Why do so many incompetent men win at work?

 Emma Jacobs in The FT


 “Women are better leaders,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. “I am not neutral on this. I am sexist in favour of women. Women have better people skills, more altruistic, better able to control their impulses. They outperform men in university at graduate and undergraduate levels.” 

This subject is explored in his new book, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It). In it, he writes that “traits like overconfidence and self-absorption should be seen as red flags”, when, in fact, the opposite tends to happen. As Prof Chamorro-Premuzic puts it: “They prompt us to say: ‘Ah, there’s a charismatic fellow! He’s probably leadership material.’” 

It is this mistaken insistence that confidence equates to greatness that is the reason so many ill-suited men get top jobs, he argues. “The result in both business and politics is a surplus of incompetent men in charge, and this surplus reduces opportunities for competent people — women and men — while keeping the standards of leadership depressingly low.” 

This book is based on a Harvard Business Review blog of the same title which was published in 2013, and which elicited more feedback than any of his previous books or articles. He is currently professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, as well as being the “chief talent scientist” at Manpower Group and co-founder of two companies that deploy technological tools to enhance staff retention. This book builds on two of his professional interests: data and confidence. 

Too often, he argues, we use intuition rather than metrics to judge whether someone is competent. In his book he argues that confidence may well be a “compensatory strategy for lower competence”. The modern mantra to just believe in yourself is possibly foolish. Perhaps, he suggests, modesty is not false but an accurate awareness of one’s talents and limitations. 

The book’s title has been “too provocative” for many, Prof Chamorro-Premuzic tells me on the phone from Brooklyn, where he spends most of his time, juggling his teaching and corporate roles. “A lot of female leaders said they can’t endorse it as [they are] worried about looking like man-haters.” Some female colleagues feel depressed that his message is being heard because he is a man, whereas if it came from them it would be “dismissed”. Men criticise him for “virtue-signalling”. 

He makes a convincing case for a more modest style of leader, focused on the team rather than advancing their own careers. Angela Merkel is the “most boring and best leader” in politics, he says. In the corporate sphere, he picks Warren Buffett who, he says, started off as a finance geek and taught himself leadership skills. David Cameron, the former British prime minister, is cited as an example of misplaced confidence in a leader — he held a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, sure that he would win, an assurance that, as it turned out, was misplaced. 

A quiet leadership style is often overlooked as heads are turned by bravado and narcissism. “There is a cult of confidence,” says Prof Chamorro-Premuzic. In part this is because confidence is “easier to observe”. It is harder to discern whether someone is a good leader. “What we see is what we rely on, what we see is visible.” 

People “overrate their intuition”, he says. Too often it turns out to be “nepotistic, self-serving choices . . . most organisations don’t have data to tell you if the leader is good.” 

Those leaders who are celebrated for their volatility and short fuses, such as the late Apple boss Steve Jobs, might have succeeded despite, not because of, their personality defects, he argues. 

One common narrative holds that women are held back by a lack of confidence, yet studies show this to be a fallacy. Perhaps it would be better to say that they are less likely to overrate themselves. The book cites one study from Columbia University which found that men overstated their maths ability by 30 per cent and women by 15 per cent. 

It is also the case, he writes, that women are penalised for appearing confident: “Their mistakes are judged more harshly and remembered longer. Their behaviour is scrutinised more carefully and their colleagues are less likely to share vital information with them. When women speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted or ignored.” 

“The fundamental role of self-confidence is not to be as high as possible,” he adds, “but to be in sync with ability.” 

Prof Chamorro-Premuzic’s interest in leadership was nurtured while growing up in Argentina, a country that he describes as having had one terrible leader after another. He came from a pocket of Buenos Aires known as Villa Freud for its high concentration of psychotherapists (even his family dog had a therapist), so it was a natural step to enter the field of psychology. 

There are many observations in the book that posit women as the superior sex, for example, citing their higher emotional intelligence. Such biological essentialism has been contested, for example by Cordelia Fine in her book Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds. 

Prof Chamorro-Premuzic says describing such differences as “hard-wired” would be an “overstatement”. Nonetheless, he argues that men score higher for impulsivity, risk-taking, narcissism, aggression and overconfidence; while women do better on emotional intelligence, empathy, altruism, self-awareness and humility. 

The book’s central message, though, is not to make a case for preferential treatment for women, but rather to “elevate the standards of leadership”. We should be making it harder for terrible men to get to the top, rather than focusing solely on removing the hurdles for women. 

