Harvard study: “Leadership is not a beauty contest. Doers do.” A good future leader has scientific precursors, and “the desire to be in charge” does not correlate with future effectiveness and leadership.
“We can be scientific and analytical about selecting managers — and management is not a squishy thing that we can never get our arms around.”
It’s not about personality traits. “What matters is the ability to make decisions about the allocation of resources under time constraints; how to organize and motivate the members of your team to produce the most output. The lesson for me is that it’s a crutch to use personality traits and preferences to predict performance because they’re not that closely related to the performance you’re interested in.”
A predictor of future leadership is current ability and demonstration of making things happen, not just “talking” about them. “It has nothing to do with how a person looks, how they speak, or what their preferences or personality traits are. None of those things are predictive. There are only two things that are: One is IQ as measured by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, which measures general and fluid intelligence, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, etc. But the one that’s more interesting to me is a measure of what we call economic-decision-making skill, or the ability to allocate resources effectively.”
“Characteristics such as age, gender, education, SAT scores, college major don’t do a very good job of predicting who’s going to be a good teacher, for example. Yet if I put you in the classroom for a little bit of time and I see how much you improve student learning, that is a very good predictor, because it’s very closely related to the thing you ask people to do. If you want to know who’s going to be a good manager, make them manage. Don’t just rely on personality characteristics, or whether they raise their hand to say, “I want to do it.”
“Leadership is not beauty contest. Doers do.”
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