6min chapter

Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan cover image

The Science of Leadership with Harvard Professor David Deming: Why the Best Leaders May NOT Be Who You Think

Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

CHAPTER

Intro

This chapter explores a study from the University of Essex that identifies key qualities of effective managers and examines how organizations select their leaders. It highlights the surprising finding that a strong desire to lead may hinder managerial effectiveness compared to those chosen at random.

00:00
Speaker 2
If you haven't heard yet, I just launched Future of Work Leaders, a global community of the world's top people leaders shaping the future of work and employee experience. If you are interested in learning more and requesting an invite, and if you are a chief human or chief people officer, then head on over to futureofworkleaders.com. Again, that is futureofworkleaders.com. Hey, everyone. Welcome another episode of Future Ready Leadership. My guest today, David Deming, Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. You'll probably also notice that I'm in a different background, different setup today. So I'm using my iPhone as my webcam. My wife is in our studio. But the good news is, is that you get to be the first one to see this. Look at that shirt. Future. Oh, wow. Ready, ready. Yes. Brand. So there might be a future ready store coming soon. We're testing out some product ideas. We got a little hat over here. So maybe. Wow. Very nice. And maybe in the future that'll come out. David's actually been a guest on the show. I think it was in 2017. So not quite a decade, but many, many years ago. And I reached out.
Speaker 1
You have an age today, David. Yeah,
Speaker 2
we still look the same. We still look the same. I think I didn't have a son when we first interviewed. I think my daughter was probably just turning one. And I was living in the Bay Area. Now we live in Los Angeles and I have two kids. So a lot of this kids. All right. Yeah. My two kids are teenagers now. Oh, my goodness. That comes at you fast. My guest. Yeah. But I asked David to be a guest on the show today because I came across an article that came out fairly recently. And we'll go into more details of the article, but I just want to read a quote from the article, which is, we found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are on average worse than randomly assigned managers. So I'm just going to let everybody think about that quote. We're going to unpack the lot. We're going to get into the study and explore that in more detail. But David, thank you for joining me again today. It's great to be with you again, Jacob. So let's start with the background of that study because I came across it. I know it got shared a lot on social media. There was a lot of discussion around it. So before we get to the findings, what was the study? What did you do? And then we'll talk about what you actually found.
Speaker 1
Yeah, sure. So we were interested in the question of what makes somebody a good manager and how to identify good managers. And our starting point for that was, I guess, the observation that when you think about how many firms pick managers, they often do it in ways that are not literally random in the sense of throwing darts at a board or rolling dice, but can be a hazard, right? It's some combination of who do I think is good at the job that they're doing before? So who's a good line worker, production worker, who's a good software developer, whatever it is in the firm, who seems like they're smart and talented in general? And then also, who wants it? Who wants the job? Who seems like they want to be in charge? And so we designed an experiment in a lab at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom where we put people in groups. And we did it a particular way, Jacob, that was important for the study. We randomly assigned people to groups. And in particular, we assigned them to multiple groups. So like the challenge of identifying who's good on a team or who's a good manager is that if I put David and Jacob and Frank on a team together and they do really well, who was responsible? You don't know. There's three people and there's only one outcome, which is how well the team did. And, you know, moreover, is it because each of them is good individually or because they get along really well, they have great chemistry or bad chemistry in the opposite case or whatever. And so in order to untangle that knot, what you need to do is you need to assign people repeatedly to different teams. So I'm going to put Jacob on a team with David and Frank and then with Betsy and Horace and then with Eunice and Maude and on and on. And if every time we add Jacob to the team, he makes the team better regardless of who his teammates are, then we say Jacob's good in a team. So that's the kind of – and there's a lot of fancy methodology behind that, but that's the basic idea. If any of your listeners are basketball fans, there's something called plus minus, which calculates what is the point differential between your team and the other team when you're on the court, which is different than the final score. And so there are some players in the NBA who have very high plus minuses, and that means they're kind of doing the little things that help a team get together. So it's kind of like that idea if you were to randomly assign people to lineups. So we did that. And then we added another ring. Yeah, several hundred. I don't remember the exact number. Four, 500 people. Okay, so it's a big group. Yeah, it's a pretty big group and around multiple teams. And the experiment happened in many different sessions over the course of a month. So it was pretty big. And we did another thing, which is we said, okay, well, the groups, we structure the task that they have to do so that there's a leader and there's two team members. And the leader's job is to coordinate the other team members and to kind of submit the final assignment and decide who's going to do what. And in one condition, we pick the leader randomly. And in another condition, we ask people, how much do you want to be a leader? Do you really want to be in charge or do you only kind of want to be in charge? And they had to rank it on a scale of one to 10. And in the second condition, we said, OK, the people with the highest scores, the highest preference for leadership, they get to be the leader. And that's the source of the finding you cited at the beginning. When we pick people through that method, which is like who raises their hand, who really wants to be a leader, those leaders are on average worse than when we randomly pick the leaders.

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode