Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
There are many paths to leadership:a) Suppose I want to startup a company because I like coding and spending 40hours in a cubicle sucks. Out of dumb luck my company strikes it big and the planets align for a little while so I can execute and in 3 years I'm the leader of a $250m/yr company. I was able to execute when opportunity presented itself, but I have no idea how to generate opportunity, or find it.b) Same story as above, except this time it's me and four of my beer buddies, except I'm loud and domineering in business decisions and they're all introverts. One guy quits because he doesn't like how things went, the rest make me de facto leader and when corporate paperwork comes around I put myself as CEO. The others are quiet about which I spin into a kind of legitimacy. From there on out I try and bounce around CEO and President positions. I have no other qualifications than being domineering and subversive.c) I worked my tootsie off and made it through a Harvard MBA program. Boom, I'm immediately picked up as a Jr. VP in a large and powerful, but old and crusty megacorp. I stick it out for 4 years while all my of senior leadership retires, next thing you know I'm a Senior Executive VP at Big&Crusty MegaCorp Inc. I can't seem to figure out how to navigate the politics to make it higher, so after 5 years at Big&Crusty MegaCorp I strike out. I find an executive recruiter who finds me some CEO positions to shoot for with some medium sized $50-100m/yr copmanies. I interview, and one of them has the right mix of board members to think that a young and energetic "shooting star" is just what they want to kick their revenue in the rear. Regardless of how the company does, I now have a resume that shows all kinds of good bullet points: Harvard MBA, upwardly mobile as a executive, CEO experience. I can now bounce around CEO and President positions for a while...spending a year or two at each place, strike enough good compensation deals to make me rich and eventually buy myself into a few choice board positions. Note I barely have any actual work experience at this point, I've only shown boundless ambition and a willingness to wait for senior people to retire so I can take their position. The only thing I know how to do after 15 years is navigate the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy.d) I start in the mailroom and work my way up through a mix of competency and and ambition. A few times my competency damns me and I end up stuck in my progression, but I follow a strict up or out policy. Over the years I notice that I've forgotten many of the skills I used to have in the lower levels, I have to locally optimize my brain I tell myself. I'm working 40-60hr weeks trying to be competent in my current job, I simply don't have time to remember what I did 5 years and 2 jobs ago -- but it bothers me that I'm now functionally incompetent for a job that I used to be among the best at. Eventually, I work my way into a Senior Exec VP at a growing company. I'm really good at the job I'm in, but I rapidly lose qualifications for jobs I used to be in. At the Senior Exec VP level I've simply forgotten what it's like to be in the trenches, I try to be sympathetic, but it's so hard to relate...just as hard for me to relate to the Senior Exec VP when I was in the trenches. Am I a competent leader?e) etc.I'm specifically not addressing gender in these scenarios (as the article is discussing) because what I'm trying to say is that regardless of gender any of these scenarios might put somebody into position as an "incompetent" leader. The path to leadership (incompetent or otherwise) in my mind is distinct from the social and psychological issues related to gender arriving in those leadership positions. In scenario a and b), there is nothing in gender that prevents women from starting up their own companies. You see it all the time, there are tons of businesses started and run by intelligent and driven women. c & d might still be tougher, there's lots of entrenched power structures that still make it difficult for women to arrive into the top jobs. In d) the person also had enough opportunity to not be guided into a progressing, but dead-end career path.Anecdotally, I think it's very hard for women to be accepted into leadership positions. If she's too tough she's marked as an "angry bitch" and will get rejected, if she's not perfectly competent in areas far outside of her job function, she'll be marked as "stupid" and get rejected, etc. etc. Cultivating authority, for a woman, requires a degree of careful presentation and balance that is very hard to do and most men don't have to deal with. I've worked for some very good women bosses and a women CEO and I admired their ability to find that balance and presentation style that gave them command without them appearing as an "angry bitch" or "stupid".I've also worked with some women that couldn't find that balance, they weren't really doing anything a reasonably competent man wouldn't do, but were marked with gendered epithets and eventually driven from their job. Afterwards, I spoke to some of them personally, they felt unbelievably rejected and worthless -- one suffered from depression and dropped out of work for a year. Their job models didn't do anything different, but their models were all men -- so they couldn't figure out what happened and what got them rejected...but the truth is they were simply playing by different rules and weren't able to navigate the environment well enough to figure out what those rules were.