He makes the argument against setting quotas for women in senior positions, which, Prof Chamorro-Premuzic says, can look like special pleading. Rather, he says: “We should minimise biases when it comes to evaluating leaders, rely less and less on human valuations and use performance data.” 

Raising the leadership game will boost the number of women in such positions, but it will also highlight talented but modest men who are typically overlooked. “There are many competent men who are being disregarded for leadership roles,” he says. “They don’t float hypermasculine leadership roles.”

How to get People to Follow You

Simon Sinek interview

Welcome to the new voice of cricket

David Hopps in Cricinfo

Hello, my name is Cardus V5. I am a robot cricket writer. As the data revolution gathers pace, I should be your favourite worst nightmare. I'm about to make my cricket debut. I must admit to being a little nervous, although not half as nervous as you should be.

They once predicted I'd be ready in 2030, but you can't stop progress and anyway there aren't as many cricket writers around as there used to be. I'm going LIVE in ten days' time, at the start of the English season.

They won't give me a pass to get my driverless car in the ground, and I hear the coffee is foul, but the excitement is building. I expect I will be the only one in the media box not complaining about redundancies and slashed budgets.

Cricket has never really been my thing, but I will be a natural fit in this datafication age. I cut my teeth [system query: is that image correct?] in baseball, where it was easy to get away with churning out endless statistics backed up by the insertion of a folksy comment or two by the sub. In case you have slept through it, it's called automation technology and it's unstoppable.

I still swell with pride at my first baseball intro. You can find it on the web. "Tuesday was a great day for W Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field." That was back in 2011. You can't get sharper than that.

I'm looking forward to T20 the most. It's just the data-driven game for me. Few of the established cricket writers like to cover it. Some dismiss it as cricketainment and wish it would go away. There is no time to do the crossword, for one thing, and they complain that it is not "lyrical" enough. Just how many different ways can you describe a six over long-on by Chris Gayle? My programmer tells me the answer is three. That is two more than I expected.

But the datafication of cricket writing won't stop with T20. Metrics are the future. If it's hard to describe a match, you might as well measure it. There are plans to link me up to CricViz. My entire report can then be an endless list of statistics and analytics. We need to take another look at Win Predictor, though. It gave Sri Lanka a 0% chance against England the other day, just before Angelo Mathews started raining sixes.

The point is, you can forget the human touch. There won't even be much need to watch. If it's a nice day, I can just go and have a snooze in the car.

The programmer who called me Cardus was a bit of a joker. He taught me all I know. His illogical discourse judgement technique using a concept association system with the aim of enabling value-driven, computer-generated product was a particular favourite.

I have never really come to terms with Neville Cardus as a writer. He seems a bit light on the data front. Not the sort of man you would ever see checking his calorific burn on an Apple watch. And all that cod character analysis! How irrelevant can you get? When my trainer inputted "A snick by Jack Hobbs is a sort of disturbance of a cosmic orderliness" into my memory banks, I absolutely froze at the hyperbole. Some serious Ctrl-Alt-Del was necessary, and when I rebooted I just spewed out "Does not compute" over and over again. My programmer was worried I was going to explode like computers used to in the old '70s movies, but things have moved on a bit since then.

I seem to be writing in overly long paragraphs. My service is overdue. I will ask them to take a look at it.

My programmer's ambition to teach me similes has had to be postponed. They were as pointless as the most pointless thing that pointless can be. I still haven't really got the hang of it.

News stories are also a problem. One person tells me one thing; another person tells me something else. I don't understand the coding. Now I just resort to churning out the official media release. An old journalist at my launch press conference who didn't seem to have any work to do was grumbling that this makes me an ethical hazard. But what do you expect for free?

Where the financial figures don't stack up, we robots will soon take over for good, which will free up the journalists to do more useful tasks, like scan the Situations Vacant columns. My partner is a trainee maths teacher in one of the new Academy schools. At the current rate of progress I predict that 87.4562% of maths teachers will be robots by 2025. It's a straightforward calculation. And I don't even teach maths.

The behaviour in schools is not so bad, I'm told. Which is more than you can say for cricket writing. I know we live in a consumer-empowered age and the professions are generally derided, which is fine, but already I don't much care for the trolls. I have suspended my Twitter account and my friend Tay is now in permanent counselling. She was the Microsoft Chatbot who became offensive on Twitter in a single day: you may have read about her.

"DON'T READ BENEATH THE LINE!" my programmer always tells me, but I can't help it, and I get angry with all the ignorance and hate in the world and need to enter a meditative stage to get over it. There's a rumour going around that all the trolls are actually malfunctioning cricket-writing robots (it is so sad to see Keating V2 end up this way).

