Leadership success and personality are closely linked.
- Leadership has a lot to do with personality, research suggests.
- Extroverts are much more likely to become top managers. But when introverts land leadership positions, they can be just as successful - if not more so.
- Similarly, agreeable men are less likely to become top managers, even though agreeable people tend to be effective leaders.
- Executives are slowly broadening their expectations around how a leader looks and acts.
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Some people are more likely to become leaders than others.
The probability that you'll become a CEO, a state senator, or a student body president depends a lot on your personality - specifically on how extroverted you are, research suggests.
But extroverts, for all their ability to get themselves noticed, don't always make the most effective bosses.
Articulating the difference between traits that are consistently seen in leaders and traits that are often seen in successful leaders is especially relevant today. A growing body of evidence supports the idea that teams with people from diverse backgrounds outperform more homogeneous groups. Meanwhile, high-profile companies like Google and JP Morgan are spearheading efforts to address unconscious bias in the workplace, so that professional opportunities aren't limited to people who look and act a certain way.
As executives and career experts begin to broaden their understanding of what it means to lead a team, personality traits like extroversion are seen in in a new light.
Extroverted, hard-working people are most likely to become leaders
One of the most influential pieces of research on leadership and personality is a 2002 meta-analysis, or study of studies, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. A research team led by University of Notre Dame professor Timothy Judge reviewed the results of 78 studies on leadership in business, government, and academic settings, and found that personality is a strong predictor of both who's perceived as a leader and who excels as a leader.
The researchers looked specifically at the "Big Five" personality traits - five broad characteristics that scientists use to measure personality. They include openness to experience (being imaginative and having diverse interests), conscientiousness (being hard-working and organized), extroversion (being talkative and energetic), agreeableness (being nice and friendly), and neuroticism (being moody or anxious).
Extroversion turned out to be the best predictor of leadership, and especially who's likely to become a leader in the first place. "Sociable and dominant people" - sociability and dominance are aspects of extroversion - "are more likely to assert themselves in group situations," the researchers write. They'll raise their hand for new opportunities; they'll explain why their solution to a problem is the right one.
Other research suggests that agreeable people - especially agreeable men - are less likely to assume management positions than the average person. That's possibly because, as psychologist Art Markman suggests, employees appreciate a boss who can give frank feedback - and agreeable people are known for their difficulty providing criticism.
A 2018 Labour Economics paper found that agreeable men earned significantly less over the course of their career than other men did, which could be related to the fact that agreeable men are less likely to be senior executives.
Emerging as a leader - getting a promotion to management - is one thing. Excelling in that role is another. More recently, scientists have looked at the traits, skills, and everyday behaviors that make a successful leader.
Nice, boring people are more likely to succeed as leaders
For starters, the best leaders may be "boring."
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University, has written that the most successful leaders don't have Steve Jobs' or former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's infamous temper. Instead, they're boring, meaning predictable and emotionally stable. They have high integrity, in the sense that they're honest and trustworthy, and they value fairness in their organization's culture.
The link between agreeableness (ie, niceness and friendliness) and leadership is a prime example of how societal expectations can make it harder for some people to be recognized for their leadership potential. It can be difficult for nice guys to get promoted to management, but when they do, they tend to be more effective than their disagreeable counterparts.
In the 2002 paper, Judge and colleagues suggest that agreeableness can work to leaders' benefit and detriment. Agreeable people tend to go along with others' decisions, which means they're unlikely to stand out as management material. At the same time, agreeable people are likeable and empathetic, which can help them forge relationships with people on their team.
Expectations about effective leadership are changing, slowly
These findings on personality and leadership aren't prescriptive. If you aren't the type to share your opinion in every meeting, for example, you can still be a manager - and a good one.
Academics who study workplace psychology say people who are more introverted can in fact make terrific managers. And business leaders are gradually starting to recognize their potential bias toward promoting the loudest, most confident folks in the room.
LinkedIn, for example, launched a program in 2016 to help identify high-potential employees who might otherwise be overlooked for promotions because they're quieter than everyone else. Wharton psychologist Adam Grant told Business Insider about research that found introverted leaders are more effective when their team takes initiative, while extroverted leaders are better at getting their team fired up about a project.
Some influential leaders are challenging biases that are linked to gender-role expectations. Writing on Quartz, Melinda Gates remembered being the only woman hired at Microsoft in the incoming class of MBAs in the 1980s. "It wasn't always easy for me to feel at home in an environment where people seemed to get rewarded for being combative," she wrote. Instead of quitting the company, she succeeded there by treating people respectfully.
Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of business development at Microsoft, told HuffPost about similar experiences early in her career, before she joined Microsoft. At first, she tried raising her voice and interrupting people, like some of the men around her would do. Then she realized this kind of behavior was making her - and everyone around her - uncomfortable.
"To succeed on my terms," Johnson wrote, "it was important that I defined my own brand of leadership."