Business Insider on How managers selected. Self-promotion, as it happens, is one of the primary ways companies select managers in real life. Employees who want a bigger title and more responsibility express their interest in moving up the corporate ladder and do the requisite lobbying to clinch the role. The louder you are about your ambitions, the more likely you are to realize them. But the study found that the groups in which managers were selected by self-preference actually performed worse than the groups in which managers were chosen by lottery. And therein lies an irony at the very heart of corporate life: The people who most want to become managers end up being bad managers, Business Insider's Aki Ito writes.
Sounds like the classic Dunning -Kruger effect at work - an overestimation of competence. I think the "best" people tend to have a bit more humility because they actually recognize how much they DON'T know, and so underestimate their own skill set. I recently watched a leadership talk for work and one of the things that stuck out to me was the difference between the titles of "leader" and "manager". The title of "manager" is bestowed from ABOVE - people who think you should be in charge of something - while the title of "leader" emerges from BELOW from the people you are leading - based on what you are actually DOING. I don't begrudge anyone for wanting a title or the bump in salary that comes with the manager title - but it doesn't always correlate with good leadership skills, in fact, the minutiae of a "management" position is often a distraction and a waste of a good leader since they are often no longer as actively engaged in the hands-on day to day work that would make best use of their skills leading a team.
Another instance of the old truth that the worst person to give power to is whoever who wants it the most.
I'm not so sure it's surprising that ambitious people are the ones who fill roles higher up the ladder. Sounds like a tautology to me. Ambitious people achieve their ambitions, while achieving ambitions makes one ambitious. What I DO know from working in organizations as a leader for 40 years--along with being a leadership developer--is that organizations tend to promote high performers. Unfortunately, what is required to be a high performer at one level is often not what is required to perform at the next. When organizations fail to prepare people for that move ahead of time, we get the Peter Principle, where organizations are filled with people functioning at an incompetent level. They don't fire these people--that would look bad for the people who chose them for promotion, plus it's mean, plus organizations are horrible at recognizing poor performance--they're just left to wallow in their mediocrity. Avoidable with learning and development, but he, that's just a luxury and an expense to cut, right?