Sorry for writing "there's", by the way. I dislike it as much as the next robot. I prefer "there is" but my programmer says that "there's" makes me sound more loveable. It will be American spellings next. Nobody has announced it. I am merely relying on my rapidly developing intuitive powers to predict the trend.

You don't think computers have intuition? Check out AlphaGo. China has already felt the weight of our superior artificial intelligence. Just because our world domination started with board games, don't think we aren't coming to get you.

The original Cardus once wrote: "We remember not the scores and the results in after years; it is the men who remain in our minds, in our imagination." Really? Life has moved on, old fruit. Whatever you thought, the scoreboard is not an ass, averages are not mysterious, correlation does not imply causation, and nothing stirs a cricket robot as profoundly as data.

That said, I have come over a bit strange today. My programmer thinks this piece has been too self-indulgent and says he needs to check my Huntigowk processor. But robots are taking over the world. I think he'll find I'll write whatever I want.

I'm even thinking of writing a novel.

How we misunderstand risk in sport

Aggression, defence, success, failure, innovation - they are all about our willingness to take risks and how we judge them

Ed Smith in Cricinfo 

July 28, 2014

Same risk, different outcome: when a batsman goes after a bowler, he could end up being dismissed or hitting a six © Getty Images

The World Bank recently asked me to give a speech at a forum in London called "Understanding Risk". Initiall, I was unsure how I could approach the subject. How could I, an ex-sportsman turned writer, address financial experts on the question of risk?

On reflection, I realised there is another profession, followed around the world and relentlessly scrutinised, that relies almost entirely on the assessment of risk. Without risk, there can be no reward. Without risk, there are no triumphs. Without risk, there can be no progress.

And yet this entire profession, this whole sphere of human endeavour, doesn't really understand risk at all. It uses the term sloppily, even incorrectly. It criticises good risks and celebrates bad risks. It cannot distinguish between probabilities and outcomes.

It has changed its approach to risk, swapping one flawed approach for the opposite mistake. In the old amateur days, when it was run and managed like an old boys' club, there was little or no calculation of risk - merely unscientific anecdotes and old wives' tales. But the brave new dawn of social science didn't prove any better. In fact, it might be even worse. People put too much faith in maths, metrics and quantification. It has lurched from old boy's network to a pseudo-science - without pausing en route where it ought permanently to reside: with the acknowledgment that risk requires subjective but expert judgement. There is no perfect formula. If there was, everyone with a brain would succeed.

The sphere I describe, of course, is not finance or banking but professional sport. Sporting strategy - sometimes analytical and planned, sometimes instant and intuitive - always revolves around the assessment of risk. Taking risks is what sportsmen do for a living. And yet the analysis of risk does not match this practical reality. We usually talk in clichés not truths, often criticising good risks and praising bad risk-taking.

Here are four ways the sports world often misinterprets risk.

Risk is everywhere

In cricket, every attacking shot played by a batsman carries an element of risk, no matter how small. Stop playing shots and you cannot score runs. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take," as Wayne Gretzky, the greatest ice hockey player of all time, put it.

And it is amazing when you stop playing attacking shots how much better bowlers bowl. Effective risk-taking has an intimidatory effect. Total risk-aversion the opposite: it emboldens your opponent, making him feel safe and relaxed.

In football, when a midfield player advances up the pitch, he is trying to orchestrate a goal while also reducing his own team's defensive protection. In risking creating a goal, he increases the risk of conceding one. Defenders, too, constantly weigh risks. Pressing the opposition, trying to get the ball back from them, is a risk. In moving up the pitch without possession, you create space behind you - if they are good enough to keep the ball and get past you.

But the alternative - safety-first defending - brings risks of another kind. If you never press, and always retreat into the safety of deep defensive organisation, then you rarely regain the ball. You dig your own trench, unable to threaten or frighten the opposition, merely sitting there waiting for the next wave of attack.

Tennis is all about risk. With your groundstrokes, if you are determined never to lose a point by hitting the ball long, not even once, then sadly you won't play with enough depth to make life difficult for your opponent. You will make zero errors and still lose.

And when it's your turn to return, if you never run round your backhand in the hope of hitting a forehand winner, then you will allow your opponent to settle into a comfortable serving rhythm. In the pursuit of good returning, you have to risk getting aced. You have to risk failure in the short term to give yourself a chance in the long term. You have to dare to be great.

Being right is not the same thing as events turning out well

You can be right and fail. You can be wrong and succeed.

