Chapter 3 – Reputation is King
If Character is Destiny, Reputation is Fate
It is worth noting, as well, that others’ views of us do not need to be accurate in order to affect us. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted a now-famous experiment that involved providing elementary school teachers with the IQ scores of their pupils— but the information was made up. Knowledge of the pupils’ alleged intelligence influenced the teachers’ attitudes and behavior toward the pupils such that after inspecting the children’s fake IQ scores, they started treating the purportedly smart students as if they were smart and the supposedly dim students as if they were dim. With time, teachers’ false beliefs about their pupils’ competence translated into actual performance increases (in the case of “smart” students) or decreases (in the case of “dim” students), an effect known as “self-fulfilling prophecy”: A prediction about the future becomes true even though it is false at the time it is stated. Rosenthal and Jacobson called this the Pygmalion effect, after the mythical Greek sculptor who created a statue of a beautiful woman that then came to life to become his lover. Many Pygmalion effects, even in work rather than educational settings, have been reported since Rosenthal and Jacobson’s original study.
It is plausible to suggest that the self-fulfilling effects that others’ perceptions of us have on us—especially when those others are in a position of power— are to blame for the achievement gap in domains where actual competence differences are nonexistent . For example, although there are no documented gender differences in IQ, many people, especially men, believe that men are smarter than women. As the Pygmalion effect demonstrates, if people assume that men are smarter than women, they will also start treating men as if they are smarter than women, which in turn causes achievement differences between men and women. In order to investigate this, my colleague Adrian Furnham and I have conducted many studies into others’ estimates of people’s competence. All of our studies show the same gender difference in others’ estimates, with not just men but also women systematically rating males as more competent than females. The difference is especially pronounced when the raters are males— i.e., fathers see a bigger gap between their sons’ and their daughters’ competence than mothers do; sons reciprocate this by seeing the gap between their fathers’ and mothers’ intelligence as bigger than daughters do. Although this pattern is more pronounced in some countries than in others—“ masculine” societies such as Turkey, Argentina, and Japan assume greater male superiority in competence than more “feminine” societies such as Denmark , Finland, and Sweden— it is found more or less everywhere. And remember, the sex differences in actual competence are zero, or even a small advantage for women over men (for example, in many developed or industrialized countries, such as the United States, women now outperform men in college) . Indeed, more women than men attend college, and their grades are consistently higher.
Likewise, despite ample evidence that men have no better leadership skills than women do, there is a disproportionately low number of women in management compared to men. For instance, there are only fourteen female CEOs among the top five hundred companies in the world. How can this happen if there are no actual sex differences in leadership competence? Because others’ views of us (in this case women) need not be accurate in order to affect our (women’s) lives. When it comes to leadership, the majority of people who are in charge (men) see leadership as a masculine role. In a comprehensive review of scientific studies into people’s conceptions of leadership, psychologist Anne Koenig, of the University of California, San Diego, reports conclusive evidence for the preponderance of sexist stereotypes about leaders and managers favoring men. She concludes that since society believes men make better leaders, then the definition of what it is to be a leader takes on masculine qualities. As such, it becomes much easier for men to become leaders and much harder for women to break into these roles. So then: “Given the strongly masculine cultural stereotype of leadership, these challenges are likely to continue for some time to come.”
Unsurprisingly, a survey of 705 senior female leaders (vice presidents or higher in Fortune 1000 companies) showed that 72 percent see “stereotypes about women’s roles and abilities” as a huge barrier to career advancement. 7 And yet, research evidence suggests that women are more, not less, competent leaders than men are. For example, female leaders tend to care more about their subordinates and inspire them more; they are also less likely to take dangerous risks or to be corrupt. Clearly, then, more female leaders would be beneficial to both organizations and society.
Henry Ford famously stated that whether you feel that you can do it or not, you are right— implying that your confidence has self -fulfilling effects on your competence. The statement would be more accurate if it read “whether others feel that you can do it or not, they are usually right,” especially when others know you well or when they have the power to decide your future.
Chapter 4 – A Successful Career
Myth 2: Success Depends on Innate Talent
Higher learning potential helps you do better in school, which then helps you do better in college , which then helps you do better when you are being trained for the job, which then helps you do better on the job. This logical transition from earlier skills to later expertise explains why faster learners have an advantage as kids, adolescents, and adults. And that’s where the documented advantages of any innate skill end.
Chapter 4 – A Successful Career
Myth 3: Arrogant People Are More Successful
· The most important attributes that successful corporate managers have are trustworthiness, kindness, and empathy. How do we know this? Because over the past fifty years there have been more than five hundred scientific studies assessing the profile of successful leaders across all types of industries and sectors and all over the world. The bottom line: Arrogant leaders are disliked by their bosses, their peers, and their subordinates, even in autocratic settings like the military.
