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So much focus on developing the confidence and skills necessary to be a good leader. So little on developing the substance, breadth, and judgement necessary to

• credit_guy 6y ago
  I can't upvote this more. Leadership comes from confidence, confidence comes from expertise, expertise comes from learning and practice. Confidence without expertise is hollow; leadership with hollow confidence and no expertise is quite dubious. A certain guy who likes to golf comes to mind.
  • lumberingjack 6y ago
    Obama and Biden I was thinking the same things they golf so freaking much
  • jtbayly 6y ago
    I assume you’re talking about this guy? https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AP110618021437.jpg https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AP11061802... Edit: Lol. I love the downvotes. I mean, who are you talking about? Tiger Woods? Jack Nicklaus? Or were you dragging politics into this just to make a cheap shot? If so, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
    • arolihas 6y ago
      Trump has played 308 rounds of golf since becoming president in 2017. Obama in his 8 years in office had played 333.
      • lumberingjack 6y ago
        One of them owns several places where you can golf the other one is married to a man
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • MobileVet 6y ago
        Easy now... let’s not bring facts into this discussion.
        • arolihas 6y ago
          My bad, I should be more careful around trump supporters, I know they’re allergic to facts.
      • bjourne 6y ago
        Interestingly, in Trump's book How to get Rich he recommends taking up golf as a means to becoming successful.
        • Retric 6y ago
          It seems a stretch to assume he actually wrote any of the books with his name on the cover. Ghostwriters are cheap, and writing takes time. That’s not a dig, it just seems like a poor ROI.
          • Tarsul 6y ago
            Probably true. The book "The art of the deal" was ghostwritten. Here's a nice article about the ghostwriter (and how it haunts him): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/04/donald-trump-tony-schwartz-interview-art-of-the-deal https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/04/donald-trump...
          • jacobolus 6y ago
            Claims that he even read a single full book in the past few decades (with his name on the cover or otherwise) are not credible. They changed the briefing format to a few bullet points in a large font with lots of pictures, and he still doesn't bother to read them (Tillerson: he "doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things"). He stumbles and mispronounces words when slowly reading a few sentences on a teleprompter (also reportedly set to a much larger than usual font), commonly misreads a word or phrase and then ad libs a nonsensical embellishment to play the mistake off as intentional, and frequently goes entirely off script with visible relief to just speak off the top of his head. There is a deposition video where he flat refuses to read a few sentences of a contract out loud. When people ask him about what he is reading, he grimaces and deflects with an answer about being too busy. The speculation that poor eyesight contributes to his functional illiteracy seems plausible.
        • klyrs 6y ago
          It really helps the getting rich plan if you golf at your own resort, and charge the government to feed and house your entourage.
      • jackpirate 6y ago
        I would love a source on this. But even if true, that still paints Trump as the bigger golfer since Obama had 2x as many years to play essentially the same amount of golf.
        • arolihas 6y ago
          That was my point.
        • csa 6y ago
          > I would love a source on this. https://thegolfnewsnet.com/golfnewsnetteam/2020/12/29/how-many-times-president-donald-trump-played-golf-in-office-103836/ https://thegolfnewsnet.com/golfnewsnetteam/2020/12/29/how-ma... This article supports the numbers for Trump and adds additional information. https://www.golfchannel.com/article/golf-central-blog/obamas-final-tally-333-rounds-golf-potus https://www.golfchannel.com/article/golf-central-blog/obamas... The above article gives numbers for Obama. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-defends-golf-trips-falsely-claims-less-than-obama-2020-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-defends-golf-trips-fal... This article compares them both as of the summer of their 4th year in office. Short summary, Trump played at about 2x the pace of Obama.
          • hansthehorse 6y ago
            Obama played golf 113 times in his first term. Trump played 302. In the first 100 days of the presidency Obama played golf once, Trump played 19 times.
    • aaomidi 6y ago
      Is complaining about downvotes the same "snowflake" behavior I've been hearing about for years? Interesting to have your feelings hurt that easily.
      • jtbayly 6y ago
        I’m not complaining, and my feelings aren’t hurt. I’m laughing at you.
  • bzb6 6y ago
    You can make a point like this without getting politics involved because it inevitably cheapens the discussion.
    • madbkarim 6y ago
      How’s that comment is political?
  • lordnacho 6y ago
    If you look at schools, especially elite ones, there's a strange desire for all the kids to become leaders. Nobody questions it, I don't know why. I guess the school thinks it's useful to be associated with some future leaders? The thing is leadership ought to be like you say. Some kind of competence that allows you to help a group of people complete some kind of task. But let's be honest. The kids want to be student council president because it's prestigious. They grow up and then they want to be CEO because it's prestigious and well paying. They pay lip service to the idea of helping a team, but really, we know they don't care all that much. It's ass backwards, people want to be leaders because {prize} and then they think about how to get there. Sometimes we get lucky and they conclude that they need to climb the ladder by being competent (this fails a lot due to pyramid structures and politics), but often they just figure out that to seem competent, you have to shout a lot about how competent you are.
    • dpeck 6y ago
      Schools, especially elite ones, often see their purpose as creating/fostering leaders out of the pool of potential that they’ve curated.
    • poulsbohemian 6y ago
      > If you look at schools, especially elite ones, there's a strange desire for all the kids to become leaders. Those schools maintain their status and position by ensuring their alumni become leaders. Thus it is to their advantage. Which brings us to the bigger picture... we live in a Darwinian word of evolve-or-die, strongest-will-survive. Thus passing on to our children the skills of leadership are part of this same desire for our children to thrive.
      • technothrasher 6y ago
        That sounds more like a Lamarckian metaphor than Darwinian one.
