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You're Too Nice To Be A Great Leader (And That's Okay)

This article is more than 9 years old.

[This post is part of a series examining several common, cherished myths about management and leadership.]

Today, leadership has become synonymous with success. It shouldn’t be.

Nice people and humble people usually don’t make great leaders. They often make their greatest contributions by quietly working behind the scenes to keep great leaders out of trouble. Then everyone builds a statue of the great leader and forgets the nice people.

That’s just the way it works. But in a real sense, the unsung nice people are truer heroes than all of history’s great leaders combined.

Take the case of Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill. In the spring of 1940, it became clear that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had lost the confidence necessary to lead Britain's efforts against Hitler. The question arose as to whether the job should go to Lord Halifax, the foreign minister who was a widely respected figure, or to Churchill, who was leading the country’s defense efforts but who was viewed by many as an out-of-touch, jingoistic fringe politician.

At that point, Halifax made a decision of epic proportions and considerable humility. As Harvard Business School Professor Gautam Mukunda wrote in Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, “while he was certain he could do the [prime minister] job,” Mukunda recounted, “he thought Churchill needed someone to restrain him, and that he could do that more effectively as foreign minister than as prime minister.”

Churchill’s stubbornness, combined with his narcissistic streak, had gotten him into many bungles and catastrophes before and after the war. But in the context of the war itself, he would shine, as a result of those qualities--and because of the willingness of people like Halifax to play their own humble roles offstage.

Why Narcissists (Generally) Make the Best Leaders

In 2000, psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby penned an important article for the Harvard Business Review exploring which personality type makes the greatest impact as leader.

He looked at three main Freudian personality types:

1. The erotic type: No, these people aren’t oversexed. Rather, they’re people who want to love and be loved. “Many erotics are teachers, nurses, and social workers,” Maccoby wrote. “At their most productive, they are developers of the young as well as enablers and helpers at work. As managers, they are caring and supportive, but they avoid conflict and make people dependent on them.”

My own observation is that most management “gurus” and experts fall into this category. Their prescriptions for good management are shaped more by their own romantic, idealistic, “warm-fuzzy” personality type than by the realities “out there” in the world.

2. The obsessive type: These are the conscientious people who devour self-help books. Their nagging superego rules the day, keeping their pride and ambition in check. “They create and maintain order and make the most effective operational managers," Maccoby wrote. "They look constantly for ways to help people listen better, resolve conflict, and find win-win opportunities.”

These are the people who keep the management gurus in business, by obsessively showing up for their lectures. But there are real limits to what such a person can accomplish as a manager or leader. “As entrepreneurs, obsessives start businesses that express their values, but they lack the vision, daring, and charisma it takes to turn a good idea into a great one,” according to Maccoby. "They can also become narrow experts and rule-bound bureaucrats,” he added.

3. The narcissistic type. Jackpot--here’s the ultimate leader, the Caesar archetype. “Unlike erotics, they [narcissists] want to be admired, not loved,” Maccoby noted. “And unlike obsessives, they are not troubled by a punishing superego, so they are able to aggressively pursue their goals.” On the downside, their tendency to not listen and to not empathize risks utter and complete disaster in the long run.

As Freud himself wrote, the narcissists “are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or damage the established state of affairs.”

Did you catch that last part? Freud said they’re willing and able to damage the established state of affairs. They’re the true leaders and disruptors, for better and for worse.

So what do we take away from all this? Maccoby pointed out that each these three personality types exist on a spectrum. Everyone, for example has a little narcissist in them. But the ones who have a lot tend to become what we could call “natural” leaders.

If you’re a low-level narcissist, that’s okay. You may be destined to be like Lord Halifax, helping a high-level narcissist to take the organization higher while also helping him or her to avoid crashing off the cliffs. In some other cases in which you're forced to take charge yourself, however, it means you may need to give yourself permission to inflate that little narcissist inside you (and I’ll be offering tips on that in the near future).

And if you're a high-level narcissist, congratulations and cautions to you: You have a chance to have a statue erected in your honor someday … provided your pride doesn't make a complete hash of things. Be shrewd and practical enough to keep the right number of nice, humble people around you to keep yourself honest, and to keep your organization or movement safe as you take it to a higher level.

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