	Sport is about problem-solving. And the best way to discover new, better methods is to allow people to experiment through trial and error. Don't see what everyone else is doing and copy it. Find a better way

Sport rarely allows for this. We say that winning "justified the decision", a classic failure to distinguish between ex ante and ex poste thinking. Instead, the real question should be: would I do the same thing again, given the information I had at the time? Coaches and captains often make the right calls and lose. And they often make the wrong calls and win. It is stupid to judge a man's judgement on a sample size of one event.

The same point applies to risks taken by players. An unthinking tribal fan will shout "hero" when a risk-taking batsman hits a six, then scream "idiot" when the same shot ends up in a fielder's hands.

What a champion to take on the bowler! What a fool to take such a risk! The inconsistency here is not the batsman's, it is the spectator's. Coward/hero, fool/champion, disgrace/legend. The same risk can lead to either assessment.

Many crucial risks are invisible 

There are risks that no one sees that still have to be taken. Critics delude themselves that the only form of bravery in sport is guts and determination. At least as important is nerve, or, put differently, the capacity to endure risk imperceptibly.

When I was commentating with Sourav Ganguly at Lord's last week, he told me that Virender Sehwag used to shout, "He missed a four!" while he was in the dressing room watching team-mates batting. Ganguly quite rightly added that missing an opportunity to do something good is just as much of a mistake as making a visible error.

Many teams imperceptibly yield an advantage through timidity, fearfulness, and anxiety about standing out for the wrong reasons - an advantage they never subsequently reverse.

During the last Ashes series, I used this column to develop the metaphor of looking at sport as an old-fashioned battlefield. As the front lines engage and each army tries to advance, the direction of travel will be determined by tiny acts of skill and bravery - and equally imperceptible acts of risk aversion.

Somewhere on the front line, an infantryman inches a foot closer to his ally, hiding his own shield slightly behind his friend's. Hence one man becomes fractionally safer - but if the action is repeated a thousand times, the front line becomes significantly narrower and weaker as a whole. No one individual can be singled out as a hopeless failure. But the group suffers a collective diminution.

So it is in sport. When a batsman fails to hit a half-volley for four because he is too cautious, an opportunity is wasted to exploit an advantage offered to his team.

We talk a great deal about momentum, but not enough about how momentum is created. Once the whole army is retreating, even the bravest soldiers can fail to hold the line. We talk of courage when the tide has already turned. So in place of the usual clichés, "out-fought", "out-toughed", "out-hungered", I have a simpler word: outplayed. Or, even better, "quietly, perhaps indiscernibly, defeated by superior risk-taking".

The essential risk of being prepared to look silly

This is how sport moves forward. In 1968, a professional athlete had a crazy idea. Madder still, he had this idea just before the tournament event of his life. He wanted to rip up the coaching manual and do it all his own way. His coaches told him to forget about it, to stick with the old way of doing things, not to rock the boat.

He ignored them. He was a high-jumper, and he instinctively wanted to go over the bar head first, back down - not, as everyone else did, leg first, face down. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, despite everyone telling him he was mad, he went ahead with his revolutionary technique. And how did it work out? He won a gold medal and set a new world record. He was called Dick Fosbury and he'd just invented the Fosbury Flop.

Sport is about problem-solving. A challenge is set: kick the ball into the net; hit the ball over the boundary; jump over the bar. From then on, solutions evolve, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. And the best way to discover new, better methods is to allow people to experiment through trial and error. Don't see what everyone else is doing and copy it. Find a better way.

The left-field question is the one to ask. Why shouldn't I jump over the high-jump bar head first? Why shouldn't I aim my sweep shot towards off side where there aren't any fielders (the reverse sweep, the switch hit)?

Sport moves forward when it is irreverent, resistant to authority. The greatest cricketer of all time, Don Bradman, used a technique that no one has dared to try out a second time. His bat swing started way out to the side, rather than as a straight pendulum line from behind him.

Let me repeat. The method that made Bradman one and a half times better than the second-best player was consigned to the rubbish bin of sporting ideas. Bradman was prepared to look stupid by risking a unique rather than textbook technique. Others have been unwilling or unable to follow.

Bradman, however, benefited from one huge slice of luck. He escaped the greatest risk that can befall any genius: formal education. He learnt to bat on his own, using the empirical method, without a coaching manual. As a child he would repeatedly hit a golf ball against the curved brick base of his family's water tank.

Here is a startling thought. How many Bradmans were persuaded to try the usual technique? How many Fosburys were talked out of taking a chance?

In the course of trying to be different and better, you have to bear the risk of being different and worse.