally gravitate to what society is generally attracted to – confident and charismatic personalities. Judge leaders based on their actions instead of their words and charm
- Raise the standards we use to judge men. Often, women are asked to act more like men in order to become leaders. This is fundamentally flawed. Just look at our covid situation, seven female leaders use Truth, Decisiveness, Tech, and Love to quickly led their nation out of crisis.
Recommendation 2: Leave bad leaders. There are many bad leaders already in place at work and in politics. Sometimes we feel powerless to change that or have any say in whether they get promoted further. I am here to remind you that we are powerful.
- “Vote with our feet” – by leaving a department or entire organization that are filled with bad leaders. Actively look for other jobs when you work for a bad leader. We cannot change others but we can change ourselves. If we do this in mass, bad leaders cannot stay in power long. We are skilled and in this day and age of covid, remote “wisdom workers” are valuable and have more options than ever. More and more companies are hiring outside their geographies in our “new normal”.
- “Vote” in local and national elections – Our police departments across the nation need to be reformed to eliminate the blatant racism we have seen. We must vote locally for politicians that understand and will do something about the systematic racism in our political and police systems. And of course in November, we must all vote for who should be president – who is the person that can help us through this massive pandemic that has now gone out of control in the United States.
Recommendation 3: Focus on what matters when you develop your leadership skills. It’s not just our judgement and actions as followers that need to change. We also need to be self-aware and proactively develop true leadership skills.
- Competence – do you still need to be confident? yes. however, it cannot be at the price of competence. Competence includes being able to define vision, charter a course in the face of ambiguity, lead from the front, and be decisive.
- Humility – always be open to learning and listening. A great leader is surrounded by people smarter and different from him and her. Humility allows a good leader to listen to others and allows others to provide different perspective and solutions
- Integrity & Empathy – be true to your word and always understand and care about the impact of your actions to others. This is beyond lip service and again it’s the action of a leader that demonstrates these traits – will you step up and take accountability for your team’s mistakes? will you care about your people as people in additional to as your team members? etc..
Here are additional articles and tips on how to develop your leadership skills. Below is also a 15 min discussion we had on this topic at our last month’s coaching call.
Remember we are all powerful! By changing ourselves and our actions, we lead the way to the change we want to see in the world. 🙂
Your comments: Did you learn something new from the Ted talk and/or this article? What new action will you take as a result? I look forward to your comment
Lei