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Catalyst | Last Word
Nine Lies About Work:
A Freethinking Leader’s
Guide to the Real World
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall,
Harvard Business Review Press, 2019
W
hat if everything we know
about organisational
culture turns out to be
untrue? Well, maybe not everything.
But when was the last time any of us
questioned received wisdoms such as
the importance of feedback or goals
cascaded down from the top?
Harvard Business Review first
put together this authorship team
to write about the flaws of that old
shibboleth, performance appraisal,
with predictable results. Now the
authors are back to explore what
they see as the disconnect between
how we’re told to work and how we
actually work best. At the heart of the
book is the paradox that many of the
ideas and practices held as ‘settled
truths’ – those ‘nine lies’ – are actually
deeply frustrating or unhelpful for
the people on the ground.
More worryingly, the effect of these
virtually universal practices that
attempt to assert control and manage
complexity, is that individuality at
work gets lost, or goes unnoticed.
That’s a problem at a time when
meaningful work is so important
to workers and when individual,
human spark and contribution
are increasingly seen as the key to
thriving organisations.
This is a deliberately provocative
book asking uncomfortable
questions about the dangers
of the oversimplification and
misinterpretation of much-cherished
corporate concepts.
Why Do So Many Incompetent
Men Become Leaders?
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard
Business Review Press, 2019
T
he theory that women need
to show up and grab career
opportunities almost at
any cost seems to be waning in
popularity. Increasingly, laying the
responsibility for a workforce gender
imbalance with women themselves
seems at odds with a focus on the
barrier effects of wider organisational
structures and cultures.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has
taken up the cudgels with a book
that questions the validity of asking
women simply to display the same
stereotypical traits that have got
men to the top. For Chamorro-
Premuzic, the bigger problem is not
the under-representation of women,
but the over-representation of men,
particularly those who are inept.
His research explores a possible
causal link between the prevalence
of poor leadership and the fact that
most leaders are men – and that
most organisations tend to reward
confidence rather than competence.
This often backfires once a leader is
in post. When competent women who
don’t fit the stereotype are unfairly
overlooked, we all suffer.
If leadership was evaluated more
carefully, it is likely that more women
would succeed, because women score
better on measures of competence,
humility and integrity – the polar
opposite of the confidence, charisma
and, yes, narcissism traditionally
associated with leadership.
Issue 3 - 2019
65