I recently did some guest teaching in the graduate program in Organizational Leadership at Indiana Wesleyan University. There was a lot of discussion and Q&A with a very diverse, bright, and accomplished group of graduate students. They had many comments, observations, and challenging questions. One question stood out and got us all thinking: “Why does it seem [based on observations] that most leaders/managers are mediocre—neither really good nor really bad?
I’ve never had that question posed, and it stimulated a lot of thinking (and continuing discussion) over two days. After a lot of reflection, here are my thoughts:
Is Leader Effectiveness Normally Distributed?
My first response was to consider what is meant by leader “mediocrity.” If leader effectiveness is a continuum from the very poor to the very good/outstanding, then mediocrity is in the middle. As a psychologist, I immediately thought of the normal distribution—the well-known bell curve. If leader effectiveness is indeed normally distributed, then the bulk of leaders are in the middle—approximately 68 percent of them.
Noted psychologist Robert Hogan asserts that 65 to 75 percent of managers are bad. With that normal distribution in mind, where would Hogan draw the dividing line between good and bad managers? Likely somewhere in the mediocre range, so that the majority of mediocre leaders are joined with the roughly 16 percent of leaders who are at the low end of the normally distributed effectiveness dimension.
While that might answer the immediate question of why most leaders seem mediocre, it’s really more complex than that.
Maybe It’s Not the Leader, But the Followers
Leadership is co-created by the interaction of leaders and followers. When the leaders fail, it could be due to the leader’s incompetence/ineffectiveness, or perhaps the followers—the team members—are to blame. [OK, we just blamed the leader, now we’re blaming the followers?!]
That brings us to the issue of how we evaluate leader effectiveness. Effective leaders lead teams/collectives that achieve outcomes. So, one way to determine leader effectiveness is to focus on goal attainment. But, as we just saw, that has as much to do with the followers—the synergy of leaders leading and followers following in concert toward achieving the goal.
Another way to determine leader effectiveness is to focus on leader mistakes—what are commonly called “derailers.” (Hogan, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2011). This is a big part of Hogan’s assertion about so many bad/failed leaders. Derailers include a wide variety of leader missteps that typically result in the leader being fired and/or replaced.
Perhaps the gold standard for evaluating leader effectiveness is to focus directly on how leaders lead, putting them through a managerial or leadership assessment center (Kleinmann & Ingold, 2019). This involves a series of simulated leadership/management tasks, and the leaders are evaluated on their abilities to successfully accomplish the tasks. Of course, this is a costly and time-consuming methodology, but it does lead to a good understanding of a leader’s skills and competencies.
A more common way of evaluating leader effectiveness is to ask the followers to evaluate the leader’s effectiveness, and this is likely most relevant to the original question. In 360-degree evaluations (and other ratings of direct supervisors), followers rate their leader’s effectiveness on a variety of dimensions. Commonly done as part of a manager/leader’s performance review, these evaluations have a number of measurement problems. First and foremost, the ratings are subjective and potentially biased. There is evidence that these ratings are correlated with how much the follower likes the leader. Another issue is how the follower conceptualizes the ratings. Are they holding their leader to unrealistically high standards? Are the followers hypercritical and subject to a “no-leader-is-ever-good-enough” severity bias? And, with multiple followers/direct reports, the mean/average is often the resulting measure, but the followers may vastly disagree, with some very high and some very low ratings (that result = mediocrity).
What’s the Answer?
Well, there’s probably no definitive answer. To understand leader effectiveness, we clearly need to consider the entire leadership “system,” which consists of what the leader and the followers bring to the leadership equation. We also have to consider the situation—the context. Sometimes, the context presents a “no-win” situation where the collective is doomed to failure regardless of their shared capacity for leadership.
Leadership Essential Reads
From a leadership development perspective, the best answer to the mediocrity question is clear. If so many leaders and followers are mediocre, the best strategy is to help them develop, to get better at leading and following. This is what leader (and follower/team) development is all about—moving the needle and pushing those mediocre leaders and followers toward the positive end of the continuum.
