Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
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blogs.hbr.org
Speaking as a non-conservative, I find the implication that conservatives believe women to be incapable of management offensive. I believe conservatives would say that there is no single and simple answer to the question but that it has do with the differing career and life goals between men and women--the priorities and decisions that men and women use to guide their decision-making. This is how conservatives explain the wage gap, and the same logic would be applied to the management gender gap. As a non-conservative, dismissing their argument about the wage gap (which boils down to, "You're telling me I could pay $0.72 on the dollar for equal skill? Why in the world would I ever hire men?") out of hand is isolating yourself from a genuine criticism. I believe this introductory paragraph attempts to isolate its argument from genuine criticism by similarly dismissing viable counter-arguments as unworthy before it even begins.
I also find the article's juxtaposition of "conservative" alongside "chauvinists" a particularly underhanded and obvious attempt to imply that there is a great deal of overlap between these two groups.
If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children. You're not giving their point of view any legitimacy.
After 13 years, I still prefer to sit down and disappear into the screen and build things. I have natural leadership ability, I have a big personality when required, but I just don't feel motivated by money or rewards to take on the responsibility of leading a team.
I watch my colleagues get promoted, all male. And then I watch them try to balance wife, kids, and life. Without their wives, they tend to do poorly at life maintenance. They get fat, or pot-bellies at least, their hair falls out (probably just genetic but still) and after a few years the stress has broken them. The factors of leading means your reward depends on others whom you are unable to really control. So they spend time playing head games with people and taking work home that others can't or won't complete.
The handful of women I know in leadership positions also have a stigma attached. Their ego leads just like the males, but the women are considered "too aggressive" and get labeled as such.
So with minimal reward (I require double my income to ruin my life), management/leadership is just not an option for me, regardless of my abilities. I suppose living up to my capabilities should be reward enough, but it isn't.
Until I get a wife and/or make enough money to pay for the easy leisure and lack of worry I have now, I don't care about the prestige of leadership.
Chauvinistic or not, I truly believe if the reward were there, our society would have more women in leadership positions.
My personal life has a higher "fee" than men for living and breathing my job. Pay me that fee, I will make a go of it.
What "but still"? What is it about that that still supports your point, even if it is entirely out of ones hands if your hair falls out? If it is indeed mostly/totally genetic, why continue to look at it as a symptom of "letting oneself go"? That's just a stigmatizing attitude to hold on too (if it is indeed mostly genetical).
Bald men and short men have hurdles, too.
Getting fat is for many a lifestyle issue (a bad lifestyle is what you alluded to in the first place). It may be partly genetic in that some people only have to start worrying about their waistline in their thirties while some have to do so in their teens. It is not clear at all that baldness is a lifestyle issue.
Noone mentioned short men.
When you say...
> Chauvinistic or not, I truly believe if the reward were there, our society would have more women in leadership positions.
Specifically, what is the reward you are describing and how does it differ from the reward available for men? Are you saying you believe the reward to incent women to management would need to be greater (putting aside the uncertainty about how to define "greater") than the rewards that sufficiently incent men?
I will think about it. If I can find a way to present my position more clearly without social Hacker News repercussions, I will.
edit: funny, how I do the same in real life, with my career, etc. I withhold strong positions, and give watered down expressions, to survive. Kinda sad. Lack of real anonymity means I also have to moderate expressions. Any future employer finding me here will hold everything I say here against me.
I don't want to turn this into a political debate, but the conservative ideology does lack legitimacy for the most part. The reason the term "conservative" is used is because the person is resistant to alternative points of view as well as information that contradicts their perspective. This is why those who reject climate change are conservatives: they are rejecting or ignoring scientific evidence because it doesn't fit their worldview.
I don't treat conservatives as children. That does children a huge disservice. Children by their nature are curious and they want to learn new things. Conservatives in contrast are stuck in certain mindsets (that revolve around Just-World Fallacy) and are scared of change in general.
As another anecdote, I have met many conservatives who are willing to discuss and debate ideas. None of these conservatives I have met has acted or said anything that suggests they believe women are incapable of management.
I have met chauvinists and I have met conservatives. I don't see a whole lot of correlation.
