Don’t Be Yourself
- Kim Meninger
- 45 minutes ago
- 23 min read

In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about why authenticity is overrated and what to do instead. My guest this week is Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, psychologist, professor, Chief Science Officer at Russell Reynolds Associates and author of the new book Don’t Be Yourself. Tomas argues that it’s not raw authenticity that makes you a good leader. Great leaders care deeply about what others think of them. They leverage their emotional intelligence and engage in strategic impression management, which leads them to come across as more authentic and trustworthy to others. Tomas believes that instead of bringing our authentic selves to work, we should focus on being our best selves.
We also explore concepts from Tomas’ book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (And How to Fix It), including a look at how we overvalue confidence and undervalue competence. We examine what DEI got wrong, how gender bias holds women back, and how AI can help us create more meritocratic systems.
About My Guest
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Science Officer at Russell Reynolds Associates, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, a cofounder of Deeper Signals, and an associate at Harvard's Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He is the author of several books, including Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It), upon which his popular TEDx talk was based, and I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique.
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Connect with Tomas:
Website: https://drtomas.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Yourself-Authenticity-Overrated/dp/1647829836 (or if you have a preferred bookseller - bookshop, Barnes & Noble)
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Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:
Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.
Learn more about the Leading Humans discussion group
Join the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals.
Schedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges.
Websites: https://kimmeninger.com
Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome Tomas. It is such a pleasure to be here with you today. I've been really looking forward to our conversation, and I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Yeah, so me too excited to be here. I'm Tomas. I'm a psychologist by training, born and raised in Argentina, and the first part of my career, I was a clinical psychologist, you know, focusing on mostly psychological disorders. Then I moved to Europe, where I kind of retrained as an organizational psychologist. And for the last 10 years, I've been split mostly between New York and London, and kind of also between academia, where I mostly study and research leadership and the practical or real world, commercial world, if you like, where I recently started a new position as a chief science officer with Russell Reynolds associates, which is highly boutique, specialized leadership advisory firm that mostly deals with kind of C-Suite executives.
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Kim Meninger
Wonderful. Well, I will tell you that I fell in love with your work when I read the book. Why do so many incompetent men become leaders? It's such a great title. It catches people's attention, and I've shared it with so many people around me. I know we are going to get to your most recent book, but I'd love to start here, because I work with a lot of people with imposter syndrome, and so confidence is a big challenge for so many of the bright and talented people that I'm trying to coach and support. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about your argument that we overvalue confidence charisma and what the impact of that is on our organizations.
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Yeah. So first, you know, as we are kind of in around the sort of like holiday period, and for our listeners, perhaps who are still thinking about good Christmas presents, or perhaps playing Secret Santa. Why so many incompetent men become leaders, and how to fix it is a good option, but make sure people don't know it's gifted by you or it's not specifically targeted at a specific male boss, because it could backfire. You know, a kind of disclaimer there, don't, don't sue me or blame me if that goes wrong. But yeah, I think to the serious part of your question, that for the past 15 or 20 years, one of the kind of underpinning or overarching themes to mostly our research has been this fundamental disconnect between how good people think they are, which is their confidence or self-belief, and even to some degree, their self-esteem on the one hand, and then on the other hand, how good They actually are at something. And you know, one of the fundamental paradox that that book and my earlier research have highlighted is that, contrary to what most people think, it is often more adaptive to be delusional about your skills than to have self-awareness. So particularly in the case of male executives or corporate kind of male employees, oftentimes, you know, thinking that they're better than they actually are helps them almost have a contagious effect on others. So imagine you go to a job interview and you truly believe you are the hottest thing or the best thing since sliced bread, you're probably going to impress interviewers more, particularly if they're not competent themselves, compared to somebody who says, You know what, I've not done this before. I think it will be hard, but I'm willing to do what it takes to learn it. And you know, at least I know what I don't know, which should be good, right? Because that makes me self-aware, so that confident or overconfident bias is more common in men than women, mostly because it pays off. And so we live in this almost paradoxical world in which the rewards are different for men than for women in general, and even though women are rewarded for being self-aware, they're then not promoted because they are, you know, not selling themselves well. And even though we keep on saying would have been, wouldn't be, wouldn't it be nice to have leaders who are self-aware? A lot of these leaders have been promoted for their delusional thinking and for being unaware of their limitations. And unjustifiable please with themselves.
