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About 35% of current jobs in the UK are at high risk of computerisation over the following 20 years, according to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941 and type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the …
Most bosses drown in their inbox. Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky can barely remember the last email he wrote. “I don’t know if I write an email a week.”
Although we love to assume that leadership must change from one year to the next—prompting us to reimagine or reinvent it on a regular basis—the reality is far more mundane.
Whatever you lead and whenever you lead, the essence of the leadership challenge remains fundamentally unchanged: Can you turn a group of people into a high-performing team? Can you convince a group of people to set aside their individualistic, selfish agendas to be part of a cohesive, coordinated unit? Can you persuade people to cooperate to get ahead of competing teams? Can you find ways to help people trade in comfort in the present to help produce a desired result in the future? And perhaps most diagnostic of all the questions: What will happen in the group, team, or organization you are responsible for that would not have happened if you were not there?
Unsurprisingly, leaders are more likely to accomplish these critical goals when they are smart, socially skilled, and honest, so they can elicit trust and earn a positive reputation. These are some of the ingredients that get others to want to follow them. To be sure, context can change the specifics of what good leadership looks like. For instance, in the AI age, leaders must be particularly good at staying calm, projecting confidence, enabling people to have hope in the future, thereby inspiring a willingness to change.
Transformational leadership qualities thus become more central than in more predictable and less complex times. (Though, we should note, humans are consistently prone to interpreting their own times as more complex and challenging than any previous time!)
More subtly, however, leadership is not just about actual skill and competence, but also about perceived skill and competence—projecting a leadership aura, or being seen as leader-like by others. Perception determines whether those others choose to follow. Sometimes, projecting leadership traits is indeed a reflection of actual skill, but sometimes the appearance of leadership is just an appearance.
Then and now
Assessing leadership was easier in the past, when leadership inferences were made on largely observable traits (strengths, speed, dexterity, courage, or even, sadly, height) and observed in individuals with whom one had close, regular interaction. Long ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in groups of no more than 15 to 20 people; everybody knew each other well and had an accurate working model of others’ expected behavior. Reputation, that is, was close to reality. Fast-forward to our current times, however, where we make rapid inferences about strangers, including whether we should trust them with high-stakes projects and decisions. But if true leadership ability today is about difficult-to-observe attributes such as curiosity, learning orientation, coachability, and the ability to instill psychological safety in a team, organizations face a growing risk of not having the leadership they need to succeed.
Worse, it’s getting harder to determine whether a leader is performing well. For instance, when an executive interviews for a new role and reports that in their previous company they grew market cap or shareholder return by 40%, a logical question is “because of you, in spite of you, or coincidentally while you were there?” And, notably, this is not a question the interviewee is best positioned to answer. When outcomes are nebulous and the contribution of senior leaders is ambiguous or delayed, opportunities are ripe for faking leadership talent.
How people fake it
Ironically, then, in an age with ubiquitous data and AI, with an unprecedented impetus to be more meritocratic and talent-centric (relative to our long history—at least within most organizations), and with competent HR departments armed with data science, it has never been easier to fake leadership talent and deceive others.
Consider just a few of the salient tactics below that people employ to come across as more leader-like than they actually are.
1. Confidence theater: Speak with certainty, especially when the evidence is ambiguous. People routinely mistake confidence for competence, particularly when evaluating leaders. Sadly, this is often a short-term recipe for success, for “you can fool some people all the time and all the people some of the time.” Faced with complexity, we trust our instincts, which unfortunately leads us to mistake confidence for competence and gives rise to a world in which all style and no substance will get you farther than no style and all substance!
2. Self-deception: If you actually believe you’re a great leader, others tend to start to believe it, too. (Self-deception is contagious, forming a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.) This may sound intuitive, given the popularity of the “fake it till you make it” mantra. Take note, however, that the practical benefits of self-deception vis-à-vis leadership ability are in stark contrast with the near-universal appreciation of “self-awareness.” “Fake it till you make it” may be a good recipe for persistently trying to master a new skill if it means “keep practicing,” but when it includes self-deception, it’s an approach with limited value. It is advantageous for leaders to be aware of their strengths and limitations, but in a world in which confidence often trumps competence, exorbitant levels of self-belief may persuade people that you are better than you actually are. This is a leadership conundrum. Just as the greatest salespeople learn to lie to themselves so they don’t need to lie to their customers, the most promising candidates for leadership roles may be deluded about their own talents, allowing them to come across as authentic and smart (especially to a naive or gullible audience, including interviewers). Sadly, if you truly believe you are a stable genius, you will be more likely to persuade others of that than if you are a self-aware stable genius who genuinely displays rational self-doubt and insecurity!
3. Borrowed success: Take disproportionate credit for good outcomes while attributing failures to markets, predecessors, teams, or circumstances. Leadership attribution makes this remarkably easy. As Ben Dattner illustrated in his great book, Credit and Blame at Work, a particular skill found in those who advance their career without having the talents or credentials to back it up is an ability to manipulate organizational perceptions of credit and meritocracy. A universal tactic for faking leadership potential is to blame others for your mistakes but reassure people that other people’s achievements should be attributed to you. “My team did X” is a simple heuristic for reminding people that positive outcomes are linked to your leadership—whereas “this person is responsible for Y” can be a great strategy for deflecting blame and accountability. It’s unattractive but unfortunately often works.
4. Performative empathy: Learn the language and visible rituals of caring, listening, inclusion, and psychological safety without displaying these qualities when they are costly or inconvenient. Although creating the conditions for team members to speak up freely, take healthy risks, innovate, and learn from smart failures is a rare leadership skill—we praise these behaviors precisely because they are not the norm—it is sadly all too easy to pretend you care and emulate or replicate these behaviors without actually rewarding the outcomes. In fact, empathetic leaders are obviously better than those who lack empathy, but narcissistic or psychopathic leaders can master the art of faking empathy. Imagine a human agent—similar to today’s AI—who digests Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and sends all the right signals that make people trust and like them. Now imagine this same person lacks any sense of integrity, altruism, or ethics. If that’s the case, you should probably run away as fast and far as you possibly can!
5. Strategic busyness: Make leadership activity highly visible: meetings, initiatives, town halls, transformation programs, and constant communication. Activity is much easier to observe than impact—making looking like you are leading a useful substitute for actually leading. We have all met “empty suits” and corporate managers or leaders who are always where the action is, somehow joining and featured in all meetings, when visibility is rewarded as a sign of executive presence or reputational brownie points. And yet, these tendencies can be inversely correlated with actual productivity or value-adding measures. Most notably, if you only care about being seen and can master the art of “managing up” in meetings and projects, you are unlikely to devote time to turning a group of people into a high-performing unit, let alone developing and harnessing other people’s potential.
Perhaps the greatest leadership challenge today, then, is not developing better leaders but becoming better judges of leadership. We can blame bad leaders for rising to the top, but it would be more honest and constructive to blame ourselves for making poor choices and getting distracted by false leadership signals. We must create systems—healthy and meritocratic organizational cultures—in which career success and status are awarded not on the performative art of appearing leader-like, but on actual leadership and a demonstrated ability to turn a group of people into a high-performing unit.
In short, faking leadership may work for the faker, but it harms everybody else. A world in which we become better at spotting and stopping fake leaders is a better world for everyone—perhaps even for the fakers themselves.
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