Some Leaders Are Better at Looking Successful Than Being Successful

I have developed a small prejudice over the years. Whenever an executive spends too much of a business presentation talking about themselves, I become suspicious. Not because leaders shouldn't explain what they have accomplished. They should. But there is a point at which a presentation about the business becomes a presentation about the person running it.

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One executive I knew particularly well was very good at this. He had an impressive personal story. He had started near the bottom of the organization and worked his way up, eventually reaching a very senior leadership position. He was understandably proud of that journey, and he spoke about it often. Very often.

Presentations about the business somehow found their way back to his career. Conversations about other people's experiences frequently became opportunities to recount his own. His personal story had become an important part of the story he told about his leadership. There was another characteristic that, in retrospect, seems connected. He wasn't a particularly good listener. 

 

Managing up is not the same as leading

This executive was, however, exceptionally good at managing upward. He understood what senior management wanted to hear. He knew how to make his achievements visible, how to position himself around successful initiatives and how to communicate confidence and ambition. Senior leaders noticed him. And he climbed the corporate ladder remarkably quickly.

For some time, that seemed to validate the perception that he was an exceptional leader. But eventually I began to wonder whether we were confusing two very different abilities: the ability to lead and the ability to create a compelling narrative about one's leadership.

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Organizations are particularly vulnerable to this confusion because the people who decide who gets promoted rarely experience those executives in the same way their teams do: senior management sees the presentation, but the team experiences the leader. They experience whether the leader listens when they speak, whether disagreement is genuinely welcomed, whether credit is shared, whether bad news can travel upward without being repackaged, and whether conversations are actually conversations rather than opportunities for the leader to speak again. Those things are much harder to put on a slide.

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The internal market for reputation

There is nothing inherently wrong with managing upward. Executives need to communicate what they and their teams have accomplished. Good work that nobody knows about can easily become invisible work.

But there is a difference between making the work visible and making yourself the protagonist of every success story.

I have seen leaders become highly celebrated inside organizations because they were exceptionally good at the latter. They were articulate, confident, visible and skilled at ensuring that influential people understood their contribution. Sometimes the results justified the reputation and sometimes they didn't.

And that is where organizations should become more skeptical. Because self-promotion can, at least for a while, substitute for performance in how leadership is perceived.

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Who gets to judge leadership?

One of the weaknesses of traditional organizations is that the people deciding whether a leader should be promoted are often better positioned to observe how that leader presents than how that leader leads. That creates an obvious distortion.

A leader can be impressive in a quarterly review and exhausting to work for during the other 89 days of the quarter. A leader can speak eloquently about developing people while rarely listening to them. And a leader can build an extraordinary internal reputation without building an extraordinary organization.

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This doesn't mean that quiet leaders are automatically better, or that ambitious executives should avoid promoting their accomplishments. Visibility matters, particularly in large organizations. The distinction I have become more interested in is where the leader places the spotlight.

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The strongest leaders I have known didn't need to be the protagonist of every success story. Their presence was visible in something else: the quality of the people around them, the strength of the teams they built and what those people were able to accomplish.

Perhaps that is a less glamorous form of leadership. It is also considerably harder to fake.

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So the next time an executive gives an impressive presentation about everything they have accomplished, perhaps there is another question worth asking:

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What would the people who work for this person say if the leader weren't in the room?