Flawed Managers that Flourish

In 1990, psychologists Robert Hogan, Robert Raskin, and Dan Fazzini wrote a brilliant essay called “The Dark Side of Charisma.” It argued that flawed managers fall into three types:

• the High Likability Floater, who rises effortlessly in an organization because he never takes any difficult decisions or makes any enemies.
• the Homme de Ressentiment, who seethes below the surface and plots against his enemies.
• the Narcissist, the most interesting of the three, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him inexorably up the corporate ladder.

Narcissists are terrible managers. They resist accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don’t believe that others have anything useful to tell them. “Narcissists are biased to take more credit for success than is legitimate,” Hogan et al. write, and “biased to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their failures and shortcomings for the same reasons that they claim more success than is their due.” Moreover:

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people . . . and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to “self-nominate”; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.

Vote for the type of managers that flourish in your organisation by clicking on the relevant check box in the column to your left.

Why the Mighty Fall

In his latest book How The Mighty Fall, Jim Collins describes the five stages through which a proud and thriving company passes on its way to becoming a basket case:
- hubris born of success
- undisciplined pursuit of more
- denial of risk and peril
- grasping for salvation
- capitulation to irrelevance or death

Toyota's president Akio Toyoda, who took over in June 2009, believes his company, world's largest carmaker since it surpassed GM in June 2008, is in the fourth stage. He surprised business journalists and his own company by making this announcement at a press conference in October 2009.

Collins elaborates that companies in the fourth stage 'react frantically to their plight in the belief that salvation lies in revolutionary change usually hastening their demise'. Such companies 'need calmness, focus, and deliberate action'.

Mr Akio Toyoda is the grandson of the founder of Toyota. His approach is not visionary. It is simple, incremental and requires painstaking attention to what the customers want. That, experts believe, is its virtue.