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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
What would the perfect robot manager be like? Looks aside, it would arguably be
objective, transparent, unselfish, and apolitical. Because of this, it would
assign the right task to every person and reward unselfish team behaviors,
creating a culture of trust and keeping morale high. It would monitor
individual and team performance with the precision of the best quantified-self
app, and provide real-time feedback to boost everybody s productivity.
Undoubtedly, it would operate according to data rather than intuition and make
only evidence-based recommendations. In short, the perfect robot manager would
be utterly predictable and completely boring.
And yet dullness is not how most organizations choose managers today. Instead,
they look for flash and vision, and bold displays of confidence whether or
not that translates into actual competence. Indeed, despite the vast body of
knowledge including independent scientific evidence on what makes a good
manager, too many people get promoted to management positions based on past
technical expertise or their previous individual job performance, so they end
up, in effect, transitioning from skilled labor to unskilled management.
This problem can be mitigated if we are able to assess managerial potential
more effectively. And the barriers to achieving this have less to do with
finding the right tools to assess managerial talent than our inability to
understand what we should be looking for. You can have the best tools in the
world but if you are really good at measuring the wrong thing then your
problems won t go away.
So, what does a boring and very good manager look like?
First, let me explain in more detail what I mean by boring. In psychology,
the technical and less socially loaded term is emotional maturity. It is
mainly a function of being emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious.
Unsurprisingly, we all become more mature (boring) as we age. In any culture
people are more volatile and antisocial during their teens, and they become
more conforming, conservative and rule-abiding as they grow older. Although
this tends to have a negative connotation in much of the Western world which
avowedly values creativity, disruption, and individuality it is clearly an
asset when it comes to managerial potential.
In the most compelling and comprehensive synthesis of independent scientific
studies about managerial competence, Tim Judge reports that effective managers
tend to be highly adjusted, sociable, friendly, flexible, and prudent. They
are, in fact, the reverse of the famous self-made billionaires and tycoon
entrepreneurs we often use as examples of great leaders. Imagine working
directly for Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or David Rockefeller; it may sound great,
but most people are happiest working for people who are the exact opposite. As
Michael Maccoby pointed out in an influential HBR essay, these entrepreneurial
leaders tend to be poor listeners who are sensitive to criticism and
demonstrate low levels of emotional intelligence. In addition, it should be
noted that people who are as ruthless, impatient, demanding, and excitable as
Jobs and Bezos usually lack the genius to get away with it, so they are much
more likely to derail than to invent the next Apple or Amazon.
Second, as you transition from individual contributor to manager, you shift
your focus from solving technical problems to solving people problems. To
achieve this, you need to be able to delegate in order to concentrate on your
team members. This makes emotional labor a key quality in managers. Much as in
the service industry the best performers can connect emotionally with the
customers, when you are a manager you need to be able to connect emotionally
with your subordinates. As an employee, you labor to manage your own emotions;
as a manager you also labor to manage other people s emotions. This depends on
having quality interactions with your team, and you can only do this if you are
calm and cool-headed, if you are able to display strategic emotions which
involves a fair amount of faking it and if you are capable of understanding
that it s not really about you.
Again, when we think of classic charismatic or colorful leaders, you get a very
different type of profile. To have emotional intelligence is not to be
overwhelmed by emotions and unwillingly leak non-verbal communicational cues;
it is about having low emotional reactivity and being as phlegmatic as the
Queen of England. As psychological studies have indicated: The most effective
leaders are found to be those who operate from a stable center, who are
personally grounded, other-directed and create the kinds of secure and
supportive environments where creativity and productivity thrive.
Third, what people value most in a manager is integrity, which is best
conceptualized as an attribution and assessed via others rather than
self-ratings. The best way to predict counterproductive or unethical work
behaviors is by asking subordinates to report on the probability that their
manager will, in not-so-subtle language, screw them over. And once again, it is
boring managers who take the prize: the fewer dysfunctional dispositions or
dark side personality traits they display, and the more predictable, reliable,
and, yes, boring, they are, the higher they re rated on integrity, and the more
morally they behave. This issue reminds us of the many famous case studies of
leaders who are clearly brilliant from an expertise or competence standpoint,
but morally feeble: Sepp Blatter, Bernie Madoff, and Pablo Escobar come to
mind.
In brief, it is time for organizations to understand that their best potential
managers are not the people who stand out; they are not the people who
self-promote and take credit for others achievements, or have mastered the art
of politics and upward career management. They may lack charisma and have no
remarkable vision for the future, yet they are probably the best people to help
execute the company vision and ensure that staff stays engaged and productive.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, a Professor of
Business Psychology at University College London, and a faculty member at
Columbia University.