STRATEGY
You Need to Stop Hiring Incompetent Leaders
Hire Leaders for What They Can Do, and Not What They Have Done
Traditionally, companies reward their best employees with promotions. They have the preconceived notion that these employees will produce the same — or better — result when they are placed in a higher position, and that they might have their standards permeate to his/her subordinates.
Yet ironically, incompetence seems to be a norm.
When there is poor leadership, there also exists employee mismanagement. That contributes to the employee burnout crisis when a recent Gallup study showed that about two-thirds of full-time workers experience burnout on the job—in most situations, the burnout does not stem from hard work and high performance, but about how the employee is managed.
Poor leadership comes in many shapes and sizes. Signs of incompetence can come from abusive behaviors, lacking technical expertise, having no clue on how to give feedback, failing to understand potential and general inability to evaluate performance. Regardless of how purposeful, well-crafted and meaningful the job is to the employee, incompetent leadership will result in inevitable burnout, turnover, and even accidents.
Even when there are empirical research and data on the cost of poor leadership, it is clear that many organizations are still not underscoring the importance of not promoting people to become incompetent leaders.
With such a huge supply of people out there, how can organizations ensure that they are getting the right people?
Rather than look at past performance, organizations need to look at potential. While leaders often need to obtain a certain level of technical competence, years of experience can also cloud their mindsets and views. The Peter Principle—even though stated by the author himself that it was published in jest—is real, and studies have shown that top-performers are, in fact, really terrible managers.
Exceptional technical skills are great to establish credibility but great leaders need to continually keep an open mind.
High-Performing Contributor vs. Effective Leader
Individual contributors are measured by performance, ability, likability, and drive. In contrast, leadership demands different character traits, such as empathy, integrity, and persuasiveness. Rather than focus on the ‘number of sales’ that the candidate has done, it is more logical to focus on the traits that the candidate has exhibited.
Contrary to popular belief, technical skills are not the primary reason why new hires fail; a study showed that technical competence formed 11% of the reasons why new hires failed.
Instead, poor interpersonal skills are what dominated the list of reasons, such as being unable to receive feedback, unable to understand and manage their emotions and lacking the ‘right’ temperament for the job.
It is insanely difficult to coach a person to be pleasant, fair and caring when they do not have a base in those assets naturally. Hence, leaders need to particularly scrutinize candidates who are promoted from an individual contributor role and focus on the potential, not past performance. Leadership traits are often predictable and using science-backed assessments can be a start to assess a leader’s potential performance.
Regardless of the methodology used, it is never wise to promote the top salesperson. More often than not, you lose a top performer and gain a poor manager—that’s two problems from something that never was.
Emotional Resilience can Mask Incompetence
When you google ‘how to manage your boss’, you get the whole concept of managing up. It’s about building smooth, productive relationships with higher-ups. It’s about adapting to your boss’s communication and decision-making style. Not to be confused with brown-nosing, it is about creating the best situation for yourself as a subordinate.
Yet, employees who excel at managing up can have a bad side effect; employees who are resilient enough to put up with bad managers will help to mask poor leadership simply because they had ‘grit’.
In a similar vein, incompetents leaders can mask their incompetence by simply hiring emotionally resilient employees. They will deliberately lookout for high levels of emotional intelligence, grit, and resilience. That way, they are more likely to appear “engaged” on an employee engagement survey even whey are poorly managed or unfairly treated.
Companies who over-index in EQ or emotional stability will have a disproportionate image of themselves. Without analytical and honest people, it will be difficult to detect problems in leadership. While it is undoubtedly great to have dispositionally happy and cheerful employees, companies must understand that this is much like customer reviews—customers who are lenient, positive, friendly or have low standards may leave 4 or 5 stars, but that doesn’t mean that the company is doing a great job.
Look Forward, Not Backward
Predict the future and think out of the box—often, promoting based on culture fit seems like a good idea. Yet, that still remains a contentious issue.
To deepen the leadership pipeline, companies must turn away from hiring for culture fit and start looking at people who don’t conform; misfits, non-conformists are usually people who might excel in the leadership role, giving the right support and time period.
People who are deemed to be “not ready” are also worthy of more scrutiny; their youth, agility, and confidence are able to help them become great leaders, despite having no solid track record.
It’s time to rethink the notion of leadership.
When companies have narrow definitions of leadership, it forms a key systemic reason in the lack of diversity in leadership. In recent years, poor leadership and the sobering number of incompetent leaders have been an organizational challenge for many.
One key difference any company can make immediately is to start looking at potential than performance. Definitely, it is difficult, (humans are notoriously poor at predicting), but it is a much better indicator of a person’s performance than to base it on what the person has already done.
High potential is the key, not top performance.