    • hrktb 6y ago
      > Nobody questions it, I don't know why. Money. In our society it pays more in average to be a leader. On the why it pays more, I’d posit leaders are closer to the money source so get more negotiating power as they have more information.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    Also empathy and altruism. You have to care about how everyone is doing and how the whole group feels.
• clairity 6y ago
  we make this kind of mistake all the time. it's the basis of the "you get what you measure" aphorism. confidence and charisma are secondary signals, loosely correlated with wisdom and capability. once we emphasize confidence and charisma over wisdom and capability in our leader-choosing algorithm (how political contests have evolved, for instance), we're pressuring the system to weaken that correlation even further, as it's very hard (likely impossible) to maximize all desirable characteristics at the same time. we can see this with popularity itself, which has changed over the past century in the (american) culture from emphasizing capability to emphasizing confidence (with the concomitant rise of mass media and the concentration of mass attention and esteem).
• ericnolte 6y ago
  Skills associated with great leadership have many applications outside of leadership itself. Traits such as high empathy, confidence, creativity, flexibility make great leaders, but also just generally make great people. It would be no surprise the two are correlated!
  • dnautics 6y ago
    Honestly as a follower those are commonly praised, but bad signals. You want a leader who is loyal to you and materially and socially supportive of you above almost all else. It's such a mind fuck to work for someone who is empathetic but doesn't stand up for you, or even undermines what you are doing (whether or not deliberately). You can wind up sinking years of your life by being stuck in that situation without even seeing it
    • HarryHirsch 6y ago
      We'd do well if we all lived by the immortal words of Arthur Seaton: "There's no peace between worker and management, only a truce over paychecks."
      • dnautics 6y ago
        Paychecks are the "almost all else" in my assertion, yes. But I think it's wrong to assume that jobs can't or shouldn't provide value beyond remuneration.
• qzw 6y ago
  This is very astute. Some of history’s “best” leaders have been humanity’s greatest villains.
  • api 6y ago
    Confidence is usually confused with competence, and charisma with vision and direction. I've seen this enough that I've come to believe it's hard wired to some extent, though it can be overridden rationally. Confidence and charisma seems to tell our so-called "reptile brain" that this is a big alpha that should be followed, and I strongly suspect that the effect also tends to down-regulate the rational mind in the same way that stress and fear do. I've experienced the "if they're in the room you agree with them" type of charisma more than once, and personally I always found it creepy and disturbing. Looking past superficial confidence and charisma is something that should be explicitly taught.
• derefr 6y ago
  > It would be nice if leadership skills and confidence correlated with wisdom and capability. Why? That only seems like it would be nice in a world where leadership skills and confidence are rare, and thus it's a "seller's market" for people with those skills, where people might have to settle for just picking a leader because they are good at leadership, regardless of whether they are wise. (Which is, admittedly, the world we live in now.) However, in a world/cultural zeitgeist where leadership and confidence are commonly-cultivated attributes (like conscientiousness is in today's world: something inculcated by parents, teachers, media, etc.), most people would have that attribute, making most people potential leaders — and thus there would be a "buyer's market" for leaders. Leadership ability could be taken as pure table-stakes, and leaders would be selected first-and-foremost on their wisdom/capability/etc. It is exactly the focus of the article, taken forward, that would make such a world come to pass.
  • feoren 6y ago
    What about a world where we all agreed to fight against our natural tendency to follow the guy who shouts the loudest and instead pick leaders who have the traits we want, like wisdom and capability? Then we don't need to bother trying to teach a bunch of naturally shy, intelligent people to shout at each other more.
    • TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
      What about a world where we're not compelled to follow anyone just because another segment of the population thinks it's correct?
    • notriddle 6y ago
      Do you know how to measure that?
• amelius 6y ago
  Yes. There is too little data to claim or even suggest that there exists a "recipe" for creating good leaders. Better to read some biographies of great leaders so at least you have a good view of the original data. Here is one for starters: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/05/those-who-have-known-angela-merkel-describe-her-rise-to-prominence/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/05/those-who-hav...
  • veddox 6y ago
    > There is too little data to claim or even suggest that there exists a "recipe" for creating good leaders. We‘ve been studying leadership since the very first books were written (and probably since the first tribal elders started sharing their experiences around the camp fire). It is important to keep in mind that effective leadership can be stunningly diverse and depends heavily on personality and context. Stanley McChrystal makes this point quite well. Nonetheless, there are certain characteristics and traits that many effective leaders exhibit in some way or another. (IMO, John Maxwell provides an excellent summary of these.) But I heartily agree with your sentiment that reading biographies of leaders is one of the best ways of „learning the trade“ (aside from actually, you know, leading).
• jgalt212 6y ago
  > developing the substance, breadth, and judgement A leader cannot have one without the other. If you've spend any time amongst high academic performers, many of these folks have "developing the substance, breadth, and judgement", but not nearly as many have the confidence to apply these skills as leaders.
• aksss 6y ago
  Impatience for indecisiveness, courage to move forward with uncertainty, a focus on goals, vision of the goal, an ability to identify and overcome obstacles, the ability to cultivate and grow effective lieutenants. These are also some attributes of leadership that seem to me more a product of personality, and while you can learn to hone them, changing one’s personality isn’t that common or easy, IME.
• marmaduke 6y ago
  The focus is perhaps in proportion to how children are. You can make them confident by making their wishes come true (“I want a piece of candy”, ok here you go); developing substance and judgement is a profound Socratic experience that gives every would be parent figure a run for their money (or, well, children) All to say your comment is spot-on.
• znpy 6y ago
  In fairness, the title says "leaders", not "good leaders".