· The past ten years have shown that women tend to make better leaders than men. Why? Because they are generally more trustworthy, kind, and empathetic. True, there are fewer women than men in corporate senior leadership roles, but only because until recently (and still today in many parts of the world) women were not even allowed to aspire to top management jobs. Moreover, those who have the power to enable women to get those jobs (a.k.a. men) often operate under the stereotypical or prejudiced assumption that men are better leaders than women, partly because they don’t realize that arrogance is a destructive leadership quality.
· Although there are still many arrogant people in management (not only men), arrogance is neither necessary nor desirable to get to those positions, and it almost certainly guarantees failure once people get there, if they ever do. Gallup, the global consultancy that specializes in the assessment of employee engagement, reports that 60 to 70 percent of employees worldwide are either dissatisfied or seriously unhappy with their jobs, and that the single most important cause of this dissatisfaction is incompetent management. This data is based on thirty years of research and comprises seventeen million employees. Indeed, when bosses are arrogant, their subordinates end up hating their jobs and quitting. As the saying goes, “People join organizations but quit their bosses.” And when they don’t quit, they don’t perform to the best of their capabilities, engaging in counterproductive work behaviors (e.g., cheating, stealing, gossiping, or spending hours on Facebook).
Therefore, there should be far fewer arrogant people in charge than there currently are. For the sake of socioeconomic growth, political progress, and our sanity, we should work to prevent arrogant individuals from advancing in their careers at the peril of other people. The two reasons why arrogant people sometimes end up being successful is that they prioritize getting ahead at the expense of getting along— being ruthless, manipulative, exploitative, and bullish— and because their high confidence (arrogance) is often mistaken for competence.
On a slightly more positive note, in my career I have met, interviewed, studied, and coached hundreds of
successful people from around the world and all sorts of jobs. Many of them were arrogant, yes, but the vast majority of arrogant people were not really successful, and the vast majority of really successful people were anything but arrogant. It’s just sad that arrogance is something we often notice and remember people for— just think back to the prime example of Donald Trump: The very reason he stands out is that he is an exception (something that would normally not happen in the real world). If it were not for his obscene arrogance we might actually be allowed to forget who he is. Thankfully, though, arrogant people usually end up doing worse, whereas gentle, generous, and modest people end up doing better. So, whenever you see someone successful acting in an arrogant way, ask yourself if that person is truly competent, or if he is disguising his incompetence with his confidence. Sometimes, arrogance can be the most obvious disguise for a person’s incompetence, and even mask his insecurities— why else would he need to bring others down in order to big himself up?
Chapter 7 – A Healthier Life
The Unhealthy Side of High Confidence
Sadly, most people behave as if they have been given an optimistic forecast about their health. In what is arguably the most impressive longitudinal study relating to confidence and health, Dr. Howard Friedman and colleagues inspected the association between the personality characteristics of fifteen hundred eleven-year-old children and health outcomes seven decades later. They found that at any given age, optimistic and confident children were at higher risk of dying than their more pessimistic and unconfident counterparts, and the reason was their higher propensity to take health risks. In line, Dr. Friedman concluded that the key recipe to extend life is a combination of prudence and persistence: “The best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness.”
Chapter 7 – A Healthier Life
Low Confidence Extends Life
Unsurprisingly, men have higher death rates for twelve of the fifteen leading mortality causes in the United States, and they die an average of five years earlier than women. The two underlying reasons, namely higher risk taking and lower prevention, can be attributed to men’s higher confidence. As noted by Dr. Ruben Pinkhasov of the Maimonides Medical Center in New York, who reported the preceding statistics: 52 “ Men’s importance on self-reliance, physical toughness, and emotional control all play in to their masculinity and inhibit their willingness to seek help from health professionals.” Or, if you prefer, women’s lower confidence drives them to seek advice and minimize risks compared to men. Some men live longer than women, but mostly when they are less confident than typical men. By the same token, some women die younger than men, but partly because they take similar health risks and neglect preventive behaviors as most men do. What matters, then, is not sex, but confidence.
Chapter 8 – Easier Said Than Done?
A More Competent, Less Confident World
Unsurprisingly, there has been a recent increase in research into the detrimental results of unrealistic optimism and delusional confidence. For example, a group of European researchers led by Nihat Aktas at Emlyon Business School, in France, found that narcissistic CEOs tend to make more aggressive takeovers, and at higher prices, disrupting the market and damaging their company. This finding is consistent with a well-known management paradox: The factors that enable executives to climb the corporate ladder are inversely related to the factors that enable managers to become good leaders. To make it to the top, it is often essential to be greedy and arrogant, but to be a good leader— even in the corporate world— you need to be a team player and modest.
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