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Kim Meninger
And it really does create a lot of challenges for women, in particular, who spend, I think you know, a considerable amount of time reflecting on themselves, thinking about all of their perceived weaknesses and flaws which keep them from promoting themselves. But also, to your point, the social rewards are different. So many of them may even have more confidence than they're conveying, but they feel like there will be backlash if they present themselves in that way.
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Yeah, exactly. So this actually. Goes back, you know, 20 or 30 years in terms of research, is a so-called Double Bind Phenomenon where, you know, when women don't fulfill traditional feminine archetypes, they will be accused of being pathologically ambitious or acting like bulldozers. You know, the Margaret Thatcher phenomenon, or kind of a queen bee phenomenon. It's like, Oh, my God, they're out mailing men in masculinity. So it's uncomfortable. And you know, or when that recipe helps them succeed, it knows it's not necessarily the best thing, not just for their teams or organization, but also for the majority of women who don't fulfill that hyper alpha male archetype, even though they're females, and on the other hand, when they do seem humble, self-aware, self-critical and even capable of displaying a healthy degree of imposter syndrome, because at the end of the day, there are advantages of being your own worst critic and over preparing and being a perfectionist, you know, but when they do that, then they are dismissed or overlooked, because it's like, oh, clearly they don't have what it takes to be they don't even want to be leaders. So, you know, doomed if they do and doomed if they don't, is the conclusion.
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Kim Meninger
Yes, and so I know that you talked a little bit about what to do about this in the book, and I'm sure you know. I'll caveat this by saying anybody who wants more can go read the book. But what? What's sort of your high-level advice, if we know this is the reality that we're operating within, for leaders to be thinking about when they’re making decisions?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
And here, I kind of have two buckets of advice. The first is sort of any advice, including coaching and development intervention that is designed to help women succeed within the current rules of the game, which might be rigged or unfair or biased, but it is what it is actually, you know, that would help them play the game of politics and influence perceptions, which requires you to be aware of perceptions. But in essence, you know, I think being slightly more ambitious and more bold, if you like, and even overconfident than your other female peers will generally help, will generally help you succeed within that system, you know. So even if we think the system is broken and it's not fair, well, these are the rules of the game. If you want to change them, you have to get there, you have to emerge before you can be effective. And you could question whether this advice or coaching approach is somewhat too Machiavellian and ethical or not. But if my goal is to help you as an individual succeed, we have to be very realistic about what the system and the culture rewards and sanctions. Now, on the other hand, there's a more utopian, data-driven science base, but perhaps also naive and less likely to really be effective or sort of like be implemented. Advice, which is, let's try to sanitize the system. Let's try to clean up the rigged rules of the game, and let's try to make organizations more data-driven. That is what I really hopeful that you know leaders and organizations understand that the best gender diversity implementation or strategy is to focus on talent, not on gender because if you treated gender selection and succession leadership selection and succession planning as a kind of blind wine testing exercise, and you only focus on how good people are. We will definitely not live in a world in which less than 10% of CEOs and senior executives are female. It would be 50-50, at worst, and probably 55 to 60% female, given all the evidence we have for the fact that women have a superior average advantage when it comes to EQ, emotional intelligence, people skills, humility, self-criticism, self-awareness, all the things that make leaders better, even when they don't make people leaders in general, are the ones that we should focus on, and then the gender distribution will take care of itself.
