The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
One of the most read about articles in Harvard Business Review is the article – “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?” by Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. I will offer my perspective, but I think that the problem goes far beyond simple gender stereotypes. Harmful stereotypes about leadership, aggression and dominating behavior harm both men and women equally.
As children, most of us grow up with certain impressions about adults. They are bigger, larger and physically stronger compared to children. When one enters the workplace as an adult, the stereotypes of a child do not seem to leave us.
Entrepreneurs, greed and Hollywood:
The current US based economic system has a Hollywood influence when it comes to putting people in the spotlight. In this new model, leadership is never about doing things in the background and being out of the spotlight. Leadership is garish, on your face, in the news all the time and all about domination & control. People like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are often in the news for extreme office politics, gender harassment at work, relationship breakdowns and making obscene demands for personal compensation. They are the modern-day Kardashians who never like being out of the limelight. Whether it is prancing like monkeys or making absurd statements on social media, for some people, the intent is to always capture mind space.
Even till the 1970s, leadership was exactly the opposite. Leaders like JRD Tata, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan did not just create a company. They created cities and economies where nothing existed. The car companies created sales, service and dealer infrastructure that made tens of millions of families wealthy. JRD Tata built the city of Jamshedpur and Tatanagar from scratch. He set up the Indian Institute of Science, one of the foremost research institutions in India.
The current lot of entrepreneurs and leaders do little beyond needing more and more personal wealth. A couple of billions is of no consequence, they want personal wealth in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars. I doubt if even a trillion dollars can satisfy their out-of-control greed. Why any person aspires for so much wealth defies imagination.
These folks claim to be reinventing industries and sectors. The jury is still out whether all the positive press is just empty hype financed by their billions of dollars, or if they indeed aspire to do anything good for society. They target disruption, chaos and trouble in the future of work and by extension millions of families across the world.
The dark triad:
Some of the characteristics of lousy leaders are lack of people management skills, making tall promises, scapegoating and never accepting responsibility. In addition, these folks also display the dark triad of personality traits. They are Narcissistic, Machiavellian and Psychopathic. According to research, the number of psychopaths in the workplace is between 3-21%. Since prison populations have 15-20% psychopaths, it is safe to say to say that some workplaces are more dangerous than prisons.
The reason why the dark traits go unpunished is that these folks show a lot of confidence at work. Narcissistic traits are often attractive in the short term to most people. Since much of office relationships are sporadic and transactional in nature, the bad behavior often goes unnoticed.
In promotion meetings for leadership roles, along with the reporting manager, other leaders have to make a case for promotions. Many of these other leaders are under the spell of the Machiavellian behavior of the person being discussed for promotions. All these folks are also captivated by the idea of modern Hollywood style leaders bulldozing everyone in the workplace. These mentally bankrupt tropes promote aggressive and non-cooperative culture in the workplace. This is why a person like Arnold Schwarzenegger could become a governor. People really thought that he would sweep all the detritus away from politics just like he would do in the movies.
The Indian mode of governance is the opposite of the US and is slowly gaining more prominence. It is characterized by non-flashy, hardworking people who hunker down at work. People like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Arvind Krishna are deep experts who know their jobs. They are not openly confrontational but can hold their ground against anyone. This could be one reason why Indians are all over the top ranks in the Silicon Valley. Many CEOs and almost all CTOs are Indian by birth. Most of them are in the tech industry. This is probably because the tech industry is more concerned about stock valuation than being carried away by the superficial tropes generated by media.
Impact on gender equality:
Women are most impacted by these shenanigans at the workplace. One of the reasons why they are still not getting into top positions is that there are simplistic trivializations and corporate biases about expected leader behavior. As long as Corporate America thinks that nurturing behavior, collaboration and respect are signs of weakness; there will be no hope for gender parity. Individual women vary in traits, however expecting all women to exhibit the dark triad of personality traits in order to become a leader is bound to fail.
I personally think there should be a conversation about why people cannot be their authentic selves. Acting like another person, especially towards an image one does not identify with, hollows the self and damages self-esteem. We all know the bizarre story of Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos, dressing like Steve Jobs and changing her vocal accent to sound like a man. It is a sad world when a woman has to act like a man to do well at work. For all the time Elizabeth was the center of media attention, who knows how many young girls were influenced by her caricature?
Impact on men:
Men suffer as much as women because of such nonsense coming from media about culture and workplaces. Noxious corporate leadership expectations are toxic even for most men. 8% of men possess the dark personality traits compared to about 5% in women. Hence, forcing 92% of men to embrace their dark self is also bad.
Everybody suffers in the end. This is the bane of a modern society with no railings to safeguard it. 92% of men and 95% of women constantly suffer and get deprecated for no fault of theirs. It is not clear how any change can happen. Change may begin with the US CEOs or CHROs looking inwards and introspecting on their corporate culture and understanding how biases impact all employees.
For more such articles, also follow my Substack and Careerbolt channels.
