What gets people promoted into leadership isn’t what makes them effective at it. Organizations reward confidence, charisma, extraversion, visibility, and technical skill — traits that predict leadership emergence, not leadership effectiveness. Effective leaders communicate effectively, develop their people, have the hard converations, adapt, and lead from a service motive rather than a selfish one. In Fred Luthans’s observational study of roughly 450 managers, only 10% were both successful (in being promoted) and effective.
TL;DR
- Emergence ≠ effectiveness. Getting the position and leading it well are two different things.
- We promote for the wrong signals: confidence, charisma, extraversion, narcissism, self-promotion, talking the most, technical ability.
- The cost is real: 20% global employee engagement, managerial failure rates averaging around 50%.
- Luthans’s numbers: the fastest-promoted managers spent 48% of their time networking and 11% developing their team. The most effective managers reversed it.
- Why it persists: the hero-leader image, position mistaken for competence, Dunning-Kruger, and a cycle where ineffective leaders promote for the same reasons they were promoted.
- The fix: hire for motive, teachability, and effectiveness behaviors; and once you have the authority, kill the politics beneath you.
What often gets someone promoted into a leadership position is not the same as what makes them effective as a leader.
And that’s a problem.
In fact, that’s a big reason why we still have so many bad leaders in organization today. People are hired and promoted for the wrong reasons.
And what makes it worse is that these two aspects are often conflated (treated as if they mean the same thing) in academic and popular leadership writing. It’s assumed that just because someone has a position of leadership or were able to be promoted into that position (such as a CEO position), then they must also be effective as leaders (see Hogan Assessments).
And most of us know that’s not true just from experience. But more than that, research shows that as well.
Leadership emergence vs. effectiveness
This gap has a name in leadership research.
Leadership emergence: getting into the position, whether through a promotion or hiring, and part of it is being perceived as “leader-like”.
Leadership effectiveness: is actually building high-performing, satisfied, committed teams that get results.
Why this is important
This is important because it is having real impact on our organizations. Leadership is the #1 cause for failure or success, because, ultimately, everything traces back to the leader.
The way a manager behaves or acts affects other people’s careers, stress, and more.
Their actions cause an organization to succeed… or to crumble and fall.
They are ultimately in charge of the culture and engagement of their employees.
And the stats show this gap is an issue.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that in 2025, only 20% of employees were engaged worldwide (United States at 31%).
Gallup elsewhere also stated that “companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.”
Hogan Assessments, looking at 12 different published estimates of managerial failure, stated that they range from 30%-67%, averaging at about 50%.
We can also look at the Great Resignation, the distrust of leaders and corporations and more, and we can see there is an issue.
And a big part of the cause is this gap between leadership emergence vs. effectiveness.
The qualities and traits that get people promoted
When it comes to the media and to society and culture, what do people often think makes someone a good leader?
Many think of the heroic type of leader who commands attention and is a single source for direction, decisions, and making things happen.
Here are some common traits that get people hired and promoted:
- Confidence (or projected confidence)
- Charisma
- Extraversion
- Personality
- Political skill, networking, self-promotion, visibility
- Narcissism
- Talking more in meetings (babble hypothesis)
- Technical ability
Let’s look at some of these more in-depth.
Confidence
Frequently people think that someone showing confidence makes them a leader, that leaders should have confidence.
And it’s true that if you show no confidence, people likely won’t follow you.
But confidence, or projecting confidence (whether you really have confidence or not), doesn’t make you effective.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, in his article “The Dark Side of Having Confidence” on Psychology Today discusses a study that shows