Choosing the right leaders – do we know what we’re doing?

I often have my MARC classes do an exercise where I ask them to get quiet for a few minutes and visualize someone in their life who has been a good leader.  I ask them to write down the traits their good leader has.  Then we collect those traits on a piece of flip chart paper and go through it together.

I did that recently on my last day of a class, and the 19 trainees gave me the following traits of good leaders, written here for the most part the way they told them to me:

Patience	Understanding	Leads by example
Direct	Has life experience	Honest
Good listener	Emotional intelligence	Fair
Transparent	Approachable	Empathetic
Clear communicator	Can walk beside you	Inclusive
Visible	Vulnerable	Confident
Collaborator	Humble	Trustworthy
Authentic	Has a backbone	Can do the hard things
Supportive	Respectful	Caring
Available	Accountable	Servitude
Sense of humor	Reliable	Has your back
Adaptable	Flexible	Walks the talk

The class was able to list these traits in fewer than five minutes.  My other classes in the past few years produced nearly the same off-the-cuff results.

And I don’t think any of us can argue with the results they produced.

Armed with most of these traits, a leader can be a collaborative servant leader who builds her people up and helps them grow and succeed.  She can also be decisive and direct when the situation needs fast, heroic action.  She can be visionary and inspire her team to reach the highest goals.  She is flexible, yet always principled and acts in a consistent manner.  She has her team’s back.  She has ownership, and she’s honest and trustworthy. 

So, we should hire and promote people into supervisory roles based on their demonstrated traits compatible with our list. It should be easy, right? 

Wrong. 

We very often fail.

It isn’t that we don’t consider and look for these great leadership traits.  It’s just that psychology and human behaviors get in our way and we fall prey to unconscious biases that cause us to project these traits onto people with no facts and for no rational reasons.

Here are a few of the biases that derail us.

The Halo Effect

The American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike popularized the “halo effect” in a 1920 paper, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.”  The phenomenon was observed in 1907 by psychologist Frederick L. Wells, but Thorndike named it, studied it, and spread it to the psychological community.

The halo effect is a cognitive bias that causes us to see something we like in a person – for example, physical attractiveness or beauty – and then assume the good-looking person is also intelligent, competent, confident, trustworthy, bold, decisive and whatever else we like.

It causes us to generally hire tall men for CEO positions, attractive females for customer-facing jobs, and beautiful people to be our actors, marketing promoters and models. 

We don’t know we are doing that, of course.  Our minds work fast and take shortcuts in making most decisions (see Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Kahneman and Tversky).  We move fast and save precious brain energy that way.

Although more attractive men are generally at a hiring and promotional advantage, attractiveness can pose a potential roadblock for females in leadership or male-dominated jobs.  The well-documented “glass ceiling” that limits female advancement is, in part, due to this halo effect.

Referred to sometimes in the literature as the “beauty premium,” physical appearance will often illogically affect who we choose as supervisors and higher-level leaders.

We don’t have to be psychologists to know that the halo effect is real – and that it poses real and serious risks for hiring and promotion decisions.  You’ve seen it and so have I, over and over.  Watch television or a movie tonight, or a marketing campaign.  I can almost guarantee that this “beauty premium” will be present and active at points in your viewing evening.   

And the halo effect isn’t limited to beauty and attractiveness.  For example, we tend to see social or kind people as likable and also as intelligent.  One good quality spills over into one or more other traits we assume the person must have.

Knowing that this unconscious bias exists may help companies to avoid promoting leaders based on looks or other irrelevant criteria.  But vigilance in creating uniform selection methods and criteria keyed to desired leadership traits is necessary to avoid this natural tendency to think attractive people are somehow supervisor because of how they look.

AI tools may help mitigate the halo effect with software to scan job applications and eliminate human error.  However, these must be carefully chosen and managed and can have unintended negative effects. 

Overcoming the halo effect requires recognizing that your brain uses mental shortcuts to make fast, unconscious judgments.  You can counter this bias by applying structured, deliberate strategies.”  Things like labeling the halo effect and dealing with it up front, choosing objective promotional criteria, and using checklists and processes will help us overcome our biases.

Confirmation bias

If we fail to do so, a second unconscious bias – confirmation bias – kicks in and causes us to look only for information that confirms for us the great qualities that this good-looking or very likeable individual has.  We see good teamwork behaviors but fail to notice narcissism and humble bragging.  We see intelligent decisions made and ignore or rationalize away the decisions that turned out to be poor.

Pygmalion effect and self-fulfilling prophecy

Confirmation bias may then cause the Pygmalion effect (or Rosenthall effect), where expecting someone to do well causes them to perform better.  We provide more coaching, more one-on-one time, more praise, more development, more opportunity, more visibility for our attractive person, resulting in a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of success.

Of course, we want to provide every resource at our disposal to help our people continuously improve, advance and succeed.  But we want that for everyone – not just the “chosen ones” where the choices were based on biased judgments.

MARC training as resource to manage unconscious biases

The leader training we provide at MARC hits confirmation bias head-on, and provides consistent checklists, processes and instructions to reduce, if not eliminate, biases like the halo effect in our leadership decisions. 

Use of MARC concepts requires fact-based, deep-thought decision-making.  It moves us out of the fast, automatic decisions that rely on biases for their conclusions.  We approach things like scientists creating and testing hypotheses instead. 

Of course, MARC alone won’t solve leader selection problems.  It won’t guarantee that the leadership traits identified by my classes will form the backbone of a fair and consistent system for leader selection.  But it is an important tool in a company’s leadership toolkit.

Call Gary Kleckner, MARC Vice President: 216-973-7323 and see how MARC can help identify and satisfy your interests in a strong and engaged workforce.