When individuals decide to accept new ideas and viewpoints, this creates conflict with the label they've chosen to apply to themselves. Enough new ideas, and they simply start call themselves something else. A conservative open to too many new ideas will stop calling themselves conservative, and a liberal open to too many new ideas will stop calling themselves liberal. This happens all the time, in both directions - it's the people that change, not the labels.
That the conservative position has liberalized over time to meet the liberal position in a lot of places and on a lot of subjects is good. That doesn't change the fact that when the conservative position differs from the liberal position, it differs by offering some sort of biological or religious defense of discrimination against women.
>If you actually believe conservatives think this way, you'll never actually convince them of anything because you're speaking at them as if they are children.
I don't think that observation is controversial, or that children are the ones who either originate or maintain these beliefs in society. Also, I don't think that you should pick your beliefs about reality based on their marketing potential rather than observation and the historical record.
The point being that when we engage those of opposite views by dismissing their views out of hand, we usually make ourselves feel righteous in doing so by rationalizing that they are simpletons. They are beneath our level of understanding and any attempt we make to sway them is hopeless.
I don't mean to imply that the author was trying to persuade the opposition's point of view. Rather merely that the introductory paragraph exhibits the hallmarks of a closed mind, and unfortunately one that disingenuously feigns being open. I find that particularly disappointing.
These labels we assign to political points of view are so broad that I find it distracting to dwell too much on historical associations of each word. Historical perspective cannot be dismissed, but if the present and past differ, I'd rather consider the present.
On this subject, what do conservatives think now about women in leadership and management positions? I honestly cannot say with a straight face that modern conservatives think women are incapable of management. In fact I feel perpetuating that myth only serves to diminish whatever progress they have made toward our point of view, as if we're moving the goal posts and sneering at them for even trying. It seems like petty politics and not genuine effort to improve matters.
Also, It is a chauvinistic position to claim that about conservatives as it seems to make an assumption that conservative=male.
I personally would not class myself as conservative as I tend to disagree strongly with their policies, however I do not think that people like Thatcher or Widdicombe believe that women are not capable of leadership and it would be hard to claim that they are not conservatives.
There's a sentiment here that leading a complex organization (or even a team of complex humans) would be easy, if only all leaders were competent.
In my experience, there just aren't that many people who stand out in high-stakes leadership roles. People at the top make mistakes. But I rarely look around at the people below and think, "man, if only they were in charge." The people leading often represent the best options on hand.
Are aggressive, over-confident males overrepresented in leadership roles? Probably, but it's not a man vs. woman issue. It's an overconfident person vs. everybody else issue. It's as much a problem for non-overconfident men as it is for non-overconfident women.
Yes, and so are cautious men, and nice guys, and pretty much every other kind of guy.
"Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong. [...] If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22."
2) Clearly the only solution for our incompetent leader problem is for everyone to go to HBS, right?
Only if you first assume that there has to be a "leader"--that a single person at the top has to "run things". In fact, it makes no sense at all for the allocation of huge amounts of resources to be dependent on a single person's decision--or the decision of an extremely small percentage of the people affected, for that matter. Do people just not understand the concept of a single point of failure?
I think one explanation is that the ability to rise within an organization (political skill) is orthogonal to the ability to be competent at your job role (technical skill). So you see a lot of VPs of engineering who have absolutely no clue how to build a product, and have never built anything of value, who rose through the ranks and got there because they know how to "work the system". Great VPs need to good at two very different things: politics, and their actual job, and for this reason they are rare.
This is of course no different from the reason why politicians are generally so terrible at their job. (Why Todd Akin, of "Legitimate Rape" fame, is on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology, for example.)
They might not be rare if more organizations had a smarter idea about the actual job a VP of technology needs to perform.
One of the best VPs of technology that I ever worked for saw it as his job to use his considerable abilities at playing politics to guarantee that no tech person below him had to deal with any political BS. He himself had no ability to work with technology, and everyone knew it. But he knew who did and enabled them to do their job.
Every technical person in that organization understood and valued this about him. As he moved from company to company, they would voluntarily seek him out. And now that he founded his own company, the fact that people who have worked for him wanted to work with him again proved to be one of his biggest assets.
