Ever wondered how so many incompetent men get to the top?

I certainly have. As usual, McKinsey has an answer.

The short answer: because he’s a man.

Specifically, he’s a particular type of man. McKinsey researched the question of what propels people to the top, controlling for abilities, competencies, interests, personalities, age, gender and socioeconomic status. Gender was one of the strongest predictors.

They then looked at the relation between gender and performance once they got the jobs. They diplomatically note that leaders weren’t selected on the basis of talent, merit or potential.  

It finds that the qualities that make for better leaders such as empathy, self-awareness, integrity and humility are not as highly rated by selectors as overconfidence and narcissism, which seldom deliver outstanding company performance. Worse yet, competence doesn’t even come into it.

This bias obviously affects certain men who have these qualities, but more so women, who tend to have a stronger sense of EQ and empathy. 

Oddly, diversity programmes which skew towards appointing more women may make the problem worse if they’re promoting women who lack empathy, self-awareness, integrity and humility. 

There’s a twist in this: those qualities don’t really make them stand out as leaders at the outset – it’s what makes them better leaders as they grow in the role. The real problem is that selectors put more value on the confidence they can see in front of them than on potential for growth. Of course, they have to be sure that candidates have the technical skills to do the job, but very often the ‘selectors’ are either people who are themselves endowed with that overconfidence or who have bought into the ‘strong leadership’ myth. Things won’t change until leadership selectors subscribe to the value of people-centred leadership.

The solution is not to put more women in leadership training programmes. The McKinsey authors say “if you focus on gender, you may or may not increase the quality of your leaders. But if you focus on talent, you will probably increase the competence and quality of your leaders, as well as increase gender representation.” 

The solution is to train all your leaders in self-awareness and empathy. Integrity and humility are matters of character that can be amplified by self-awareness and EQ, they’re not teachable skills. 

The interesting thing is that when you underpin your leadership training with self-awareness, the best learners develop an authentic confidence along with an awareness of their limitations. It’s still the case that selectors have to be encouraged to look for potential and talent as well as confidence, but people who go through that kind of development process are going to be good leaders by any definition. 

Training programs that teach self-awareness are going to create learning that lasts, because self-awareness is the first step to the behavior changes that improve performance.

Correction: while you can teach self-awareness, it’s something that has to be learned and practiced rather than taught. And it has to be learned practiced in daily life, not a classroom. 

Here’s some of the things we’ve observed about how people become more self-aware: 

• A structured leadership development program can create self-awareness, but it must be done with care and subtlety.  

• Avoid the term ‘mindfulness’. For a lot of people, it conjures up images of meditation and other fluffy new-age spirituality stuff. Use a term like ‘active mindset’ to distinguish from the ‘default’ setting 

• Learners on the program need to be encouraged, coached and supported by their managers if they are to develop self-awareness and empathy 

• People develop self-awareness through practice. The material for that practice is all around them. Delegation, for example, is a wonderful opportunity for mindfulness – stop, consider whether this is something only I can do, choose to delegate it.  

Every day contains hundreds of such opportunities, and the structured program is the ideal way to have those opportunities revealed. A good program will teach skills like communication and difficult conversations, but what people really learn is self-awareness and empathy. 

In our experience, self-awareness is what unlocks learning that lasts.