By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Clarke Murphy
Over and over again, organizations are unable to appoint the right leaders. Although there are many reasons for this state of affairs—including overreliance on intuition at the expense of scientifically valid selection tools—a common problem is organizations’ inability to predict whether leaders will fit in with their cultures.
In order to upgrade their selection efforts, organizations must:
- Decode leaders’ motives and values. While expertise and experience are central to a leader’s potential, they can’t predict performance. A proper understanding of fit must take into account a leader’s motives and values, also known as the “inside” of personality. For example, leaders who value tradition will have a strong sense of what is right and wrong, will prefer hierarchical organizations, and will have little tolerance for disruption and innovation. Put them in a creative environment and they will struggle.
- Decode their own organizational cultures. Sadly, most organizations underestimate the importance of profiling their cultures. Well-designed surveys that crowdsource people’s views of the culture are a much better indicator of a company’s values than the aspirational competencies curated by senior executives.
- Be realistic about the new leader’s ability to change the culture. It’s hard for newly appointed leaders to reshape culture. That’s not to say that organizations should give up and only hire leaders who are a good fit. In fact, moderate misfits who are charismatic and visionary are a company’s best bet for driving top-down change—but the process will be slow, and these leaders will need a great deal of support. The odds of success will be slim, and some leaders may be so disruptive in their intentions that they may harm morale and productivity, or end up disrupting themselves. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, “Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, a professor of business psychology at University College London and a faculty member at Columbia University. Clarke Murphy is CEO of Russell Reynolds Associates.