Can Your Boss Actually be a Psycopath?
A student raised the following question during one of my classes: what is the reason for the phenomenon that emotional intelligence grows with rank up to mid-manager level, then it goes free fall, as we go higher and higher in the hierarchy.
There were no substantiated research data behind the question, and yet, I started to think about it.
We tirelessly keep teaching the ‘how-to-be’ to leaders. The integrity, the quality of character, the principles and values and how they (should) treat others. We believe in this. I believe that only these traits can bring a team to the highest possible performance.
And I also must admit that practice sometimes contradicts us.
What we can see in real life, – all too many times – is that supervisors, managers, directors all the way up, are abusive of power, they are mobbing and bullying their team members. The reasons can be different from person to person. However, the hope to reach better results, higher efficiency will come in the very end of the list of reasons. The most common ones are rather enjoying the feeling of power complemented with negative emotional intelligence (ie. lacking the ability to feel empathy and being impulsive). We often observe scheming, interpersonal manipulation, and moral indifference to others.
Narcissistic Psychopaths Enjoy Leadership Positions
When we are all perfectly aware of the leader type that we would like to hire, how do the Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths get to power in politics and in businesses?
A recently published book, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas is searching for the answer, if corruptible people seek power more than the rest of us and if power corrupts—both of which statements are true—how do we reengineer society and redesign systems to make sure that incorruptible people seek and obtain power and that power actually doesn’t corrupt people but purifies them?
Boeing
A new documentary on Netflix, – Downfall, The Case Against Boeing, – spectacularly spotlights the difference between the Boeing company, before the merger with McDonnell Douglas, and the recent ruthless, emotionless leadership.
Alan Mulally, whose leadership is currently being taught around the world as the example of empathetic efficiency, appears for a couple of seconds in the movie, just to symbolise the belonging, the family type relationships where safety was above all, and engineers were encouraged to report every error that came to their attention.
At the end of 2018 and beginning 2019 two Boeing commercial airflights fell down due to a technical error that would have been avoidable, if the by-all-means cost saving had not overruled safety considerations.
There can be hardly any sadder and more spectacular demonstration than this documentary, of how things can go wrong, when leadership is assumed by emotionless autocrats – Dennis Muilenburg and accomplices – whose only drive is the higher and higher share price.
How do Abusive, Corruptible People Get to Power?
Research has shown that bad, abusive people are disproportionately likely to seek power, disproportionately good at getting it, and likely to become worse once they wield it, because power does indeed corrupt.
We have designed, in ways that we promote people or in ways that we hire people, a system that caters to extroverted, narcissistic Machiavellian psychopaths.
A lot of systems that are used to vet people or promote them or to hire them in the first place involve “performances,”: short-term performances in which superficial charm — the two words that are most associated with psychopaths or narcissists — are on display.
In a research study, children were shown two pictures of different faces, and they were told to choose someone to be the captain of their imaginary ship in this computer simulation. They were given no other information. What was amazing was that the children didn’t realize that one of the faces was the winner of a French election and one of the faces was a loser, a runner-up in that election. The children—like clockwork, the overwhelming majority of the time—picked the winner to captain their ship, even though they had no idea of the context of the face.
The above suggests that leadership selection might be far less rational than we think it is. Understanding those cognitive biases that go into it is crucial to counteracting them and getting better, rational choices in determining who leads society.
We have some human tendencies, we have some broken systems, but they’re fixable, and the ultimate outcome can be a much more just and incorruptible world.
How can we change the existing systems?
Often times simple and easy changes in selection processes can improve results considerably. As an example, many universities professors do not see the name of students whose papers they are correcting. There is an identification number, which eliminates bias toward or against a person.
When controlling employees, much corporate surveillance involves low-ranking figures in the company who simply don’t have the capacity to bring the company down. The ordinary employees are being watched in ways that often border on the dystopian—there are even devices that have weight sensors in chairs, and webcams that are constantly monitoring whether you’re taking an extra five minutes for your coffee break.
When you think about systemic risk to a company, to an organization, it’s usually people who operate in corner offices behind closed doors who can do the most damage if they are not subject to proper oversight.
If you are going to have some level of oversight, audits, or actual checks – randomised integrity testing -, you don’t need to apply them constantly. They just need to be gazing more upward; they need to be more tailored toward the people who can actually ruin the company, the people who actually have access to embezzling millions or billions, instead of the people who might steal a paperclip.
Sources:
Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us, by Brian Klaas, Scribner (November 9, 2021)
Downfall, The Case Against Boeing, Netflix