Archive for October, 2011
Why All the Leaders Are Above Average October 5 2011 no responses
My friends at SmartBrief on Leadership run a weekly poll on a question of interest to their 165,000 readers. A great guy named Mike Figliuolo, author of the just released One Piece of Paper, comes up with the questions and offers his analysis on the results. This week’s write up was a doozy.
Last week, Mike asked, “How do you think people would rate you as a leader?” with the choices being average, above average, below average, best leader they’ve ever had or they think I’m a terrible leader. It turns out that 74% of the respondents think they’re either above average or the best leader their people have ever had. How is this possible?
A lot of these leaders may be suffering from what social psychologists call illusory superiority. It’s the same phenomenon that led 68% of the faculty at the University of Nebraska to rate themselves in the top 25% of teaching ability or why 93% of U.S. drivers put themselves in the top 50% of driving ability. It might have something to do with why so many companies use peer benchmarking to pay their CEO’s at the 75th percentile or above. It might have been why former Dunder-Mifflin Scranton office manager, Michael Scott, thought he was so hilariously funny.
Is it possible that you are prone to illusory superiority? Given the stats, the odds are pretty good that you might be. (Me too, for that matter.) So, what can you do to give yourself a better chance of being a reality based leader? Here are four ideas:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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