Agreed, and in fact this is what I meant by the VP's "actual job." As a VP of Engineering, your job is indeed to build a great engineering team and then protect them from the inevitable politics.
However, to build this team you need some framework on the technology to understand who is BS'ing you, and who you can actually trust to do the right thing. IMO you can't do this well if your background is in, say, finance. (Similar to how a great engineer would probably make a terrible CFO.)
The incompetent VPs I've had to deal with weren't stupid, in fact many were quite smart, and of course politically astute. But they just didn't know enough about the technology to know who to trust to actually deliver a great product as a team.
This is where you're wrong.
You don't need to understand the technology. You just need to have someone that you can trust who does. And said trust can be based on past experience, not current. Furthermore trust is to some extent transitive. If you trust person X and they say that person Y is competent at tech, odds are that person Y is smarter than your average bear. Couple with a sample project or two, and you're on your way to having another person whose opinion you can lean on for tech matters.
What can't be outsourced is judgement of people.
"Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." - Stephen F. Freind (Pennsylvania House of Representatives)
"In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits, where a woman can get cleaned out." - Jodie Laubenberg (Texas House of Representatives)
"I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape." — Chuck Winder (Idaho Senate)
"Well, bad weather is like rape: if it's inevitable, you might as well relax and enjoy it." — Clayton Williams (Texas Gubernatorial Candidate) (this comment was a "joke")
"Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman." - Douglas Henry (Tennessee State Senate)
"Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." - James Leon Holmes (Federal Judge)
"The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant" - Henry Aldridge (North Carolina House of Representatives)
I have no idea if it was part of the curriculum or just an off the cuff remark from a misinformed teacher, but the idea came from somewhere, and it can't be exclusive to Republican politicians.
I really do suspect other people had been taught this, but pretended they'd never heard it so they could lash out with more righteous indignation and outrage, rather than accept some people honestly believe wrong things they were taught.
a) Suppose I want to startup a company because I like coding and spending 40hours in a cubicle sucks. Out of dumb luck my company strikes it big and the planets align for a little while so I can execute and in 3 years I'm the leader of a $250m/yr company. I was able to execute when opportunity presented itself, but I have no idea how to generate opportunity, or find it.
b) Same story as above, except this time it's me and four of my beer buddies, except I'm loud and domineering in business decisions and they're all introverts. One guy quits because he doesn't like how things went, the rest make me de facto leader and when corporate paperwork comes around I put myself as CEO. The others are quiet about which I spin into a kind of legitimacy. From there on out I try and bounce around CEO and President positions. I have no other qualifications than being domineering and subversive.
c) I worked my tootsie off and made it through a Harvard MBA program. Boom, I'm immediately picked up as a Jr. VP in a large and powerful, but old and crusty megacorp. I stick it out for 4 years while all my of senior leadership retires, next thing you know I'm a Senior Executive VP at Big&Crusty MegaCorp Inc. I can't seem to figure out how to navigate the politics to make it higher, so after 5 years at Big&Crusty MegaCorp I strike out. I find an executive recruiter who finds me some CEO positions to shoot for with some medium sized $50-100m/yr copmanies. I interview, and one of them has the right mix of board members to think that a young and energetic "shooting star" is just what they want to kick their revenue in the rear. Regardless of how the company does, I now have a resume that shows all kinds of good bullet points: Harvard MBA, upwardly mobile as a executive, CEO experience. I can now bounce around CEO and President positions for a while...spending a year or two at each place, strike enough good compensation deals to make me rich and eventually buy myself into a few choice board positions. Note I barely have any actual work experience at this point, I've only shown boundless ambition and a willingness to wait for senior people to retire so I can take their position. The only thing I know how to do after 15 years is navigate the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy.
d) I start in the mailroom and work my way up through a mix of competency and and ambition. A few times my competency damns me and I end up stuck in my progression, but I follow a strict up or out policy. Over the years I notice that I've forgotten many of the skills I used to have in the lower levels, I have to locally optimize my brain I tell myself. I'm working 40-60hr weeks trying to be competent in my current job, I simply don't have time to remember what I did 5 years and 2 jobs ago -- but it bothers me that I'm now functionally incompetent for a job that I used to be among the best at. Eventually, I work my way into a Senior Exec VP at a growing company. I'm really good at the job I'm in, but I rapidly lose qualifications for jobs I used to be in. At the Senior Exec VP level I've simply forgotten what it's like to be in the trenches, I try to be sympathetic, but it's so hard to relate...just as hard for me to relate to the Senior Exec VP when I was in the trenches. Am I a competent leader?
e) etc.
