Hot air rises—and so, unfortunately, do many of the aspiring leaders who spout it. Why do we continue to mistake confidence for competence, and what should we be doing differently?

In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It) (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2019), joins McKinsey talent leaders Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle, as well as global editorial director Lucia Rahilly, to discuss why the traits that propel us to the top seem to diverge so widely from those that make us great leaders—as well as how to choose stronger, more successful, and more diverse candidates for leadership roles.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How do leaders rise?

Lucia Rahilly: It’s with both great glee and a genuinely heavy heart that we begin our topic for today and talk about Tomas’s research on why so many incompetent men rise to leadership positions. It’s a serious and, in some cases, devastating issue. What prompted you to pursue this particular line of research?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I was interested in knowing the truth. What is it that propels some people to leadership roles? Why are some people effective or ineffective when they get to those roles? Gender was actually a peripheral variable.

Our research was focused on abilities, competencies, interests, and personalities, but of course, we collected data on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. We found a remarkable gap whereby gender was one of the strongest predictors of why people reach leadership roles through nomination, selection, or election.

We also saw the effect of gender on predicting performance once they got to occupy those positions. We saw that we didn’t select leaders on the basis of talent, merit, or potential. That’s the main conclusion of the research.

Lucia Rahilly: Lest we lose the majority of our male audience, let us be clear: men also suffer the consequences of bad leadership. The stakes are high for all of us in hiring and cultivating good leaders. This isn’t just a female issue or an identity politics issue, correct?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: It doesn’t really matter whether the person in charge identifies as male or female. The important thing is that when they are competent, we all benefit. We are more productive, more engaged, and less likely to engage in antisocial behavior. Fundamentally, competent men should relish the transition to a meritocratic system, whereby people achieve leadership roles based on their talent and potential, because there are many competent men who are, ironically or paradoxically, overlooked for leadership roles.

This is precisely because they have some of the qualities—empathy, self-awareness, integrity, and humility—that ultimately make them better leaders but don’t really make them leaders to begin with. If you succeed at playing within the current rules of the game, you’re going to get further, but then you’re going to make things worse. And if you don’t, you might never be selected. This is the interesting conundrum that we should be addressing when we talk about things like gender diversity.

Empathy and gender

Bryan Hancock: One of the interesting pieces of research in your book is that women, on the whole, have a similar IQ to men but have higher EQs [emotional intelligence], although the difference in EQ between men and women is no more than 15 percent. While women’s tendency to have higher EQs can help explain why there are fewer women in leadership, there may also be a large number of men who are competent, who have high EQs, who are the nice guys, and who may not rise to the top.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: We have this paradoxical situation wherein if we made leadership selection gender blind and only focused on the traits that have proved to lead to more effective leadership styles and approaches, we would end up not only with more women in leadership roles but also slightly more women than men in them. There’s this underlying assumption in gender diversity interventions that, because most leaders are male, there’s something we need to do to help women who are not as naturally predisposed to being good leaders.

It’s actually the other way around. There’s a lot of antimeritocratic and implicit positive discrimination going on that favors not just men but overconfident, narcissistic, and incompetent men when it comes to leadership roles.

Lucia Rahilly: What does the research tell us about women in leadership roles?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Often, even when women are appointed to very senior leadership roles, it isn’t because people have embraced what they bring to the table in terms of EQ, self-awareness, self-control, integrity, humility, people skills, et cetera. Rather, it’s because they go for a profile of somebody who may be biologically female but out-males males in masculinity. So there’s a queen bee or Margaret Thatcher phenomenon. In fact, there are many countries in the world that are run by women who look more alpha male than their male competitors.

The point is not to have more biological women in charge but to have better leaders in charge. And if we don’t understand that we should optimize for a more feminine, empathetic, or competent style, whether it’s displayed by women or men, we run into problems.

We’re also much more likely to remember failures in leadership when the leaders are female. If you look for an arguably psychopathic, narcissistic, and very toxic leader who became very rich and famous, for every female case, there’s probably nine or ten male cases. The male cases make for great movies like The Wolf of Wall Street. But when the leaders happen to be female, we’re more likely to hear, “Oh, my God, women shouldn’t be leaders.”

Three steps forward

Brooke Weddle: Tomas, there’s so much to unpack in that, and I feel my blood pressure rising. It’s like a personal engagement here, as well. How do you even begin to penetrate this? We put women in leadership training programs to try to level the playing field. They’re very well intentioned, but it sounds like the treatment should be applied to male, rather than female, leaders, who could strengthen their EQs. How do you have that conversation with leaders so as to inspire them to think differently?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: There are three basic steps that I tend to follow. The first is to get leaders to show me how they know that the current leadership is actually adding the most amount of value. In most organizations, there’s a discrepancy between individual or personal career success on the one hand and value added to the organization on the other. Companies should start to decrease that.

The second one is to focus on the business case. Leaders should be committed to elevating the quality of leadership, because that’s good for revenues, profitability, innovation, et cetera.

And the third one is to try to make leadership selection gender blind. I always say the best gender diversity intervention is done by focusing on talent, rather than gender. 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.

Measuring change and evaluating impact are really important, because there are a lot of well-meaning interventions that don’t necessarily translate into good outcomes. Pointing the finger at women and blaming them for not applying for jobs when they don’t meet the qualifications or requirements is one of them. So is blaming women for not leaning in or speaking in meetings when they have nothing to say. Mansplaining things is another one.

There’s also the accusation against women of having imposter syndrome and the implication that because they are pathologically insecure, they will never be leaders. There are a lot of these well-meaning approaches or intentions that will, when we look back in 50 years’ time, hopefully be understood as benevolent sexism.