I’ve had a version of the same conversation at least a dozen times in the past few months.
Someone tells me about a leadership role they were passed over for. They’re thoughtful, accomplished, and genuinely capable. And somewhere in the story, the phrase “didn’t seem hungry enough” or “not ready yet” comes in.
Then they tell me about the person who got the role instead. I already know how it ends.
Think about what our selection systems actually reward: visibility, confidence, urgency, the ability to project certainty even in uncertain moments. We reward the performance of leadership ambition and call it a talent pipeline.
The research backs this up. In a series of experiments, Cameron Anderson and his colleagues at UC Berkeley found that overconfident people were given higher status in groups, even though they were no more competent than anyone else. We give displays of confidence far more weight than they deserve.
The thoughtful, the quietly capable and those who deliver results with no fuss are deemed to be either not ambitious enough or not yet ready. The ones who ask hard questions before they accept responsibility, because they understand what that responsibility means, are the one’s getting filtered out. And leaders in organizations believe they’re making good decisions.
A recent blog published in Harvard Business Review last week puts words to something many of us already know instinctively but have never quite had permission to say out loud. Its authors, Alexis Zahner, Martin Gutmann and Scott J. Allen, warn us against mistaking eagerness for readiness or hesitation for a lack of ambition. Their central claim is to understand what the source of the hesitation or eagerness is, and leaders need a more rigorous way to separate candidates who are reluctant yet ready from those who are eager but not yet ready and from those whose hesitation signals a real mismatch with leadership work.
This bias of ignoring people who don’t show up as extroverted, ambitious, confident and certain but are thoughtful and quietly capable for leadership positions, have resulted in the absence of a section of people in leadership positions – introverts, women and people who are from a culture that values thoughtfulness and quiet competence over false confidence and unbridled ambition.
But here’s what makes this harder to solve than it looks
Leaders who make it through the first filter, often the most confident and ambitious, then run into what Rakesh Khurana calls “structurally induced narcissism.” In a recent Fortune essay, Nitin Nohria, former Dean of Harvard Business School, explains his colleague’s idea. The constant praise, attention and deference that surround a leader slowly bend them towards it. And Khurana’s point is that this happens even to leaders who never had the tendency to begin with.
Not ego. Not a character flaw. Structure.
From the moment someone steps into a significant leadership role, something begins. People stop pushing back quite as hard. Rooms go quieter when they walk in. Opinions shift once they’ve shared theirs. Their confidence becomes infectious, at least at a surface level. None of this is malicious.
It’s just how people behave around people who wield power and it shows up stronger as the size of the organization grows and the leadership span grows. Over time, it reshapes the leader, regardless of where they started. When they don’t hear contradicting viewpoints, their confidence grows even more, and they are blindsided by what no one is telling them.
Some leaders are aware of this phenomenon and put strategies in place to avoid these traps. The overconfident and over-ambitious leaders are probably the least likely to do this.
Adam Grant and his colleagues found that extroverted leaders tend to be less receptive when their teams take initiative, while quieter leaders are more likely to listen and act on it.
The thoughtful and self-aware leaders who are more likely to build defenses are already in the minority.
To be clear, better selection doesn’t make anyone immune. Khurana’s point applies to quiet leaders too. What it changes is who is likely to notice the drift, and who is likely to do something about it.
That’s the double filter. The first filter selects for displayed certainty. The second filters out the dissent that would correct it. And the people most likely to get through the first are the least equipped to resist the second.
This is probably why, the overall trust in leaders and their leadership has been declining for a long time, across organizations, across society and in the institutions that they lead.
We’re losing at both ends.
And neither failure is an accident.
In fairness, confidence isn’t the enemy. People need to see it in their leaders, especially in a crisis. Nohria himself notes that CEOs must project confidence even when they doubt themselves. But projecting confidence is something a good leader does. It isn’t proof of good judgment. Our selection systems mistake the projection for the judgment.
What leaders worth following do differently
I don’t think this is hopeless. But I do think it requires two things we don’t talk about enough:
- Rethink who and how we promote people to leadership positions.
- Put in place structures and strategies to avoid the drift towards narcissism
Leader’s worth following don’t use confidence and ambition as proxy for competence. Before making a decision on promoting someone to a leadership position, they not only consider technical competence as the foundational non-negotiable but also look at their ability to be open to feedback, to be curious, to be able to bring their team together as a unit and be aware enough to defend themselves against the structural shift towards narcissism.
And when a strong candidate hesitates, they don’t read it as a lack of ambition. They ask what’s behind it:
- What exactly are they hesitant about?
- What would they need in order to be confident that they could do this well?
- What do they think this role would demand of them that their current one doesn’t?
The answers usually reveal whether someone is reluctant but ready, needs more experience, or is genuinely not suited to the role.
The second is designing against the structural forces that erode good leaders from the inside. The leaders worth following don’t just try to lead well. They build structures that protect their own clarity.
In practice, that means:
- They wait for their team to share their perspectives, before sharing their own.
- They identify at least one person whose job includes telling them what they don’t want to hear, in every meeting.
- They hold regular skip-level conversations, without the direct reports in the room.
- They look honestly at who has left their team in the last two years, and why.
They keep the people who will tell them the truth, however inconvenient it is. They coach the people they promote to leadership roles, to learn and do the same.
So, before your next promotion decision, don’t rule out candidates because they don’t seem to be confident or ambitious. Go deeper and pick the best candidate irrespective of their ambition or confidence or lack thereof.
And before your next meeting, ask yourself if your team has stopped disagreeing with you, and if yes, when and what could you do about it.
You probably know which kind of leader you’ve become and which kind of leader you want to be.
The world needs more Leaders Worth Following.