I'm specifically not addressing gender in these scenarios (as the article is discussing) because what I'm trying to say is that regardless of gender any of these scenarios might put somebody into position as an "incompetent" leader. The path to leadership (incompetent or otherwise) in my mind is distinct from the social and psychological issues related to gender arriving in those leadership positions. In scenario a and b), there is nothing in gender that prevents women from starting up their own companies. You see it all the time, there are tons of businesses started and run by intelligent and driven women. c & d might still be tougher, there's lots of entrenched power structures that still make it difficult for women to arrive into the top jobs. In d) the person also had enough opportunity to not be guided into a progressing, but dead-end career path.
Anecdotally, I think it's very hard for women to be accepted into leadership positions. If she's too tough she's marked as an "angry bitch" and will get rejected, if she's not perfectly competent in areas far outside of her job function, she'll be marked as "stupid" and get rejected, etc. etc. Cultivating authority, for a woman, requires a degree of careful presentation and balance that is very hard to do and most men don't have to deal with. I've worked for some very good women bosses and a women CEO and I admired their ability to find that balance and presentation style that gave them command without them appearing as an "angry bitch" or "stupid".
I've also worked with some women that couldn't find that balance, they weren't really doing anything a reasonably competent man wouldn't do, but were marked with gendered epithets and eventually driven from their job. Afterwards, I spoke to some of them personally, they felt unbelievably rejected and worthless -- one suffered from depression and dropped out of work for a year. Their job models didn't do anything different, but their models were all men -- so they couldn't figure out what happened and what got them rejected...but the truth is they were simply playing by different rules and weren't able to navigate the environment well enough to figure out what those rules were.
I manage a team of incredibly talented programmers and I have to work hard to keep up technically in order to make informed decisions when needed. Even with all this effort, I have no illusion I could be as competent a programmer as they are without a lot of work.
edit: I was tempted for a moment to say "I lead" but they need less my leadership than my management. One leads from within and I write very little code these days. I offer some technical advice derived from my experience (mostly the "don't do that, because that will be hard to maintain" kind of advice). What I do, hopefully well, is shield them from external interference so they have a developer-friendly environment where they can better contribute with their skills. It's devilishly hard.
>>What I do, hopefully well, is shield them from external interference so they have a developer-friendly environment where they can better contribute with their skills.
I'm not a programmer, but I work closely with them. I'm responsible for demonstrating and supporting the products they build, as well as finding new areas in which those products can be used.
What I noticed is that the teams that are the most shielded produce the highest quality code, but - and this is a huge BUT - the product itself ends up being the most short-sighted and limited in terms of good user experience. The reason is that "shielding developers from external interference" inevitably equates to shielding them from a real understanding of how the end-users actually use it.
I don't mean that as a derogatory comment. But, as someone who is on the "business" side of things, when I work with products developed by shielded teams, often times I find myself wondering, "Holy shit... what the hell were they thinking??" The features and functions work, and they work well - but they are not terribly relevant to what the customer actually wanted.
This shielding has to be limited in scope. Perhaps the most difficult part is distinguishing between what's good input that will improve the product and what's noise and teaching our product team how to do it by themselves.
That and dealing with power grabs ;-)
Please, less nitpicky top comments, and more of this. :)
(arguably this is a worthless comment, but maybe highlighting more of the great comments publicly can stop the trolls / righteous indignation peddlers?)
In my experience, the women bosses I've had that would be called "bitch" would be called "asshole" if they were male. I've worked for bitches and assholes, and neither make work life pleasant or productive. This line of reasoning gets repeated often, and I would hate for young women to think that you need to be a bitch to be good leader.
e) I'm a career manager with a nice-looking, but superficial set of credentials in the form of education, speaking engagements, articles and the like. I'm not competent or aggressive enough to really scare of offend anyone and fine points of political maneuvering are lost on me.
