[Transcript]

Recently we spoke about the Big 5 personality traits. But which of these traits do you think great leaders typically have? Do you think a great leader would typically be higher or lower in openness? Conscientious? I will bet a lot of us would typically expect extraverts to be great leaders, but why wouldn’t introverts be good at leading? Extraverts might be more willing to try and win elections but that doesn’t necessarily make them better leaders does it?

My name is Shaun McMillan and this is the Best Class Ever. 

Great CEOs Are All Different

In fact, a study that compared hiring practices, performance results, and even successful CEOs revealed that there is no ideal personality temperament for great leaders. Some great leaders were high in extraversion, but just as many were not. Of course they need to be intelligent enough to deal with the problems, but not all CEOs are particularly creative, assertive, enthusiastic, or agreeable. Just as many are introverted, conscientious, unassuming, reserved, or disagreeable. We even find that it’s hard to predict who would make a good leader or not. Some research has found that choosing people to be the leader at random as opposed to holding elections produced leaders who were just as good. In fact it allowed for people who might otherwise not volunteer to be leaders to really show their potential. Elections are essentially popularity contests, but voters and HR departments don’t seem to have any discernment about leadership potential when you look at the data. Who is to say that those who want to be leader, should be leader? Maybe the one who does not want to be leader will be less tempted by the trappings of leadership.

Sociopath Runs for Election

I heard a great line the other day from a tv show that came out 6 years ago–before the two most recent Presidential elections. In the show two psychologists were talking about President Nixon’s irrational paranoia. One asked, “How could someone who is sociopathic become president?” And the other responded, “How could you not be sociopathic to become president?”

The case of Steve Jobs

Everyone seemed to notice that Steve Jobs could be a real asshole. But he is also known as a visionary and is one of the most famous CEOs of all time. So people often ask, was being a jerk part of what made him so great? Perhaps it was his sheer force of will, his tactical use of humiliation, and complete disregard for people’s feelings that allowed him to be so demanding, and made those who could not receive it desire to receive his approval. 

Steve Jobs personally chose Walter Isaacson to be his biographer. Isaacson had already written popular biographies on other famous innovators like Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson agreed to write the biography with one condition. He reserved the right to express his own opinion without Steve being able to edit it. Steve agreed. Isaacson wrote in great detail about how humiliating it could be to work for Steve, and how Steve refused to acknowledge Lisa as his own daughter even after giving the new Macintosh computer her same name. Perhaps it was this unrelenting willingness to make demands of people and the withholding of acknowledgement that drove his employees to bring his vision into reality. 

At the end of the book Isaacson had only one opinion he wanted to express about Steve Jobs. He concluded that what made Steve an unusual success had nothing to do with the way he treated people. The simple fact was, Steve did not need to be such an asshole and the suffering it caused those close to him was totally unnecessary. 

Work Crazy Long Hours or Don’t

Do great leaders need to work tirelessly long endless hours? Perhaps it is better to be conscientious, meaning both orderly and industrious. Bill Gates certainly fit this profile when he was CEO of Microsoft. He said that he knew who worked late and who didn’t because he was often one of the last to leave. Looking back Bill now says he sees the world differently and takes far more vacations even though he now oversees one the largest philanthropy organizations in the world taking on some of the world’s most intractable problems. 

The case of Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, doesn’t work long hours. He is in fact famous for getting eight hours of sleep every night, and working only a few hours each day. He says that his job is to come in, make some of the most difficult decisions well, and leave the rest to his more than capable staff. 

The Problems with Popularity Contests

Do elections produce good leaders? The research data tells us that picking leaders at random might work just as well as holding elections. As we discussed before, Socrates had some deep suspicions that left to the wisdom of the mob, democracy does not always promote the best rulers. I mean really, what does winning a popularity contest have to do with making great leaders. 

Shakespeare too also explored this theme in many of his plays. What makes a wise leader? 

Maybe Democratic Elections Don’t Produce Better Results 

We may think we have a good intuition about who would make a great leader and who wouldn’t but this does not turn out to be the case when we measure results. We are finding that the way our human resource departments conduct interviews and use resumes are so riddled with bias that our confidence in a person’s potential to join or lead a team has almost no correlation with their actual ability to perform the role when we compare the results later on. Recruiters tend to choose recruits who look and sound like themselves leading to a lack of diversity. People who are good at interviewing aren’t always as good at doing the work. We tend to promote taller people, but what does height have to do with the ability to lead? Why would men make better leaders than women, or women any better than men? IQ and conscientiousness are the strongest indicators of success, but men and women score relatively the same on average on these two scales. Women do tend to score higher in agreeableness, which is a combination of politeness and compassion, but none of our research shows whether being high or low in these characteristics would make you a better leader. 

At a school in South America they did an experiment where they allowed any students who wanted to be on the student leadership committee volunteer to be elected leader. But they didn’t hold any elections. They simply chose at random from all of those who volunteered. Turns out some introverts, who we all know typically would not try to win an election, turned out to be really great leaders. Sometimes students who no one would have guessed would make a great leader really took the initiative, took responsibility for solving problems, and became really proactive. There were also cases where tall handsome charismatic leaders turned out to be totally irresponsible and unreliable. They might have fit the prototypical image of what we imagine a good leader would look like, but they just as often ended up neglecting their actual role and leaving their responsibilities to fall onto everyone else.

How Do Scholarship Committees Sort Through Applications?

Scholarship committees often have panels of professionals to judge the essays, college admissions applications, and/or grant proposals of post graduate students. There are often a few stand out submissions, but how do you judge between the great majority of mediocre submissions? We could score them according to somewhat arbitrary metrics, or judge them by granular metrics, but when the marginal differences between scores often skew so close to one another that you might as well choose at random. Well, why not choose at random? At least choosing at random or by lottery is somewhat fair in terms of equal opportunity. And leaving it up to chance would at least remove some human bias. 

All of this is to say that anyone can make a great leader. Extraverts, introverts, those who are agreeable, those who are disagreeable, men, women, from any background, from any country, whether high or low in neuroticism, or high or low in openness. If we really want great leaders, we should really watch out for our bias towards the loud, outspoken, handsome, beautiful, and/or assertive tall people, you know, the ones we expect to win popularity contests. Let’s give a chance to the quiet, unassuming, but thoughtful ones. Or even better, just pick at random from all of those bold enough to volunteer. 

To learn more great lessons feel free to visit me at www.BestClassEver.org