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Kim Meninger
So given everything that you said, and I really appreciate that perspective, what do you think the answer is to the backlash around DEI these days? I know there's a lot of emotion around this. What's I mean, and like you said, the system is deeply screened. It's going to take a long time to fix. But are there, are there things that leaders could be doing in the near term?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Yeah, it’s super interesting. So I think that clearly it's happened, right? Clearly, we went from maybe one extreme to the other extreme. And I, you know, call me naive, or maybe my. I'm a hopeless optimist, but I do think that most of the times when you have two extremes, reality and truth is somewhere in the middle, right? So I think the fact that the pendulum may have swung too much into one direction, by which I mean, you know, treating this as the number one business priority and saying it's more important than kind of a shareholder accountability or profit make it, and there is a social justice. I mean, you know, for profit, corporations never really believe this, right? And then it gets politicized as well. So if it's advocated too much by one party, then it's not surprising that, in a Hegelian way, it goes from like, you know, kind of thesis and then anti-thesis at the other extreme at the same time. I think the intentions that people have, even when they weren't distorted and exaggerated and they were kind of well-meaning intentions to increase fairness and meritocracy, were not met by an objective ROI, you know. So I think a lot of the things that were very common, like unconscious bias training, and then a lot of the interventions that also included affirmative action or pushing diversity as a statistical kind of numbers game too much without focusing on creating inclusiveness, didn't give results. So although I think it's, you know, telling that the same organizations that said this is the most important thing in the world now is saying, Oh, we stopped doing it like you know, clearly you didn't believe in it so much. If you're now going into the other extreme, I do think there is a big group that is saying, Look, we need to find more effective ways to increase fairness, meritocracy and under that make diversity work. And so, you know, maybe there is an opportunity to focus on results and outcomes more than hopes and aspirations.
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Kim Meninger
And I really hope so as well. And I think this ties back to what we were talking about earlier, with the confidence versus competence debate as well, because I do think that a lot of how we perceive meritocracy is a bit distorted today, right? Because some of some of the political arguments assume that if it's not held by a white man, then it must have been some type of affirmative action, right? And we, we've sort of lost the, the actual definition of meritocracy. And to your point, if, if our natural bias is to overvalue personality traits, then we're not really going to get to a place where we're looking at some of those objective measures.
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Yeah, and I think it's more that we overvalue the wrong personality traits, you know, and this is temporary changes, you know. I always remind people that, if you take a grand scheme of big picture, look at things, you know, for 90% of our human evolution or evolutionary history, we lived like hunter gatherers, and these groups were led in a very egalitarian way. Half of the times they were led by women, half the time one man. So you know, then you have the rise of the alpha male. Then we've been trying to shift to a more kind of inclusive servant style, democratic sort of leadership. Now it seems like command and control is back, but I think changes take a little time to come into fruition, where I think there is an opportunity to meet both sides or both ends of the political spectrum is I think everybody prefers a meritocracy. I think everybody prefers fairness to bias. And I think everybody prefers a world, a system, a country, an organization, a workplace where a, if you have talent and work hard, you get further. And B, if you add more value, and you have the right people in the right role, everybody wins. Where there is significant disagreement is around the degree to which these things will happen naturally, without intervention. And there, I think generally, if you're more to the right or to the conservative end of the spectrum. You think any intervention to change the natural order of things is should be seen as, you know, affirmative action, positive and anti-meritocracy. And if you are on the other side, you say, look, I mean, how can you say that? If you know, if, if we don't do that, you almost inevitably get 9080, or 70% of middle-aged, white male people in charge, you know the people of which the group of which I belong to, by the way, so you know people. So if that happens, and you're saying that meritocracy happens without any intervention, does it mean these people are truly better than everybody else and everybody who doesn't fit as a and then you got to say, well, let's take a look at how organizations or the world is doing in general. And I think there's a lot of evidence that there is rule for improvement. Also. There is evidence that when you have leadership teams that are more balanced, they add more cognitive diversity, they see things in a different way. You have less group thing. So it isn't just that women. And have a lot of talent that is underutilized because they, they are the recipient of invisible and sometimes visible biases, is also that what actually would mix things up and create a more adaptable leadership team and organization, because, you know, women and men are different.
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Kim Meninger
Do you see good examples out there of this? I mean, do you see companies that are doing this right?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Look, I think, first of all, I draw a lot from the actual large scale scientific studies that look at within companies. If you have large companies with 1000s of employees, and you look at the characteristics that make leaders more effective, in the sense that their teams have higher levels of productivity, performance, innovation, Net Promoter Score, engagement, less turnover, less counter productive work behavior, less anti-social behavior, the qualities that make those leaders effective and manage the sectors are very clear they are there. They have higher levels of knowledge or technical expertise, even though AI is making us that less important now, but it's still the case, because when you're an expert, you can use AI better than non-experts, right? You can basically cut distill the signal from the noise. Then they have higher levels of integrity, and then they have higher levels of people skill. Now, if you look at then whether there's difference between how male and female managers lead, they're either not significant, or they favor women. That's important because these are like control experiments that happen in organizations. Then, if you look at a brother with a kind of zero out, and you get a brother lens, you see that, unsurprisingly, the companies that are the most successful and the leader in their field compared to other peers tend to be quantitatively better at this. So they have higher proportion of women in leadership roles, they also report higher levels of inclusivity, because there's no point if you put in more women at the top and you don't remove the conditions that you know impede their success, then diversity won't work, and it will be backfiring. So if you look at there is an important invisible correlation between most successful companies in their field, in terms of market share, innovation, market cap, best places to work in, and how diverse and inclusive they are, which means that even if you look at tech for example, which for a while complaint of having a pipeline issue, not enough female engineers, whatever, the ones that are slightly better are doing much better, and this happens in professional services and banking and financial services and even like traditional industrial organizations now, I still think the former bucket of evidence, which is control side, is much more effective. What's also important is we live in a world in which evidence and data are often eclipsed by perception. So you know, there have been these very interesting studies showing that when companies support when companies appoint more women as board of directors in public listed companies, their stock often goes down because investors or the market thinks, Oh, my God, you know, they're becoming too woke, and they're becoming, you know, it's like too progressive, so therefore I should sell even though the data would suggest that they will be better off doing this right so sometimes, you know, organizations know what the right thing is, but they're also living, or they exist in a world where perceptions trump reality.
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Kim Meninger
Do you see the picture that you just painted? I think is one of the, the hopes that we had in the DEI movement, which was that companies that perform better will reflect this more diverse leadership, and that will make companies who aren't there yet want to be more like that, right? And that now, obviously the implementation is the important piece here. What role if do you see AI playing in the future of this conversation?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
I mean, you know, AI is ubiquitous, obviously. And I think I still believe, as somebody who has been working with AI before, it was popular, right, and especially in around the area of leadership selection and executive profiling, I still believe that AI has the potential to make workplaces more meritocratic, because AI will always be more data-driven than humans. Of course, if you only train AI or if you train AI only to replicate or predict human preferences, you're going to get biases at scale. Bias is going to be exacerbated and augmented, you know which? But. The advantage with AI is that you can always reverse engineer an algorithm and clean up the data and train it to predict not what a hiring manager wants, but what a company needs. And unlike humans, AI have the ability to unlearn very fast. AI can ignore whether someone is female, male, attractive, unattractive, black, white, Asian, Latin, poor, rich and so on. Whereas humans can never do that. Having said that, I think that it is also the case maybe a more important kind of opportunity to be hopeful as to how AI might impact female leadership is that everything AI automates and can do really well is associated more with the technical side of expertise, with IQ, with rational thinking, et cetera. Not that women don't do that. They do it as well as men, but historically, we promoted leaders into their role, for their technical expertise, for them being MBAs, from them having succeeded at the technical side of the job before, what's going to make a leader really, really stand out and better than others now already, but more so in the Future, are soft skills. Are things like empathy, EQ, kindness, consideration. So we might not realize this now, but as more and more leaders are effective because of the EQ, not the IQ, side of the equation, we're going to see so long as there is a meritocratic selection, we're going to see more women rise to the top.
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Kim Meninger
I think this is a good opportunity to shift gears into your current work around authenticity, because this is something that I'm fascinated by. I'd love to hear your take on authenticity in the workplace.
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
So, you know, I've been obsessed by authenticity for a number of years, so it took a lot to write this last book, which is called Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead. And even though it seems like an unnecessarily and exaggeratedly provocative, click-baity title, the Don’t Be Yourself part fundamentally, what I'm saying is that really authenticity has been misunderstood in popular Business Management Leadership discussion because what really matters at work and in your career is not how authentic you feel or you think you are. In fact, you know, I feel authentic when I identify with my actions and my behaviors, which may often come as a consequence of relaxing, and, you know, not worrying or caring about what people think of me. Imagine you when you're on vacation with your best friends, or maybe you when you are in the company of your significant others and loved ones and family over Thanksgiving or the Christmas party, which, by the way, tends to lead to situations where too many people stop caring about what others thinks, and then that, in combination with, you know, too many glasses of wine, you can see the dark side of just being yourself and really, you know, behaving without much consideration of what others think the kind of authenticity that actually matters is almost at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is: what matters, especially if you're a leader, is how authentic other people think you are. And the research that I review, my research and other colleagues, research in the book, shows that actually the people who we find authentic. The leaders who we find authentic, they're actually like method actors. They care deeply about how other people see them and think of them, and they actually engage in strategic impression management. So you know, they're the exact opposite of people who are just themselves and who behave without consideration for what other people think of them. Now, they do it with a lot of EQ with social skills. So you know, much like good poker players, they look like they are very trustworthy, when, in fact, you don't know what they think. And even mantras such as always be true to you, to your values no matter what or follow your heart, need to be questioned or reframed in a more nuanced way. What if your values are toxic? What if your values are narcissistic? What if your values are like even the whole bring your whole self to work? Should I bring my whole self to work if I'm a racist, probably not. Hopefully not. If I'm a sexist, hopefully not. If I'm a fascist? No, definitely not. So if there is a list of exclusions that apply to the invitation to bring my old self, my whole self, and in the end, what you want is that I bring my best self, which requires a lot of self-editing, or the kind of self that aligns with the status quo. What you realize is that there's a kind of authenticity that is a privilege for the elite. Yeah. The middle-aged, white male executives who are in charge, they can behave without much consideration for what other people think of them, and sadly, it doesn't end up very well and for everybody else, actually, there's a lot of constraints and parameters that we need to be aware of. That doesn't mean that you are under so much pressure that you should hate your job or be alienated or behave with like bystander like or sheep like conformity. But there is an important balance that needs to be met and navigated, which I think is, you know, understanding where the right to be you or the right for self-expression ends and your obligation to others begins. That's what the book is about.
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Kim Meninger
I so appreciate the nuance in what you just said, too, because I think there are a lot of women who would argue that they're they've been doing this right, that impression management is so central to how we show up for all the reasons we talked about, right? There's always that fear that we're going to be misjudged or will be backlash. So what do men say in response to this argument?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Yeah, so, you know, and here there's important, an important gender kind of a factor play. I mean, in a way, you know, we spend too long pointing the finger at women for not being themselves, when, in fact, as soon as they do going back to your previous point, they realize it's not safe. By the way, this applies to anybody who's part of the out group. So the more you're not part of the status quo or the elite, the more you are a diverse category. I mean, you know, women shouldn't be diverse because they're a majority, but they're still the out group compared to men. The more pressure you face to conform. And ironically, the more we've been pointing the finger at these people and saying, just be yourself. Don't worry. Well, if it's not safe to do so, you know? I mean, if we lived in a world where people feel that there is psychological safety and they're free to be themselves, we wouldn't need to point the finger at them and tell them all the time, just be you, you know. And on the other hand, we've allowed people who have a lot of power, and you know, the line power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We've been letting them do whatever like. So if you're the richest person in the world and you own your social media platform, to use a hypothetical example, you can just be yourself and behave without hesitation for what people think of you, and you're going to be fine, because nobody can hold you accountable for everybody else. There are constraints. And I think it's important to acknowledge that, you know, work is work. We're paid to do it, and we're paid to ideally bring the best version of ourselves, and that there is a way to create a professional version of ourselves that is still true to who we are. There's this wonderful concept in psychological research called self-complexity, which in essence, tells us that we all inhabit multiple selves. So we all have multiple roles that we play in life. There's a you that is your mother, you as a mother, you as a daughter, you as a sister, you as a friend, you as a community person, you as a manager, you as an employee, you as a leader. Even if you're a leader, you're somebody else's direct report or follower, right? And work is not an invitation to express each and one of these part of our identity, but the ones that are relevant. You know, even you know, why are shows like the office so funny and actually uncomfortable and cringe-worthily funny because they're hyper-realistic. And actually, most of us are lucky enough not to work for a Michael Scott or David Brandt. That's textbook example of sort of like, just be yourself. It's people who think they're funnier than they actually are, who think that employees care about their sex life and their private life and their personal life, and mostly it's a burden. You know, the less you care about what other people think of you, the more others will care about you, and not for the good reasons. So I think we need to kind of debunk this idea that, you know, if you feel any pressure to conform or make an effort to be the best self, you're a loser. Actually. That's what makes you successful. That's what even people at the top of their game, whether it's Trump or Obama, I don't care. They're great impression managers. Why? Because their professional self seems really very natural. I'm sure that that's not who they truly are deep down. But their professional self is so believable that they're deemed authentic, usually by people who like them. When you don't, they're like, Oh, my God, they are not authentic at all. And by the way, that's important, right? Because we don't have a neural link or objective neuroscientific measure of, ah, you're now 85% authentic, and 50 that won't come. Hopefully it won't come, you know? So even how authentic we think we are is a function of how much we bullshit ourselves.