The real players in my organization are perfectly comfortable and wield huge influence from their VP-level roles. They need an insulator and a fall guy. They orchestrate my promotion and work me like a puppet from a distance. Their success is my success, my success is their success and any of our failures will be mine.
Tangentially, how do you fix this? Googling 'corporate politics' leads to a bunch of useless magazine articles and leaves me feeling like I'm in Office Space: "I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are, googling office politics".
I feel it's something that's best learned by example, watching and learning from someone who's skilled in the art. I certainly can't claim to have mastered it, but I definitely think I've learned a lot about it over the years. I’d say more than anything it’s about empathizing, understanding the motivations of others and putting that knowledge to use.
I think technical people often demonstrate a complete misunderstanding and/or disregard for the subject. Yes, "politics" can be a nice way of referring to blatant corruption or cronyism, but it can also be a rationalization for social ineptitude.
It’s easy for an engineer to think that he’s being held back for refusing to play politics when he really just lacks the grace to understand and convince rather than prove and demand.
There’s more to being effective than technical excellence.
I guess, but I personally find it hard to really wrap my head around the political landscape at various jobs and have found myself in the path of the lawnmower blade more than a few times.
This is, from what I can tell, because there's not really a rhyme/reason from an observer's perspective to the politics at play. Any given meeting has several options for outcomes, and the optimal one depends on what today's politics look like instead of the obvious "what's good for the company/good for customers/etc." You can really mess yourself up good advocating for a position that seems reasonable when the current is, sometimes unbeknownst to you, flowing a different direction.
> There’s more to being effective than technical excellence.
I agree, but there's more to being politically savvy than just being nice & sociable.
"The way CEOs become CEOs in America is a travesty. This is one of our major problems. I use the anti - Darwinian metaphor. The survival of the unfittest.
If you remember if you were in college the fraternity president was always there for you. When you had nothing to do or when you were a little depressed. Feeling down. You go to the club and the fraternity president would always be there. You wondered when he had time to study which he probably didn’t do very much of in school. He was there to sympathize with you if your girlfriend didn’t show up or didn’t call you back and you obviously sort of liked the guy because the fraternity president was usually a likeable guy.
When the elections came up you would always vote for him. He had a couple qualities - the fraternity president. Politically, he was a survivor and he never made many waves. He did not promote controversy. Therefore when he went out into corporate America he was able to move up the ladder fairly quickly. Remember he survived, he didn’t make waves, and he wasn’t a threat. He kept moving up and up.
Eventually he becomes the assistant to the CEO. The CEO had the same qualities. He’s a survivor. He’d never employ anyone underneath him who might be a threat. The boards like these guys… this type of CEO. The boards generally don’t own any stock (another problem with our system). The boards don’t really care to hold CEOs accountable. Remember it’s a symbiotic relationship. These guys pay the boards very well – they give the boards perks. The boards don’t care to hold them accountable because that might endanger the perks they love so much.
When the CEO retires the assistant becomes the CEO. And remember what I told you. He’s a survivor. He would never have anyone underneath him as his assistant that’s brighter than he is because that might constitute a threat. So therefore, with many exceptions, we have CEOs becoming dumber and dumber and dumber. We can all see where this is going. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t such a threat to our ability to compete and to our economy in general."
wait what? That's not right. I would think the opposite case is true here... The boards own stock, and thus the pressure to get that value up for next quarter..
I think this is why a no-stakes system should be strived for. You shouldn't have to live in fear due to losing your job or pissing someone off. Basically it should not matter whether you still have a job or not.
A similar proposition is the Peter Principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle] which basically states that because it is often easier to promote less able staff out of the way, people are said to rise to the level of their incompetence. Seems to fit the data all too often.
Edit: The one you're thinking of is rather the Dilbert principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle].
So is this. Justifying it by saying "But it is meant to help women" doesn't help anyone, really. Most men reading this will bridle, seeing yet another "incompetent men" article on the Internet, and sexism will grow yet more entrenched.
With the exception of a few outlying examples, no job being discussed in this article is a leader. A leader has followers, and he can convince them to follow him through his sheer force of will and inspirational ability. Examples of leaders: Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Manson, Jaime Escalante, Joseph Smith, Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mao Zedong.
