During my work life, I have met various types of managers. Few were born to lead, many grew into their position gradually with their experiences and quite many were just in the wrong position.
I will bore you for a moment with the obvious: Not every manager is a leader. Not every leader is a manager. Finally, not every founder is good at managing or leading. But sure, founders must have a vision and guts to start something new. Just look at the most famous and visionary founders nowadays! Would you like to work for Musk or Zuckerberg? I wouldn’t.
If you do a little search on the internet or in the literature, you will bump into the various typologies of the leaders or managers. Of course, personality plays a role, but some social psychology researchers found something interesting.
Ruther Bregman in his book called in English “Humankind: A Hopeful History” quotes various research and experiments’ findings showing, that the position changes people. The leaders usually become the most friendly and most empathetic group members who are being followed by the others naturally. But to gain power has consequences. Those with power are usually “more impulsive, more egocentric, more ruthless, more arrogant, and more cheeky than the average individual… there is a higher chance they will be less attentive to others and they would not be interested in the perspectives of others… and they would not blush with shame. Power is like an anastethicum that numbs you to other people.” (ibid., p. 246)
If power makes you feel superior, it is easy to conclude that the others are just not doing enough or not capable of doing enough. And here we go with the monitoring, regulations, and micromanagement because only you know how to do things right. And what is the biggest issue? Those in charge do not feel like explaining their behaviour or actions. The most empathetic leaders become the opposite and there are few ways to stop them. As Bregman stated: “Good luck when you want to get them rid of power.” (ibid., p. 248)
Ohio State University mentions, that narcissistic people often are in charge of organisations, companies, or societies. It is not surprising, as narcissists “… like power, they are egotistical, and they are usually charming and extraverted. But the problem is, they don’t necessarily make better leaders.” Another study from Grijalva et al. (2014) shows, that narcissism is gender-based. As narcissism is more prevalent in men than in women, there are typically more men in management positions.
By no means do I imply that all managers are narcissists, but there are available data to worry about (1) narcissism is on the rise in general; (2) female narcissists are on the rise; (3) up to 5% of the general population has narcissistic personality disorder; (4) narcissism among CEOs is almost 20%. There is a fair chance you will work for one. If you want to learn more, you can check e.g., Unger’s blog about what kind of people serve the narcissistic leader, and Chamorro-Premuzic’s book on incompetent leaders.
We have just identified problem no. 1 on how to recognise a good leader – there are in place wrong selection criteria for identifying leaders. Someone can talk profoundly and confidently, but it does not make them competent or good leaders.
So, what is problem no. 2 – very little attention being paid to colleagues, employees, and subordinates.
In one of my workplaces, we had 3 colleagues on long-term sick leave because of burnout during one calendar year. One of them was our direct supervisor. You don’t need to be a super experienced leader to recognise, that probably something was going on in the team. This topic was never anyhow addressed by any of our managers. Not only we had never talked about it, but no manager ever checked how the rest of the team was doing, and they did not recognise our team was actually in a crisis.
These 3 colleagues returned to work: the first one returned solely because of the financial situation and not because of recovering from burnout; the second came back to terminate the work contract and the last one returned because the management did not permit her to come back to work gradually as the mental health professionals recommend it. Not surprisingly, any of them worked at that workplace for much longer and many others left shortly after.
And even if this example is bad as it is, it shows the pattern. Good leaders have as their priority the care for the people. Not for papers, not for finances, for people. When you care for people, the people will care for you in times of need.
Yes, I can see the raised eyebrows of managers. So let me tell you another story. In many NGOs there are occasionally times, when you don’t have enough financial resources. You have to make difficult decisions. We had such a situation in my other workplace on the table and almost all of us decided to work full-time hours for ½ of the salary temporarily. Not because we would have had such great personal finances, but because we cared for the organisation and understood the situation. But the difference-making factor was, that our managers spent time with us. Even our external supervisor (in Finnish työnohjaaja) refused to be paid and offered the services for free to accompany us individually and as a team through the difficult times. At the end of the day, no one was laid off, the money that the organisation owed us was paid back a few months later and we became stronger and more dedicated as a team.
It does feel quite different from the previous story, doesn’t it?
There is a study proving that a good leader should spend at least 6 hours per employee per week. It doesn’t need to be individual time of course. It can be time spent together as a whole team, in smaller groups, or individually. It can be a work-related meeting, free discussion or a personal jibber jabber. This study showed that half of the employees spent less than 3 hours per week with their managers, and 20% even less than 1 hour per week. You can check the study to see how the number of hours spent with the leaders correlates with the motivation and engagement of employees and innovation at the workplace. The more hours spent together, the higher the score in these areas.
So, what does make a good boss? Being interested in team members and spending time with them is one of the factors.
But I also have a provocative question in mind. What if we do not have any bosses? Let’s have a look at this in the next blog post 🙂
