Competent Leaders: How Many Exist?

Journalists and politicians have all kinds of theories about the economic, social and political crises that are spreading throughout the world. They like us to frame these matters as conspiracies or collapses of one or another economic system or, in many New York Times reports, ideological conflicts over "the fundamental role of government."

Perhaps something they should be adding to their theories is the role of simple incompetence in many spheres of leadership.

Psychologist Robert Hogan maintains leadership incompetence is fairly widespread:

Estimates of the base rate for managerial incompetence in corporate life range from 30% to 75%; a recent review reports the average estimate to be 50% (DeVries & Kaiser, 2003). Historically, managerial incompetence  has been conceptualized in terms of not having the characteristics needed for success—too little  of the right stuff. We believe failure is more related to having undesirable qualities than lacking  desirable ones—having the wrong stuff...

Bentz (1985) pioneered the study of managerial incompetence with an interview study of  failed managers at Sears; he noted that virtually all of them had a "personality defect" of some  sort. Bentz’s findings were then replicated by researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership  (McCall & Lombardo, 1983) and others. Leslie and Van Velsor (1996) summarized the literature  on failed managers in terms of four themes: (1) poor interpersonal skills (being insensitive,  arrogant, cold, aloof, overly ambitious), (2) unable to get work done (betraying trust, not  following through, overly ambitious), (3) unable to build a team, and (4) unable to make the  transition after a promotion.

Is Hogan right?

If so, what implications do his views have for selection and training in your organization? Especially in regard to the four themes that seem to chracterize behavior of incompetent leaders. At a local level, we can select and train better to improve results in our organizations, so knowing about his conclusions can be helpful.

At the macro level, things get kind of scary. Look at a stage with ten political candidates - we expect that 3 to 8 of them might be incompetents who will only be discovered as such after they are elected. Boy oh boy!

Worse yet at the global level. What if globalization and organizational consolidation have a side-effect of putting more and more of the world in the hands of incompetent leaders at the tops of larger and larger pyramids?

View the article at http://www.hoganassessments.com/sites/default/files/Leadership.pdf