The people and job titles being discussed here are not leaders. They are managers. The difference is that people don't do what a manager says because he has inspired them to do so. People do what he says because they are paid to do so. That is, managers don't have followers. They have underlings.
Managers are of course needed. To work in groups effectively, a roughly fixed-arity hierarchy has many advantages, and in a hierarchy someone has to be a non-leaf node. The goal of a manager is to manage his underlings in such a way as to meet or optimize certain organizational goals. In general this is a very different set of skills than those found in the best leaders.
This isn't to say that certain leadership skills aren't helpful for management: obviously it's helpful if a manager can apply some powers of persuasion to his immediate underlings. But leadership skills are not necessary to management: there are plenty of reasonable managers with few or no apparent persuasive skills whatsoever (I'll be kind and not name names).
Persuasion is also not restricted to management: it's helpful in practically any job involving human relationships. This includes teachers, salespeople, hostage negotiators, lawyers, and magicians.
But few other career paths imagine themselves as "leaders". Teachers don't go to leadership seminars or buy ridiculous low-rigor books on leadership. This seems to be a cult special to the management community. Why do so many managers imagine themselves to be something they are not? I think it's for two reasons. First, they have power, and leaders have power, and so they have mistaken one for the other. Second, and more importantly, I think management is an awful and thankless life choice. Managers don't make anything or really contribute anything tangible to society. The Dilbert Principle is very valid here. And so managers try to imagine that their jobs ("leadership!") are more important than they really are, simply out of ego boosting.
I think that leadership is so valuable a skill, and so rare and powerful a force, that we should actively fight to prevent the management community from co-opting the term to describe the daily task of collating TPS reports.
Bad managers do foment underlings. They don't care when or how a task is done as long as it is checked off. Good managers, however, keep everyone focused. They know how to direct people so that their work is more than an isolated task... it leverages the momentum of everyone else's activity, creating a continuous end-to-end flow of information and materials in, through people, and back out to customers. The care and dedication for the customer are communicated in parallel all the way from the customer to the last person to touch the code or material.
I like to think about a combustion engine as a useful metaphor. It will work a little bit if timing is within a certain tolerance. It works best when the timing is correct. And it can be optimized for excellent performance. The imcompetence and ego-boosting you're describing are EXACTLY the hallmarks of poor leadership described in the FA. We definitely all need to learn to recognize and refuse to yield to, false confidence.
Better training would yield better middle management, so would a breaking out of this long held notion of territory and holding your employees down. I'm almost convinced that all managers care about are climbing the ladder, holding their employees back (to not lose them, to not have to deal with a threat of someone better, and to be able to take credit for everything the employee produces), buffering against lawsuits, and protecting their territory. That's it.
Sure there are some common threads among all career paths, but that is to be expected. The problem is that the individual contributor to middle manager role change isn't a promotion but a career change, and so is the change from middle manager to executive.
It's also a shame, because by the time most individual contributors are done climbing through the middle management ranks whatever energy, passion, naive ambition, and leadership ability they had is probably long gone (beaten out of them), and what's left is nothing more than the same old thing. This is especially bad if they also had grand visions of what the future could be, but by the time they are done climbing the ranks, they are just another bean counter looking for the next headcount trimming and for a way to meet this quarter's goals at the expense of the long term.
It's always easy to tell what happened to the good players that got beaten down while climbing the ranks, because the originally corrupted will play that good guy's misfortune as though it happened to them. They just love taking what they've done to other people, then playing it back as though it happened to them, not other people. Just listen to the excuses and "sob stories" of a corrupted management, and you'll get a good idea of what they'll do to you if you enter the race with any form of talent, potential, or ambition.
There should be a path for those that want to remain individual contributors, for those that want to be middle managers, and for those that want to end up in a leadership/executive role straight out of school. I understand the lack of incentives that a split among these roles would create (who would want to just be a middle manager with no path to senior leadership?), but that's something to be worked through. Someone can leave the individual contributor ladder and begin on any of the other ladders, but they should understand that this is a career/direction change and not a promotion. This animal needs to be turned on it's head.
