The reality is galling. That in our faux-meritocracy, marketing eats merit for breakfast, that well-hyped mediocrity routinely outshines true excellence, that we regularly purchase the sizzle only to toss the steak aside.
But, what if I told you that when it comes to leadership, we don’t just resist rewarding consistent merit, but we actively favor and even celebrate the most glaringly incompetent leaders?
You’ve probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the idea that the more incompetent people are, the more confidence they have in their abilities.
There’s a sort of societal Dunning-Kruger effect at work too as we collectively delude ourselves into lionizing the most visibly and relentlessly feckless leaders to our detriment.
Here’s a quick quiz. I’ll describe two individuals with similar backgrounds and ambitions. Which one would you rather invite as the life of your next party?
First we have Carl. Carl is a real go-getter of a manager, a whirlwind of frenetic energy. He’s damn near impossible to pin down as he frantically races from one pressing crisis to another. When you do finally catch up with Carl, he is bursting with breathtaking war stories featuring heroic exploits as he intrepidly confronts spectacular challenges. If he fails, that failure is likely epically spectacular itself and (he always adds) beyond his control. Carl is clearly full of it, but boy-howdy, can he spin a thrilling yarn!
Then there’s Pam. Pam is the consummate professional, a solid, low-drama manager. She works extremely hard but also knows when to pause and recharge. Even so, she always gets her work done, stewarding her team adroitly and routinely racking up an impressive array of achievements to little fanfare. You rarely catch her in crisis mode. In fact, now that I think about it, she’s virtually never in crisis mode because crises just don’t happen on her watch. Pam is the very model of unflappability, persistently moving forward with little fuss, avoiding problems rather than courting danger. She is understated but utterly reliable—the epitome of consistency. Yup. That’s Pam. As consistent as mayonnaise.
I’m guessing based on these brief sketches that you’re leaning toward inviting Carl to your party. I mean, yeah sure, Pam's a perfectly nice person, but ask her about herself and she'd probably just tell you her job title. Then she'd spend the rest of the night politely grinning and nodding as Carl mesmerizes the crowd with his latest breathless saga of derring-do and eleventh-hour heroics in the face of calamity. For her part, Pam would just be, well, boring.
But now the real question: Who would you rather have running your company?
The thing is, at work Carl probably garners many more accolades than Pam does for all the same wrong reasons he’s a dilly of a party guest. Carl commands the spotlight, while Pam has better things to do, such as actually leading her team to success. But which one is truly competent? Obviously, it’s Pam. Carl is a chaos agent. He has so many hair-raising tales of catastrophe and near misses precisely because he craves high-stakes drama above all else. Meanwhile, Pam just does her job—and does it damn well—simply by avoiding mayhem.
And there are ongoing consequences. As a leader, Carl’s propensity for crisis-courting keeps his people on edge all the time, stretched to their limits as they battle to survive their latest self-inflicted firestorm. He has his loyal hangers-on, sure, but he also propels an endlessly revolving door of staff. And then there’s the organizational cost of all those blunders and missed opportunities. Carl is a merchant of mayhem. Let’s borrow a term from game theory here and call him a “stochastic leader”—one who is driven by randomness and anarchy, the opposite of consistency.
Pam, by contrast, quietly nurtures and guides her team members so that they avoid massive pitfalls and put in the work required to do their jobs right the first time out. Mistakes happen and are rectified, but Pam and her team don’t get blindsided by crisis after crisis because they simply sidestep them from the outset, eschewing drama. As a result, her people are as devoted to her as she is to them, and they share in their success. Pam is a true leader. So, again, who would you prefer running your company? The incendiary stochastic leader or the predictable fantastic leader?
Historian Martin Gutmann has documented our cultural tendency to reward poor leaders who court crises while overlooking able but unexciting leaders, a phenomenon he calls the “action fallacy.” In a TEDx talk, Gutmann lays out historic examples of leaders whose extraordinary but understated success has faded from memory. As Gutmann ruefully notes, “Very often, good leadership will result in a bad story.” Flashy failures, on the other hand, make for way sexier copy and steal the show from their high-performance, low-bluster counterparts.
In his talk, Gutmann cites Harvard Business School’s Raffaella Sadun, who touts the virtues of “boring management.” She notes that the best managers are often (maybe usually) the ones who don’t call attention to themselves, like Pam. I have witnessed the opposite many times, the managers who spin the most routine matters into “crises,” endlessly engaging in crisis talk by invoking words and phrases to suggest they’re always perched on the precipice.
Their melodrama is a tell-tale sign they are leadership catastrophes. Sure, they may sometimes tumble backwards into getting the job done, but that success is a very high-cost exception. Too often, they are like firefighter arsonists, lighting the house ablaze and then returning to the scene on the back of a fire engine. And, no surprise, they then get kudos for extinguishing the very fire they sparked.
Gutmann’s prescription for resisting the action fallacy is a tune I’ve been humming for years: “One, ignore the captains of crisis. Two, celebrate those who mitigate crises.”
Think of a baseball game on TV. Often the announcers will gush over a pitcher who wriggles out of a bases-loaded, no-outs jam unscathed. Admittedly, that feat is quite the magic trick to behold. But what about when it’s the same pitcher who loaded those bases in the first place? If this is a typical outcome for him, is he really a go-to guy?
Whenever my team has a tight lead late in a game, I’ll find myself muttering at the TV, “C’mon pitcher, don’t make this inning interesting.” I much prefer a workmanlike performance in those moments—boring management, if you will—over a heart-stopping, Houdini performance. Just give me a routine save over a nail-biter that may have me eating my ball cap.
So if you’re a big league manager, who would you summon from the bullpen to protect a small lead in the ninth inning of a key game? Do you go with the guy whose electrifying stuff thrills fans but who just can't seem to avoid putting runners on base? The Carl-like pitcher? Or do you give the nod to the workhorse who pounds the strike zone to get three outs on weak grounders and lazy flies, just as Pam would? The first option may be a wizard of sorts—a high-drama magician—but the second is a sure bet and the decidedly wiser choice.
It’s the same with leaders. Why do we favor the crisis creators, the mayhem mavens, the chaos agents—those stochastic leaders—over rock-steady producers? The answer partially lies in my refrain that marketing eats merit for breakfast, but there is more to it than that.
The “action fallacy” that Gutmann identifies is a scourge afflicting entire institutions and arguably even nations. I’ve witnessed the travails of far too many organizations under the erratic stewardship of stochastic leaders. These mayhem merchants regularly receive plaudits for handling crises that could have and should have been avoided in the first place. And, no, I’m not conflating crisis management with risk-taking here. Prudent risk-taking is worlds away from the reckless self-sabotage brought on by the chaos agents who benefit from the action fallacy.
So, next time you throw a party, be sure to invite Carl. He he’ll make a delightfully entertaining guest. But, whatever you do, don’t hire him to be CEO. That position goes to Pam, who will excel. The best Carl will do is make everything just a little too interesting before it all goes to hell.
Where have you seen the action fallacy operate? What were the consequences?
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Bored with Leadership? Well Incompetence Can Sure Be Exciting!