Transcript
If you had a group for bad leaders, no one, or very few, would ever show up. Most people, even the worst of leaders, think they are great leaders, even when they’re not.
Think about the worst boss you’ve ever had. Did they think they were a bad leader? Probably not.
In fact, I’m betting you’re thinking this applies to other people and not you, right? Why is that? Why do we often think we’re better leaders than we really are?
Well, let’s look at the reasons.
We equate position with leadership
First is that we sometimes equate position with leadership. From the outside, sometimes we assume that because someone’s in a leadership position, that they know how to lead. We see people in CEO positions, and we assume that because they’re a CEO, they must be a good leader.
Being in a position of leadership and knowing how to actually lead are two different things. And if you look at the state of many organizations, then you can see that many CEOs and leaders of that organization really don’t know how to lead because of how the organization or the culture of the organization is doing.
Sometimes we as people, when we get into those positions, we think we know how to lead because we’re in a leadership position, but that’s just not true. And part of that is because our viewpoint or what we see as good leadership is, is off. And that can happen for multiple reasons.
There’s lots of misinformation out there
First, a lot of the information out there, such as on LinkedIn, the articles and blogs and so on, they’re off. The conventional wisdom about leadership is unfortunately often wrong, and if you follow it, you’re going to hurt yourself as a leader.
But because it’s conventional wisdom, because it’s popular, it’s often followed and then repeated, and then this misinformation happens and we have a lot of people who aren’t great leaders, but they think they are because what they’ve been taught is wrong.
A lack of training (or poor quality training)
Then you have training for leadership. Sometimes training doesn’t happen, period, when someone gets into a position. So they just base the leadership on what they’ve seen in the past or the conventional wisdom or so on.
But if they are trained, sometimes the training is on conventional wisdom again. And they’re just taught what is often taught to other people that’s not really true. So they won’t be great leaders because what they’re taught isn’t good.
Sometimes though, they’re just not taught leadership. They may be taught theories or they may be taught their duties of their position, of the things they have to do, but they’re not really taught how to actually lead people. And because of that, they leave those trainings thinking they know how to lead when they really don’t.
We model off what we see (and what we see may not always be good)
Then mixed with that, we often model things based off what we see, we repeat that. Then with that, we often equate things to what we’ve seen. We base things off what we’ve seen, and then we model that. For example, if all you’ve ever seen in your entire life is mediocre and bad bosses, then you’re likely to think mediocre bosses are great because that’s the best you’ve seen.
If all you’ve had in your life to eat is grass, you don’t know there’s anything better because that’s all you’ve had. You’ve never had a steak. You’ve never had Thai food, etc.
Sometimes people base their leadership based just off the leadership they’ve seen, but the leadership they’ve seen is not really great leadership, but they think that is just because it’s the best they’ve seen. So, they repeat it thinking it’s good and that they’re being a good leader when they’re really not.
We are members of the Dunning-Kruger Club
Then there’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. And the Dunning-Kruger effect says that the less you know about something, the more confident you are about what you think you know. So you learn a little bit about the topic and because you learn a little bit of information, you think you know a lot when you really don’t.
I also think of this as the danger of a little knowledge. Too often leaders learn a little bit about leadership. They take some kind of course or read some kind of conventional wisdom or an article or book or blog, and they think they know leadership because they’ve learned something, but they’re so much more out there that they don’t know they don’t know, but they think they do.
It’s the Donnan-Kruger effect in action.
We are good at rationalizing as humans
Then we have the ability to rationalize so well as humans. When things don’t go well for us, it’s easy to rationalize why we are okay and why we’re still good, and why it’s something outside of us that caused the negative behavior or that caused the poor performance or whatever it may be.
It’s easy to rationalize ourselves as good leaders even when we aren’t.
We often think higher of ourselves than we are
With that is how we often think higher of ourselves as well. For example, if you ask a room of people who’s an above average driver, most people is going to raise their hands. Most people think higher of themselves than they really are. We as humans do that.
And so often when it comes to leadership as well, we think we’re better than we really are just because we often think of ourselves higher than we really are.
And here’s the thing with all these causes of why people don’t think they’re a bad leader when they are. The thing is, it’s not bad if you are a bad leader. It’s just bad if you don’t recognize it and then work to get better.
Everybody starts somewhere and everybody has the ability to grow and get better. We are all at different levels. Some of us are down here and that’s okay. It’s okay if you’re not great, just recognize it and start working to be great.