And since there isn't one, anyone becoming a manager against their will, or as a stepping stone to executive leadership, needs to keep in mind and constantly remind themselves of what their true ambitions are, because if they don't, then after 8 or so years in middle management, they'll become absolutely worthless and probably corrupt. They also have to fight to hold on to their ability to craft a cohesive vision and making it happen, instead of mismanaging the ambition/vision of their superiors, because otherwise, they'll be ass out pulling the same dubious shit other worthless executives pull, and they'll be beating down star employees (to protect their own skin), rather than creating an environment in which they can get out of the way, and let those employees flourish.
"Lean in" may be a bit extreme, but we DO have a problem where for whatever reason women don't ASK to be leaders, and when they do they don't NEGOTIATE for more power or pay. For whatever sociocultural reason, we seem to be in the business of shielding women from the emotional risk of failure. This is deeply ingrained in our culture: although both are changing, on the centuries-old social dance floor men ask women for dances, men ask women for dates. The head of the institute where I work famously owns a Tesla Model S, and this high school intern is somewhat obsessive about the Teslas, and I told her, "go ask him for a ride around the block", and all I got were nine months of excuses not to.
To be sure, it takes a modicum of narcissism to ask for a position of leadership, just as it takes some narcissism to ask for a dance on the dance floor (I deserve to dance with this person) or ask for a date (I deserve to go on a date). Labelling narcissism in and of itself as a bad is dangerous, what is dangerous is excessive narcissism to the exclusion of humility and reason.
Anecdotally, I don't think it's hard for women to accepted as leaders. When I worked for one, it was not a problem, I seriously had a lot of respect for her. Ok. So maybe I did once think of her as "crazy" - but it was only on the day when she hyperbolically threatened to kill the grad students if they used the wrong pipette, and they sort of deserved to hear it, their performance and lack of intellectual introspection was unacceptably low. However, I do work in academic science where positions of leadership are more often than normal (but I would not say a majority of the time) earned through directly relevant achievement. In the "normal" case, it might be easier to shrug off an incompetent or perceived incompetent leader. I do sometimes wonder, though, if whether or not I and others respected her, if she wasn't still self-conscious about it.
Negative stereotypes are supposedly okay if they're directed at men, but not women.
The real reason so few women become men is that a) women are less interested and b) there are more men at the both ends of the Bell Curve in all kinds of abilities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
Try asking people to guess a bunch of #s with 90% confidence intervals and see how often they are wrong. (Examples: Population of the US, Circumference of the Earth...)
What does this mean for leadership?
The very thing we are looking for (confidence) undermines good decisions.
So how should less confidence people inspire? That's the tough question. Some of the best professors I've had (in terms of both research production and teaching quality) have been amongst the most humble. Corporate leaders - perhaps less so. Though when you do follow a leader with humility, the strength that they project comes from a deeper place.
Now think about evolutionary timescales, a leader was primarily needed for dangerous situations such as hunting dangerous prey and warfare. The same logic applies; hesitation results in death. Blind confidence is a necessary trait to make such quick decisions, to not hesitate, and to not second guess yourself. This may be why we are wired to prefer the "confident" over the "competent."
Now, obviously, this is less appropriate in corporate leaders where the stakes are not so immediately life and death, where there is time to research and to examine alternatives. But, we are creatures of our evolution, so it is perhaps not so surprising that is the sort of person we prefer to be our leaders. I think it is important to recognize and remain aware of our biases because that is the only way we have of fighting against them when appropriate.
I think it very plausible that a lot of this sort of thing comes down to wanting to be fair, not wanting to be pushy - that sort of thing. Which generally works well with other women, but not necessarily so well if your boss is a man and prefers to communicate in a different style. Especially when your access to that style is limited by there being few gender-relevant role models; a man's aggressive he's a go-getter, a woman's aggressive she's an irrational bitch.
Homer Simpson : ...before the weight of the world broke my spirit.
Seems to have happened to me too. If it were possible to disable my conscience I would probably opt for it. Where's Dick Fuld now, eh?? Employed.
Read http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ceo-archetyp... for insight into other factors that contribute to men having a significant advantage in the hierarchy over men.
