The Best Bosses Are The Most Self-Aware: More Evidence

Good Boss, Bad Boss delves into many different hallmarks of great (and awful) bosses.  But when people ask me what the central idea is, I say that the good ones are self-aware and the bad ones live in a fool's paradise (See this recent post at HBR for more discussion of this point)-- the good ones know what it feels like to work for them, are aware of their weaknesses, and constantly make little adjustments in response to the moods and moves of the people around them, while the bad ones are remarkably clueless (a huge hazard of being a human-being, check the new book The Invisible Gorilla if you want evidence of how overconfident and clueless most of us are most of the time).

As such, I was interested to see a press release yesterday of a long-term study done a consulting firm called Green Peak Partners of 72 executives. Here is the summary, which they call "When it Comes to Business Leadership, Nice Guys Finish First." I was pleased to see their findings that "bully traits" and poor interpersonal skills where hallmarks of bad leaders, given that it provides more fodder for The No Asshole Rule.  But I was even more interested to see their finding that:

Leadership searches give short shrift to "self-awareness," which should actually be a top criterion. A high self-awareness score was the strongest predictor of overall success. "Executives who are aware of their weaknesses are often better able to hire subordinates who perform well in areas in which the leader lacks acumen."

This is not the first study to make this point, but it is interesting to see how the drumbeat for self-awareness and how tough it is to achieve for any human-being, especially those in power keeps getting louder.

P.S. In the name of evidence-based management, I should point-out that the description in the press release makes it pretty hard to tell what they did in this study, as they don't provide much information about the sample (I think it is a non-random sample of 72 folks), about how they measured performance (I couldn't always tell if they were talking about executive performance or organizational performance or both), or the nature of the instruments they used to measure the predictors like interpersonal skills and such.  Sometimes consulting firms develop proprietary methods and won't tell you about it -- that is what I like about academic research, you have to show this stuff or it does not get published.  Also, never forget confirmation bias, that we all see what we want to see -- and I like the findings of this research, it supports my book, so the flaws may bother me less because it supports my perspective. 

Comments

[Chris Young]

This is a great post Bob! Self awareness is one of those highly important personal skills that is often undervalued at the management level.

I have shared your post with my readers in my weekly Rainmaker 'Fab Five' blog picks of the week (found here: http://www.maximizepossibility.com/employee_retention/2010/06/the-rainmaker.html) to bring the importance of self awareness to their attention.

Be well!

[Ellie]

I read an editorial in Nature years ago (which I sadly can't any longer find in order to link to) about a prize they had given to some of sciences best mentors.

It was open to nominations by students and post docs and any one could nominate their supervisor. The judges had been so surprised by their results that they had decided to turn it into an editorial.

What they found was that the single most important trait that separated all the merely good bosses from the truly inspirational and excellent ones was that good bosses helped their staff to fit their management style while the great ones moulded their management style to fit each of their staff individually.

That really stuck in my mind.

[Ed_han]

This blog entry articulates and supports something I've always kind of thought or suspected. I'm very glad to have encountered it, thanks to AvidCareerist.