Why Most Leaders Are Inept
Google “my boss is,” and you’ll see the following auto-
complete options: “abusive,” “crazy,” “mean,” “incompe-
tent,” and “lazy.” Opinion surveys produce similar results.
According to Gallup, a global polling firm that periodically
collects attitudinal data from employees all over the world,
75 percent of people quit their jobs because of their direct
line manager. Results like these reveal bad leadership as
the number one cause of voluntary turnover worldwide.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of Americans say they would rather
change their boss than get a pay raise.1 This shortsighted
response fails to recognize that the next boss might not be
any better, but worse.
What to make of the obvious fact that most leaders, inept
or otherwise, are male? Since women make up around
50 percent of the adult population and, throughout much of2
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
the industrialized world, outnumber and outperform men
in college, we might expect at least equal representation of
women and men in leadership positions. And yet reality
disagrees. In most parts of the world, the notion of lead-
ership is so masculine that most people would struggle to
name one famous female business leader. For example, in a
recent survey, a thousand Americans were asked to name a
famous female business leader in tech. Some 92 percent of
respondents had no answer, and a quarter of the remaining
8 percent named “Siri” or “Alexa.”2 When I mentioned to
a client that I was writing a book on women and leader-
ship, her cynical response was, “You mean you are writ-
ing two books?” Her response typifies the weak association
between women and leadership, and not just in people’s
minds.
Even among the S&P 500 companies (which are much
more committed to gender equality than are smaller,
privately held businesses), we are very far from seeing a
balanced gender ratio. By 2017, the proportion of women
in positions in these firms decreased as the power of the
position increased:
Download the article below:
GHHR_Why_Do_So_Many_Incompetent_Men_1755948504