The secret here is "incompetent". Being incompetent means these people have a hard time holding on to a job. Because they get no raise, no promotion and no special treatment. Heck, they don't even feel part of the team. Cause they're just the guy who does an OK job. Naturally, these people are often out of a job. And since every job quickly gets complicated for them, they tend to start their own little startup.
Contrast that to competent people. Chances are, they'll get hired to do something they love and be offered a comfortable salary. Therefore mitigating (in most cases) the need to create a startup.
Now the fun part, here are some examples of incompetent leaders I've known: - A web agency owner, who was the initial web developer for years, but writes HORRIBLE, INCREDIBLY VULNERABLE code. - A head sales representative who can't write properly in his maternal language. - A web agency owned and run by someone who doesn't know anything about technology. He calls jQuery "iPhone compatible technology". - The best, a boss who couldn't even speak in front of his mere dozen employees. I wonder how he negotiates his contracts.
In such a situation, when the incompetent leader exits, all those who are next in line are these incompetent 'yes' people, increasing their chances of being considered for and granted promotion.
This dynamic exists in some institutions in contrast to the 'surround yourself with people smarter/better/more competent than you' philosophy of leadership. Jim Collins talked about these approaches in Good To Great, comparing Bank of America's 'weak general' promotion culture with Wells Fargo's approach of getting the most talented people into the highest organizational positions possible. You could argue selection bias, but it's interesting to compare the financial performance of the two banks over the last 10 years or so.
Even if the article is correct, it's fundamentally conflating leadership with management and the two are not the same.
We still don't live in a world where society comes first, which is something which is more happening in Asia.
I don't think the quote "evil prevails where good men fail to act" is always true, but there is no formula for success, there is only domination. You don't become a leader because you know how to make the world a better place, you become a leader because people trust you how to lead, and leading is about making choices and decisions.
Leaders did not invent technologies, but they were important into making them viable in business terms, which is as much important.
But nobody should forget true inventors are not as much valued as good leaders. A good leaders will be a leader who has a minimal technological knowledge, but also understand its compromise.
For example, Tesla would not be viable without introducing the high end tesla roadster, which is a classical business model inventors will have a hard time dealing with.
When those become leaders in turn, they make just as bad if not worse managers. I remember one canonical example who, in a voice dripping with contempt, told me how I was an unbelievable screwup in how I ran my business. Some years later, she left the corporate life and invested her life savings in her own startup, and lost everything.
Being a good leader is a much, much harder job than it looks like. (No, I'm not going to pretend I'm very good at it, either.)
I suppose it's like democracy - it's the worst possible system, except for all the others.
While this view may hold true for the majority, I think the complete opposite is true. The people I have learned the most from, and who are the most competent (some of them in CEO positions, most in leadership), take the exact opposite approach. Always willing to admit fault, and imperfections, and always "looking for a better way to do X".
I was disappointed.
We also notice/remember/celebrate (and attribute to competence rather than happenstance) the people at right place, right time and people at wrong place, wrong time. While ignoring the vast numbers of actually mildly competent and mildly incompetent people in the middle of the bell curve.
1) Why aren't there more women in positions of authority? 2) Why are the majority of people in authority incompetent?
The answer to the second is probably that people get promoted exactly one level above their ability. The answer to the former is the real problem, and I suspect that if you solve that you'd still have a world run by a bunch of idiots, it's just that 50% of them would be female.
Seeing that HN is a tech site: competent tech women will get a hold of tech jobs on their skill level. Incompetent women will either not do tech or be discriminated in to the job.
Remember to do your part to stem the tide of this phenomenon by not hiring or promoting these idiots. Not just the people you dislike, but people who are genuinely like this. If you stop promoting them, then they'll go away.
The power is yours.
Nine of them answer ditheringly: "I'm not sure," or "we don't really know yet," etc.
The tenth confidently steps up, displays "alpha male" body language, and says: "it's made of green cheese."
That person is now in charge of the space program.
The entire world works that way.
it is so 'un-pc' to criticise or fire anyone that after being pushed out for screwing everything up you get a nice mark on your CV saying you had a job as X even though you effectively failed as hard as possible.
it is so easy to blag an interview by ticking the standard boxes as well...