Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic

In theory, a humble leader seems like a great idea. In practice, our leadership choices reflect very different preferences. It is time for change.

Few people would contest the idea that humility is a desirable leadership quality. However, ask those same individuals to name a famous leader, and their choices will likely reflect the reverse: that the most emblematic and archetypical leaders exude arrogance and self-importance, rather than modesty or humbleness. How to explain this incongruence?

Scientific research shows that humble leaders are more likely to create healthier and more effective organizational cultures, to develop employees’ potential, as well as coach and mentor them, and boost team morale, job satisfaction, and performance. As a recent meta-analysis shows, humility is not just associated with higher levels of leadership competence, but also lower levels of counterproductive work behaviors (e.g., deviant, unethical, and corrupt acts by leaders and their teams). If you want to minimize the risks of toxic and destructive leadership, just select leaders on humility.

Employees are largely aware of the benefits of having a humble leader, as are voters. Humility enables leaders to understand their own limitations, take into account others’ opinions, acknowledge their own mistakes, and be sufficiently self-critical to attempt to change and get better, making humility a key ingredient of coachability. In contrast, when leaders lack humility they are prone to making avoidable mistakes, blaming others for their poor decisions, and overestimating their own talents to the point of losing touch with reality, preferring instead to surround themselves with Yes Men. In leadership, as in most domainsof talent, few traits are as prototypical of incompetence as arrogance.

So, why wouldn’t we want a humble leader?

The answer is that, though we tend to value humility, we are seduced more by other qualities, such as confidence, charisma, and arrogance, that are inversely correlated with humility. When faced with a choice to nominate, select, or elect a leader, humility does not actually feature high on our priority list. In fact, there are five critical pitfalls to explain why we rarely end up with humble leaders.

We mistake confidence for competence: Whether in business or politics, there’s a pervasive tendency to select leaders on the basis of their confidence rather than competence. This is why overconfidence is far more common in leaders than humility. And because the overlap between confidence and competence is just 9%, when our main criterion for appointing leaders is how good they think they are, we will inevitably end up with lots of leaders who are not very good, except in their own mind. Just look at the typical career advice offered to people who are interested in becoming leaders: “believe in yourself no matter what”, “if you think you are great you are”, “be more confident”, and “lean in”. The reason for this advice is obvious - it works. The more you focus on self-promotion, blowing your own trumpet, and managing impressions, the more likely you are to advance in your career. And there is no better way to deceive others into thinking that you are better than you actually are, than to deceive yourself first. Alas, this is not the best recipe to increase the proportion of humble leaders. There may be some who fake arrogance or external confidence while being internally modest or at least self-critical, but for each such a person we will attract ten who are just deluded about their talents, and coaching them to be humble will be hard.

We are blinded by charisma: As if Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon didn’t have enough content, we appear to want leaders who are funny and entertaining. When it comes to leadership, all style and no substance will get you further than no style and all substance. Other than Angela Merkel, it is hard to think of a famous leader who could not be the focus of a juicy, controversial, dark side docudrama. It is as if people’s main motivation for becoming leaders were to inspire the next Scorsese and DiCaprio movie. And like the Wolf of Wall Street, the reason for this is that we are often seduced, if not blinded, by charisma. We gravitate towards entertaining showmen (yes, usually men) who are fearlessly charming in high-stake settings, like political debates or in-person job interviews, and socially skilled to the point of violating conventional etiquette, and intimidate opponents. The problem is not that we find this enchanting, but that we equate it to leadership talent. Furthermore, as I illustrate in my latest book, if confidence disguises incompetence, charisma can mask psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies. This does not mean that charisma is toxic per se. Rather, it is an amplifier, making competent leaders better, and incompetent leaders more destructive. When a leader is smart, ethical, and prosocial, you want them to be as charismatic as possible, so they can have a strong positive impact on their followers. But when a leader is inept or corrupt, you should really hope that they have as little charisma as possible, or they will cause far bigger damage on the rest. In short, charisma magnifies the impact - good and bad - leaders have.

We are too lazy to evaluate talent: One of the paradoxes of talent is that, as humans evolve to acquire ever more sophisticated and complex skills, talent becomes harder and harder to judge. Indeed, throughout most of our evolutionary history talent consistent of easily observable physical traits (e.g., body strength, motor dexterity, and sheer size), with only a recent shift to intellectual skills (e.g., qualifications, expertise, experience, etc.), and the current focus on soft skills or psychological capital (e.g., curiosity, EQ, IQ, and indeed humility). Unless you are an expert in a given area, you probably don’t know how to detect expertise in others - except, of course, when it comes to shows like the X-factor or America’s Got Talent, where people’s incompetence is so clear, that we can laugh at their arrogance. But when it comes to leadership talent, we are mostly clueless as to how much of it people have. Try this: ask people to tell you who in their view was the best president or prime minister of their country, followed by a request to produce some data to back up their choice. You will see that (a) most people struggle to provide a rational, evidence-based justification for their choices, and (b) you will need help from Wikipedia to assess their claims. The business world is not much different. It includes many former CEOs who become highly successful leadership gurus after a failed career, and many talented leaders who never receive the credit they deserve.

We equate arrogance to strength: Although we often fail to detect irrational arrogance (the only way to realize if people are not as good as they think, is to establish how good they are), we are usually able to determine whether someone has a positive view of themselves, especially if their egos seem large. Ironically, our reaction to this is not to be put off - even when we say we love humility - but to see them as strong or competent. It is as if we were amateur poker players, impressed and intimidated by someone boasting and showing off, even if they are blatantly bluffing. There is, though, an exception to this rule: if the person bluffing is a woman. Indeed, while we celebrate and glorify arrogance in men, to the point of equating it to leadership talent, we are repelled by it when it is found in a woman. This suggests we are more likely to screen out incompetence (and impostors) among female than male leadership candidates. If our goal is to end up with more humble leaders, we should not make it easier for arrogant women to become leaders, convincing all the humble women in the world to lean in, even if they don’t have the talents to back it up, but stop celebrating arrogance in men.

We perceive humility as a feminine attribute: If we really valued humility, we wouldn’t overlook humble people for leadership roles. We do this with both women and men, but only because we associated humility with femininity. So, when women display it they are “unfit for leadership” because they lack the stereotypical masculine traits we desire in a leader: kick-ass bravado, reckless risk taking, and overconfidence. And when men display humility we assume they are too feminine to be in charge - perhaps they don’t even want it in the first place? Not that we don’t appreciate humility when it is found among extraordinary achievers or powerful people who display it to showcase their connection to the little people - we do like that, whether genuine or not. But those same individuals probably had to hide as much of their humility as possible in order to get to the top. Imagine if our typical career advice for someone who is interested in becoming a leader was: “let others take credit for your own hard work”, “don’t talk about your talents or achievements”, “don’t talk, just listen”, and “focus on making others look good”. When someone tells you “I prefer to let my achievements speak for themselves”, they are definitely not doing that. And when someone tells you “just let your accomplishments speak for themselves” they probably don’t want you to advance your career - of course, it should not be this way, but that’s the way it is.

So, if we are seriously interested in having more humble leaders, we should start by simply addressing - and preferably reversing - these five pitfalls. Focus less on confidence and more on competence; de-emphasize the importance of charisma; develop the right expertise, and make the right effort, to evaluate people’s actual rather than self-perceived talent; understand that arrogance is only a strength if we are intimidated by it; and accept the 21st century reality that the essence of leadership is not hyper-masculine (not that it ever was).

Forbes