In one of the organizations I worked with in the past they had saying: “If you tie a manager to a tree and wait twenty years, that manager will turn into a C level executive.” In that organization, promotion was dictated by passively sticking around. The less you heard about those managers, the more likely they were to succeed.
A recent study by Nir Halevy of Stanford Graduate School of Business found that a more common bias in organizations is that nice guys are not promoted because they are perceived as weak.
These and other biases don’t necessarily serve your teams well. Complaisant managers and managers who impose their alpha status on others are not always the right leaders for your organization.
These findings suggest that you can do a few things to make sure the right people are being promoted:
- you could get the right managers to develop the behaviors that are perceived as desirable by others in the organization
- you could identify more effective criteria and equip people to look for that effective criteria instead of selecting managers for promotion based on biased perspectives
- you could do both
Regardless of which option you choose, you’ll need to rewire the way people in the organization engage with the world. To get an organization to prefer results over status, for example, you’ll need to give people access to a new set of thinking tools to assess reality. To get managers who are not assertive or aggressive enough to stand up, you’ll need to gift managers with new synaptic strategies that will support the new behavioral changes you are expecting them to make.
Which biases does your team have when it comes to people who are considered better leadership material? Are those the right biases or, in other words, are those biases serving your organization well?