Tag Archives: Hiring

Book Review: Why So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders

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Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It)Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book does a fantastic job outlining all the ways men fail as leaders. Let me back up. This book isn’t a man hating book. Its goal is to ensure better leadership at any company. The way to do this, isn’t to just promote women, any woman. The way to do this, is to scrutinize everyone the way that women are scrutinized. Because, the data, and this book brings receipts, shows that women are better leaders.

So why are women better leaders? Well, in general women are less narcissistic in fact men are 30% more likely to be a narcissist than women. Second, men are more likely to be psychopaths, about 50% more likely, in fact. Furthermore, while in the general population about 1% of people are psychopaths, 1 in 5! Senior leaders are psychopaths and 1 in 3! Are narcissists.

Most of this book goes on to outline the failings of male leadership, because of the ways that narcissists are horrible leaders. Similarly for psychopaths. The more interesting part, though, is where the author talks about the benefits of women leadership and how that is associated with higher EQ (emotional intelligence). Both narcissists and psychopaths have very low EQ which results in poorer performance. What the author argues for, are leaders with high IQ and EQ. Women are more likely to have higher EQ than men (by about 20%). There are no significant differences between the genders for IQ, which means on the whole women are better for leadership roles because of their higher EQ.

There are a lot of reasons why we don’t pick for high EQ and one of those reasons is “confidence” really perceived confidence. Another is charisma, where male charisma is desirable and often female charisma is ignored or misunderstood.

The book, sadly, doesn’t offer as much in the way of how to fix it as it claims in the title. There are a few sections. First ask questions that can identify if someone is a narcissist. Ask questions to figure out if someone is a psychopath. Then don’t hire them. The other major innovation the book offers is using structured scored interview questions. This will create a mechanism to compare apples to apples rather than wildly different interview questions.

So, I’m disappointed on the “how to fix it” portion. Hopefully the author will include a section at the end with specific links to questions. I know there are reference and end notes, but putting together a rubric that can more easily be applied would be a great way to improve this and allow people to really see what Manpower uses to fix this problem.

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Diversity, Vital but Difficult

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Increasing diversity at work is extremely difficult. There are all sorts of unconscious biases in the work place, including the words we use to describe jobs. Language that appeals to mostly guys could be a serious turn off to females. Calling people “Hackers” like in the Fast Company linked above, not only turns off females, it turns of men too. It has a connotation of a specific type of work ethos that doesn’t necessarily mesh with the type of environment a lot of people want to work in. While it’s awesome for fresh out of college graduates, for many experienced employees it sends the wrong message.

Diversity is a worthy goal, but it also needs to be tied to performance improvements in the organization. Not because you want to make a decision to turn it off or not, but because you need to know how successful it is and how it’s impacting the organization. If you’re hiring more women, how do you think that’s going to impact your company? Is it going to increase the number of releases, the number of novel features, make the product more appealing to women in general? The answers to these questions are incredibly important because the results should shape where your organization is going over time. Diversity isn’t going to just impact the team, it’s going to move the company. As a leader you should expect a similar result from the African-American and Latino communities as well.

Sociology research has indicated that diversity in backgrounds, even something like living abroad or knowing another language, dramatically increases the number of good ideas that come out of a group. Developing a clear plan with metrics will help leaders, that may not have bought into the plan, to understand the true value.

Unfortunately, this means that there is a group of workers that are going to either actually be negatively impacted or will feel like they are being unfairly called out. Scott Adams of Dilbert wrote about this just a few days ago as it has actually impacted his career. He had to leave two careers over diversity pushes, but he knew as a white male engineer that he’d be able to find work in other industries because he was a white male engineer. Other groups do not have that luxury. The Scott Adams of this world aren’t the problem, it is the people that feel that this is the wrong thing to do are being attacked by these initiatives. This is something that needs to be addressed immediately as it can seriously poison the culture of the company. It will make the diversity hires feel like they were only hired because they were a diversity candidates not because they bring something to the table. My wife has told me she has directly been told that before, which is unfair to her because she’s an amazingly brilliant woman.

There are a few ways to deal with recalcitrant people. One is the help them leave through a comfortable severance package. Obviously this would need to be handled carefully to avoid any potential lawsuits. Secondly, it needs to be clear that there is a place in the organization for white males in some fashion. Help them help with the diversification of the organization. For the highly experienced have them mentor some of the candidates so they can support those new employee’s career growth, they know the organization best and know where it needs help the most. Enable talent to move to the best places for them in the organization through mentoring. Provide mentoring to this cohort of employee by both minorities and others that have already bought into increasing diversity.

Increasing diversity is difficult because it’s painful. It means a great deal of change for everyone involved. The incumbent employees will have to adapt to a new work culture, while the diversity candidates might feel aggression towards them. It’s important for leaders to create the right type of environment where everyone can succeed and grow.

HR, Recruiting, and Candidates

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I read a well intentioned post on LinkedIn today that really got me thinking about the recruiting process. This being near and dear to my heart since I’m going through the process of finding a new job. While at my last job I was fortunate enough to be both a hiring manager for 2 employees and involved in the hiring process for 5 positions that would not be reporting to me. Discussing with my manager the different requirements for positions he and I aligned on one thing, we wanted the best person regardless of how they looked on paper. In many cases this directly conflicted with the requirements of HR since the salary bands the employees we were hiring for required degrees or certifications.

For example one of the Business Analysts we decided to hire didn’t have a college degree, but because of the salary band required to get high quality candidates we had to have a college degree as a requirement, even though we didn’t believe it was truly a requirement. This BA turned out a better hire than one of the other BAs that had a college degree and a great deal of BA experience. Another perfect is example is the face that one of my hires was “required” to have a nursing certification to earn the pay band we knew was required to find a highly qualified candidate. I had to fight HR and argued it wasn’t truly required for the position. I eventually won and the person I hired worked out amazingly well and in fact is more highly regarded than his counter part that has that certification. Finally, one of our POs for the product had neither certification nor college degree. He has done extremely well without those certifications – granted he earned a certification and a great deal of trial by fire experience, but he started out strong because of his business experience.

These are just examples from my personal experience. This is ignoring the number of great people that have become famous despite their credentials that would have had them relegated to the dust bin in less than 6 seconds by the recruiter above. If this is the best system our current Recruiting and HR experts have developed, it’s a deeply flawed system that needs some serious rework. Finding the right candidate is difficult. It requires team work between HR, Recruiting, and the Hiring Manager. These conversations and dissociation of salary and degree requirements from applications will likely reverse the trend of college degrees required for every position. I think our thought leaders in Recruiting and HR need to do better, the article above indicates there’s a great deal of waste and non-value added activity in the vetting process because a good fit that is excluded after 6 seconds is a defect and any candidate that looks good on paper but is clearly a bad fit is also a defect to the process.

The hiring process is extremely expensive as is the onboarding and training of a new hire. Any clear poor fit from the start indicates there defects and waste in the hiring process that need to be addressed. Bragging about a 6 second “review process” isn’t the right thing to be doing, figuring out how to fix the process to ensure that the right people are hired the first time at the right time should be the goal of recruiting.