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In This Episode:
Leadership emergence, how you get promoted, and leadership effectiveness, how well you actually lead, are not the same thing. This episode walks through decades of research showing they’re often opposites: why narcissism and talking the most get you promoted, and what to do if you’re stuck playing a political game you didn’t create.
What You’ll Learn
- The difference between leadership emergence (what gets you promoted) and leadership effectiveness (what makes you good at leading), and why research shows they rarely overlap
- Fred Luthans’s landmark 1988 study on “successful” versus “effective” managers, and how differently they spent their time
- Why Gallup found that companies pick the right person for a management role only about 18% of the time
- The research behind why narcissism and self-promotion predict getting promoted but not being effective once there
- The “babble hypothesis,” why simply talking the most in a meeting makes people perceive you as the leader
- Why confidence and competence overlap far less than we assume, and how that shapes who gets hired into leadership
- Patrick Lencioni’s distinction between a selfish motive and a service motive for pursuing leadership, and why it matters
- Practical guidance for navigating office politics you didn’t create, without losing your own integrity in the process
Resources Mentioned
The Motive by Patrick Lencioni
Fred Luthans, “Successful vs. Effective Managers,” Academy of Management Executive (1988)
Robert Hogan and Robert Kaiser’s research on managerial incompetence base rates
Gallup, “Why Great Managers Are So Rare”: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231593/why-great-managers-rare.aspx
MacLaren et al., “Testing the Babble Hypothesis: Speaking Time Predicts Leader Emergence in Small Groups,” The Leadership Quarterly (2020)
Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (And How to Fix It) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic