Why Do Some Leaders Get Better with Time?

Biographies of famous leaders rarely illustrate the passage from incompetence to competence, or how losers turn into winners. If anything, the opposite is far more likely: prosocial, charismatic, and visionary leaders turning into brutal dictators, creative geniuses transforming into toxic egomaniacs, and exceptional achievers derailing thanks to their insatiable power drive or pathological ambition.

Leader contemplating the world

Source: Copyfree image from Sajjad Hussain M/Burst

And yet, organizations are spending billions of dollars each year to train and coach bosses so they can become a better version of themselves. All despite systematic scientific evidence showing that personality and values are remarkably stable after the age of 30, with the caveat that people tend to become more pleasant, conservative, and less extraverted, creative and curious as they get older. In other words, the default pattern we would loosely describe as "maturity" consists of becoming a more boring version of our former selves, and that is probably the best-case scenario (compared to, say, turning into an exaggerated or amplified version of our younger self).

Now onto the good news: Some leaders do appear to get better, particularly if they seek and receive competent professional help, including executive coaching. Furthermore, psychological research has managed to identify some key factors that account for this ability to improve, or higher "coachability" potential. For example:

1. Drive

Unsurprisingly, driven people are more likely to develop their leadership potential, not least because they are less likely to be satisfied with their performance and accomplishments. In fact, what is ambition but the ability to remain dissatisfied with your success? As Alfred Adler (inspired by Nietzsche) argued, the human will to power can be seen as an attempt to compensate for inner insecurities, which explains why many exceptional achievers seem to lust for an exorbitant degree of recognition — a lust that is largely fueled by deeply rooted insecurities that are expressed, if not disguised, as narcissism. Sadly, when leaders are overly driven their obsession for being recognized or celebrated will extinguish their desire to improve and get better... so, yes, you can be too ambitious for your own sake.

2. Openness

Most people are allergic to feedback, unless it makes them look good. However, in order to close the gap between your desired and actual performance, you need to be able to seek, receive, and digest critical feedback. Research suggests that when managers do this, they are far more likely to grow their potential and advance their careers. This is in line with decades of psychological research on the leadership benefits of openness to experience, perspective-taking, and empathy.

Openness has been linked to curiosity (prompting individuals to dig deeper to understand themselves better), and adaptability, as well as the willingness to apply one's reasoning capabilities to develop new expertise — something that, in a rapidly changing world of ubiquitous skill automation and growing intellectual complexity, is a critical ingredient of leadership talent.

3. Humility

Although we all understand the importance and value of humility, our leadership choices keep focusing on self-belief, confidence, and arrogance. This is why humility continues to grow in importance: because we are very good at overlooking and excluding humble candidates from leadership roles. Unsurprisingly, when humble leaders manage to somehow squeeze into the job, they show greater potential to improve and get better. Indeed, in the area of competence or performance, people will have a greater capacity for developing their talents if they are (a) aware of their limitations, self-critical, and under-confident, rather than (b) deluded and self-deceived about their talents, entitled, and over-confident.

Much of the leadership development industry has been downgraded to the self-help literature, which is largely focused on flattering the egos of people who are already quite overconfident and narcissistic. The ROI of leadership interventions would probably increase if more time were devoted to flatten those egos. If we want to align leaders' self-estimated talents with their actual talents, we need to lower rather than increase their confidence, so they can harness humility rather than increase their arrogance.

In short, as the classic joke in psychology states: "How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? One, so long as the lightbulb really wants to change." We can apply the same logic to leaders. This is why getting our leader selection right is so critical.

Picking leaders who are willing to change means winning half of the battle. If we select leaders on their actual potential, we will spend less time trying to develop them, and they will also manage to develop more and better. If we don't, then we will have to continue increasing our budget for coaching, training and development. Great leaders are always a work in progress; bad leaders are at best a finished product, and at worst a declining or deteriorating force with serious potential for harming people, organizations, and nations.