Are All Great Leaders Jerks?

Image of CEO Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

When you hear “CEO,” who are the first five you think of?

Do you think of inspirational leaders who bring people together to solve problems and deliver results, or do you think of the arrogant and obnoxious people who seem to spend more time on Twitter than at the office?

Or people like the CEO who once told me, “I don’t care about capabilities and leadership styles — what I need to know is what to do when you have ten people working for you, and nine of them are bozos.” And he was sleeping with the tenth.

CEOs who constantly assert superiority, who insult their staff or anyone who disagrees with them, who demand anything (and in some cases, anyone) they can get their hands on, who cover up misdeeds, lie about their businesses, cheat on their spouses, abuse their employees – and are not only famous but get away with it if their stock happens to be doing well. How many of those CEOs you think of are people you want to personally avoid?

In other words, jerks.[1]

You know it’s bad when Hollywood movies and TV shows use “CEO” as shorthand for “greedy villain,” ranging from Iron Man to The LEGO Movie, let alone movies like The Wolf of Wall Street. Watch crime shows, and see how rarely the CEO even comes off well, let alone avoids being the bad guy. Even Superman’s archnemesis is CEO Lex Luthor!

Image of Lord Business from The LEGO Movie (2014)

Here at Ascent Leadership Networks, we’ve assessed numerous top leaders in companies from around the world, using empirically derived measures and methods to identify the traits of the successful leader. We can say with authority that “Jerk Orientation” or “Jerkosity” is not a key capability for performance. And that many, many CEOs are not jerks – they’re hard-working, caring people.

But stereotypes happen for a reason. How did CEOs become villains?

The Strength that Is the Weakness

Both good and bad CEOs often share the implicit motive for Influence: getting satisfaction or emotional energy out of having an impact on or influence on others. It’s key for them to do their roles, especially in large-scale organizations.

When running a large-scale organization, most of the work is not hands-on. Instead, executives have to influence other people to do the work. Or, influence people to influence people to influence people to do the work! I once surveyed a group of executives to find how much of their time was spent just speaking to people: at least 90%, primarily as acts of influence.

However, the Influence Motive, being a deep emotional driver, is neutral in nature. As long as you get a reaction, whether positive or negative, someone with this motive can get some personal satisfaction.

On the negative side, we see deliberate temper tantrums by a child; in adults we see Internet troll behavior: saying anything that gets a rise out of someone, because getting the reaction is the reward. For example, one divisional CEO I know tossed aside an assessment report on his team and himself, saying, “too bad I can’t effing[2] read!”  He was deliberately baiting a group of senior consultants as a means of asserting his power over them.[3]

But effective executives are not like that. They find ways to influence others positively, for positive outcomes. They have the socialized version of the implicit Influence Motive, channeling their desire to influence for the good of the group. That requires some self-restraint, holding back impulsive reactions (punching someone who angers you, throwing aside that report on your team) and finding alternatives (taking time to persuade someone to your view).[4]

As it happens, we can define this precisely and behaviorally.

We have a number of tools to assess whether someone is primarily driven by socialized (non-jerkosity) Influence motive; we can define the sophistication of one’s behaviors with our empirically-derived scaled capabilities.[5] We have found that the higher you go on our executive leadership scales, the less a leader tells and the more a leader engages and then, at the highest levels, leaders empower. Socialized leaders get satisfaction on helping others feel strong and capable, not just themselves.

And beyond even that, the outstanding (and outstandingly mature) leader demonstrates that power shared is power multiplied.

Thus both the good and the bad leader can be motivated by Influence – just in positive versus selfish directions.

CEO Tony Stark (before rehabilitation) in Iron Man (2008)

So Why Do We Hear So Much About Jerks?

Personalized Influence focuses specifically on, well, personal benefit. It does what it says on the label: a person with selfishly oriented Influence motive will therefore suck up the airtime, seize the stage, and give themselves acclaim if no one else will, in order to get that personal feeling of power.

Socialized Influence focuses on the good of the group, not the individual influencing. They aren’t competing with their team for airtime, so they might empower others to take the stage, develop others to take charge, and work as a team.

It’s as simple as that: who are you influencing, and for what purpose? Or, to put it differently, it’s the difference between the people quietly getting the work done with their teams (socialized) and those noisily tooting their own horns to the world (personalized).

So why do you hear from the jerks? Because a lot of what drives them is selfish public attention, powered by personalized Influence Motive: asserting their power as loudly as possible. Meanwhile, the effective leaders influence for the good of the group – not just for themselves.

Quick test: how many Fortune 500 CEOs have you ever heard of? And how many of them appear to be jerks? Compare that to the number you have not heard of, and you will have a fairer test of how many CEOs are probably jerks, without measuring it formally.

The Jerkosity Incapability

I said early on in this article that “Jerkosity” is not a leadership capability, and that is absolutely true. It is the misuse of Influence motive, which is a potential leadership capability. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t measurable! As a company, we specialize in measuring the qualitative – of being “tough minded about tender issues,” as Professor David McClelland put it.

Since we know the key driver as well as different levels of behaviors associated with leaders at specific levels, we can absolutely grade leaders on their degree of bad leadership — let's call it their Jerkosity Incapability — weighted against their more positive manifestations of leadership.

After all, people are complicated – they can blend effective leader and jerk, or they can display different degrees depending on the context. Winston Churchill, for example, was a highly effective leader, once his aggressive Influence motive found a proper channel in World War II, but before (and after) the war his own party considered him a detriment, too willing to criticize them and constantly speaking out and asserting his views – a bit of a jerk, in fact.  As John Colville, an aide to Neville Chamberlain said later, “Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with ‘the Establishment’, as it would now be called, so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified.”[6] Was Churchill a jerk, and did it ruin him as a leader? The only real answer to that is, “it depends on the situation, and he had many other positive traits that could counterbalance it.”

We can create a Jerkosity Index, and use it as a counterpoint to their positive leadership capabilities, or even help people move it downward.

The only major obstacle, as I see it, is that the people who need it most won’t want it!

But if anyone is interested, Ascent can provide it.

Footnotes

[1] Feel free to substitute your own, more profane word.

[2] No, he didn’t say “effing.”

[3] For those that are curious, one of the consultants responded beautifully: “Good thing I can effing well talk, then!” This charmed the CEO (while incidentally terrifying his colleagues standing behind him). And no, he didn’t say “effing,” either.

[4] McClelland, D. C. & Burnham, D. H. (1976).  Power is the great motivator.  Harvard Business Review, March-April 1976, p.100-110; 159-166.

[5] Our six scaled capabilities account for 85% of virtually any executive leadership role. And only four are explicitly Influence-based, so we can get very precise.

[6] John Wheeler-Bennett, ed., Action This Day: Working with Churchill, pp. 48–49 (John Colville)