Are most leaders good, bad, or mediocre?

I recently had a guest education in the organization’s graduate program. leadership at Indiana Wesleyan University. There was a lot of discussion and Q&A with a group of very diverse, cheerful, skilled graduate students. They had many comments, observations and challenging questions. One question stood out and made us all think.

I never raised that question and stimulated many thoughts (and continued debate) over the course of two days. After much reflection, here is my thoughts:

Is the effectiveness of leaders distributed normally?

My first answer was to consider the meaning of “mediocre” for leaders. When the effectiveness of a leader is a continuum from very poor to very good/exceptional people, mediocrity is in the middle. As a psychologist, I quickly thought of the normal distribution, the well-known Bell curve. If the effectiveness of a leader is actually distributed correctly, the majority of the leaders are in the middle.

Famous psychologist Robert Hogan claims that between 65 and 75% of managers are bad. With that normal distribution in mind, where does Hogan draw the division line between good and bad managers? Because it is likely somewhere in the mediocre range, the majority of mediocre leaders are tied to about 16% of leaders in the low-end of the normally distributed effectiveness dimension.

That might answer the immediate question of why most leaders look mediocre, but that’s really more complicated than that.

Maybe it’s not a leader, it’s a follower

Leadership is co-created through leader-follower interactions. When a leader fails, it can be held responsible for the leader’s incompetence/inefficientness, or perhaps the team member who is a follower. (Okay, we blamed our leaders, are we now criticising our followers?!)

It brings us to the question of how to assess leader effectiveness. Effective leaders lead the team/group that achieves results. Therefore, one way to determine leader effectiveness is to focus on achieving goals. But as we saw it, it has just as much to do with followers. Following the concert to help lead leaders and followers synergy and achieve their goals.

Another way to determine leader effectiveness is to focus on leader mistakes. This is commonly referred to as “derailment.” (Hogan, Hogan, and Kaiser, 2011). This is a big part of Hogan’s claims about so many bad/failed leaders. Derailment involves various leader missteps as leaders become fired and/or replaced.

Perhaps the gold standard for assessing leader effectiveness is to focus directly on how leaders lead and lead them to management or leadership assessment centres (Kleinmann & Ingold, 2019). This includes a set of simulated leadership/management tasks, where leaders are evaluated for their ability to successfully complete the task. Of course, this is a costly and time-consuming methodology, but it leads to a thorough understanding of the skills and abilities of the leader.

A more common way to assess leader effectiveness is to ask followers to assess leader effectiveness. This may be most relevant to the original question. With a 360-degree rating (and other direct supervisor ratings), followers assess the effectiveness of their leaders on various dimensions. In general, these assessments, which were made as part of a manager/leader performance review, have many measurement issues. First and foremost, evaluations are subjective and potentially biased. There is evidence that these ratings correlate with how much their followers like leaders. Another question is how followers conceptualize ratings. Do they hold leaders unrealistically high standards? Are followers overcritical and affected by the severity of “nothing ever”? bias? And when using multiple followers/direct reports, the average/average is the resultant measure, but followers can be very opposed with very high and very low ratings (results=mediocre).

What is the answer?

Well, there is probably no definitive answer. Understanding the effectiveness of a leader requires clearly considering the “system” of leadership, which consists of what a leader is. and Followers bring to the leadership equation. You also need to consider the situation, or context. Sometimes, context presents a “non-winning” situation where a group is destined to fail, regardless of the shared ability of leadership.

From a leadership development perspective, the best answer to mediocre questions is clear. When so many leaders and followers are mediocre, the best strategy is for them to help develop and improve leads and follow. This means that it’s all about developing leaders (and followers/teams). Move the needle and push those mediocre leaders and followers forward into the continuum.