Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? Reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Available from Amazon here.

Look around your office. Turn on the TV. Incompetent leadership is everywhere, and there’s no denying that most of these leaders are men.

In this timely and provocative book, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks two powerful questions: Why is it so easy for incompetent men to become leaders? And why is it so hard for competent people–especially competent women–to advance?

Marshaling decades of rigorous research, Chamorro-Premuzic points out that although men make up a majority of leaders, they underperform when compared with female leaders. In fact, most organizations equate leadership potential with a handful of destructive personality traits, like overconfidence and narcissism. In other words, these traits may help someone get selected for a leadership role, but they backfire once the person has the job.

When competent women–and men who don’t fit the stereotype–are unfairly overlooked, we all suffer the consequences. The result is a deeply flawed system that rewards arrogance rather than humility, and loudness rather than wisdom.

There is a better way. With clarity and verve, Chamorro-Premuzic shows us what it really takes to lead and how new systems and processes can help us put the right people in charge.

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? Reviewed

This is both a great title for a book and also a problematic one too. The book outlines the scenario of poor male leadership. However there are also numerous examples of poor leadership by women too, bad leadership is an equal opportunities skill to do badly. Chamorro-Premuzic does attempt to explain and deconstruct this assertion a little, pointing out that there are more men in positions of leadership. He also cites the statistics that suggest that there x3 more male psychopaths than female, and many of these are in the boardroom, so, arguably, maybe there are more incompetent male leaders.

It’s a problematic statement, but we would agree that there is plenty of bad leadership by males at the moment, we are of course enduring a period of rampant populism and virtually all of these terrible leaders are male. However that doesn’t mean we might not see some bad female leadership too, the nationalist movement in France for example has a female figurehead, and Teresa May surely didn’t enhance her credentials after three wildly unsuccessful years in power.

The book aims to also offer some constructive insights and advice rather than just pull us down into a gender conversation thankfully. It is certainly a credible assertion that we might have less wars and conflicts if more of our leaders were not male, but we don’t know this for sure. On page 165 he still acknowledges that ‘assessing a leader’s impact is incredibly difficult’ and this remains the challenge throughout the whole business of assessing effectiveness.

The book does offer some well argued insights however, and includes the slightly strange, though also logical comment that narcissists tend to be happy to acknowledge their own narcissism. They make for poor leaders, though they often end up in leadership positions. Similarly, as we are all probably aware at this stage, just because someone interviews well it does not ensure they will be able to do their job well.

If this book helps to reduce the number of bad to terrible leaders out there then it will have done a good job. If a disproportionate number of these are male, well even better. In our time we’ve certainly had to ensure our fairshare of them, however it is not an exclusively male club. Read it and make up your own mind too.

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