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Kim Meninger
What do you think, then, is the incentive structure, or maybe accountability that we can put in place for a lot of the leadership within these companies who think they have license to show up as authentically as they'd like?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Well, I think, you know, the sad thing, or maybe the good thing, is that. They're already in place. You know, they're already in place. I mean, of course, you know, it's very hard to perform as a leader if you're a jerk and if you don't care about others, because fundamentally, you have to enthuse others and build a high-performing team. Look even people like Steve Jobs, who, of course, are revered as the Messiah of innovation. We know were pretty obnoxious and dislikable, but they could still tame their dark side and obviously build and motivate high-performing teams. Of course, you know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. They can be quite, you know, not very kind and caring, but they have enormous talent and a vision that can enlist, you know, everybody behind them. Now, most leaders need to be somewhat caring, somewhat kind, somewhat empathetic, to, to be effective. Now, you also have those that where they can be rain makers and drive results because they're utilizing more top-down, hierarchical and, you know, maybe bold and aggressive and coercive methods. And so because of that, lots of organizations put in place specific KPIs or OKRs in this corpus where they said, well, it's not just about the what it's about the how. Every CHRO will tell you that they struggle with this, because sometimes your biggest rainmakers are also your biggest problem makers or troublemakers, right? Like in any organization, you will find the Pareto effect, whereby 20% of the people contribute 80% of the results, and then 20% of people contribute 80% of the problems. Some of these sometimes they're the same people. So what do you do? And you know, HBs Harvard Business School has a great study of about 10 years ago where they showed that the benefit of extracting bad apples from a team are two to three times higher to the benefits of bringing in a rainmaker or a superstar. So the data are very clear. Now, of course, politics, you know, if you are not just toxically authentic, and you know your dark side is unleashed, but you're good at manipulating politics and having a parasitic effect on your own leaders, I wouldn't bet against you. You, you know, it might be that you survive. What happens then is that you multiply like bacteria or parasites, and, you know, contaminated environment that then breeds other parasites and bacteria. So extracting these parasitic leaders is really, really pays off. It's not for moral reasons that organizations should do it. They should do it if they care about profitability and ROI.
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Kim Meninger
So I know the main answer to this question will be everybody. But who do you really hope will read this book?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Everybody is a good one. Everybody is a good one. Yeah, of course. Look, yeah. I mean, maybe more so than previous books, is not so much for leaders or HR professionals, but for a general audience. So I am hoping that it's read by people who think I'm crazy and who disagree with the argument and that they change their mind after reading it. But that's my kind of again, sort of like utopian, naive, delusional optimist inside me. Actually, I can tell you more so than with other books, I've had feedback, organic feedback, and you know, not 1000s of people, but dozens of people who have written and said, You know what, I bought this book because I liked your previous book, and I respect you, thinking that I would hate it, and actually, I kind of changed my mind. So I'm hopeful that a little bit of that happens. And I think ultimately, look, I'm trying to bring a little bit more nuance and rationality to the discussion. I like to think that I pick topics where the mainstream or popular view has become so absurd that a rational and data-driven view is controversial, and so I'm hoping that when you read it, it's less controversial than you know before you read it.
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Kim Meninger
I love that, and I think that's kind of what you did with the how, Why do so many incompetent men become weird as well. You've mastered the, the title in your book. Well, Tomas, I could talk to you all day. I'm just so fascinated by your work and your perspectives. Thank you so much for being here. For everyone else who wants more of you, where the can they find you and your book?
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
My pleasure. It's been great to chat so they can just go to my website, which is Dr Tomas dot com and that's D-R-T-O-M-A-S dot com and lots of information about articles, books, stuff I'm working on, and how to get in touch as well. Wonderful.
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Kim Meninger
Wonderful. Well, thank you again for your, for being here and for all of your great work.
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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Super excited. Be here. Thank you for the invitation.
