Choosing the ‘right’ leaders

Guest blog post from SORTED: A Collaboration Consultancy is set up to harness innovations in participatory approaches to accelerate the shift towards more human centred organisations, fit for the future. If you want to explore these ideas further please reach out via LinkedIn or ben@sortedcollaboraton.org

What is the role of random selection in choosing the ‘right’ leaders for organisations?

Adam Grant, LinkedIn’s most famous organisationalist, recently penned an article in the New York Times “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way”. It positions sortition as a solution to prevent leadership being overrun by individuals possessing the dark triad of personality traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

I was keen to explore how this diagnosis impacts leadership in organisations, and how to use the SORTED approach to counteract this. So, I took the opportunity to reach out. I received a rapid response and polite decline. Although Adam did signpost me to a paper which explored this exact idea.

“How to prevent leadership hubris? Comparing competitive selections, lotteries and their combination”

The paper explores the fact that while office holders are often selected because of their professional knowledge, appointments are often influenced by other factors - using power to influence the appointment of like-minded individuals; exploiting professional networks and nepotism. Therefore, competitive selections do not necessarily favour competence, in fact they can reward traits contrary to the interests of the organisation.

While there is extensive historical evidence of use of random selection such as University of Basel selecting professors, Coptic Church appointing the Pope, the chief magistrate in Medieval Venice. Few organisations today use this method to select leadership, despite an overwhelmingly positive trend in using sortition to select participants for citizens assemblies across the world.

Without many real-world case studies to reference, the authors ran an experiment to determine how random selection can be used to select leaders. It measured three different approaches: a competitive selection treatment, a random selection treatment, and partly random selection, in which competitive selection is combined with lottery. They also controlled for perceived confidence levels of those taking part.

Results were a validation of the assumption of the important role random selection can play. They showed that partly random selection greatly reduced the self-importance of leaders. The overconfident subset claimed less for themselves and allocated more money to their subordinates. They were less prone to misusing their power and took decisions that were more beneficial to the other members of the group. On the other hand, overconfident leaders selected by competitive screening tended to abuse their power, claiming large shares of the pie.

Why does using random selection to select leaders work?

It has been shown that successful people who recognize that randomness or luck has played an important role more often express humility and a pro-social focus.

Competitive selection methods are applied to select the most competent person, usually the person with the best performance record as a leader. This causes issues particularly when selecting overconfident people. Firstly, as they show higher self-serving bias, they tend to overattribute certain behaviours and outcomes to their own disposition. They underestimate the influence of situational forces and luck. Second, competitive selection methods confirm overconfident leaders' feeling that they are exceptional and perform far “above the average” of other candidates. They feel superior to their subordinates and others and see those people as means to satisfying their personal ends.

The study also controlled for competence, which is seemingly the biggest barrier to acceptance of non-competitive selection methods. The study showed that full random selection leads to a lower leadership competence, which is unsurprising as competence by definition isn’t controlled. However, compared to purely random selections, partial random selections lead to more competent leaders. This works as partial random selection works to ensure that there is level of competence required to fulfil the role. However, once this baseline is satisfied the other nefarious consequences of competitive selection are negated.

While this theory may contradict common belief, even the word random can infer irrationality. However, this study shows that this is in fact a rational and promising way of recruiting leaders. The key point here is that ‘rational’ decision making processes are mired by our own individual and societal biases. Removing the influence of these factors while still establishing a baseline of competence can be a better option, or at least an opportunity worth reestablishing.

How to apply these learnings of using partly random selection to appoint leaders?

In the early stages of my sortition journey, the most common retort is fear of the “idiot neighbour” being given power. While this effect is countered in random selection for in Citizen Assemblies, as it involves a larger number of participants both reducing the influence of an individual and adding to the overall cognitive diversity of a group. An idea which is explored in more detail in this previous article.

However, the idiot neighbour/colleague proposition does hold when advocating for individual, leadership roles. While some my use this to advocate for elaborate accountability mechanisms involving random selection at a larger scale with recruitment or scrutiny functions. Individual leaders still have an important role to play in society, especially in organisational settings. Therefore, it is important that a competency threshold is passed, before random selection can assist in optimising the behaviours of that leader.

So, with that in mind, here’s a where could I envisage these approaches being adopted:

Political leaders – Any position that requires a mastery of politicking to assume seniority would benefit. Be it a leader of a trade union, a pressure group or a political party at a local and national level. This would minimise status games and ensure the leader can focus on things that work for the benefit of the group they represent. Furthermore, it would influence the acceptance and adoption of more collaborative practices bringing in the public and other stakeholders.

Positions on executive boards – Using partly random selection alongside other inclusive recruitment methods will ensure maximum diversity on an executive board. The role of chair becomes enabling rather than directive, especially if those who have put themselves forward for the position are focused more on their own development than that of the whole organisation.

Management and leadership positions in organisations – Beyond the CEO, there is no reason this cannot be normalised at all levels of management positions. Of course, the competency criteria must be fulfilled and ensured that it is not exclusionary. However, it would accelerate a culture of management beholden to humility not hubris.

As the paper concludes “Our proposal to draw your CEO by lot is provocative but may be promising”. There is an opportunity for organisations who are looking to shift the culture from competition to collaboration to experiment with this approach.