Ian Wat­son, 23 July 2010.

The title of this post is pat­ently absurd.

The pur­pose of a title like Women Do Not Make Good Exec­ut­ive Man­agers is to appeal to any­one who holds a strong view on the mat­ter (and wel­come to this blog — I hope the fol­low­ing thoughts don’t hurt too much!). Admit­tedly, I could have chosen the title, Men Do Not Make Good Exec­ut­ive Man­agers, but that was in a strange twist of polit­ical cor­rect­ness, less con­tro­ver­sial and atten­tion grabbing.

Key skill of a lucid man­ager is the abil­ity to chal­lenge your own beliefs and respond to evid­ence and data. In the words of Carl Sagan:

It is bet­ter by far to embrace the hard truth than a reas­sur­ing fable.”

I’ll lay my cards on the table here and let you know that I per­son­ally believe that the effect­ive­ness of an Exec­ut­ive Man­ager is a com­bin­a­tion of intel­li­gence, people skills, train­ing, innov­at­ive think­ing, tech­nical know­ledge, cor­por­ate and team cul­ture com­bined with myriad external factors. Gender, of its own accord, is unlikely to sig­ni­fic­antly change the Executive’s effectiveness. Regardless, a vast major­ity of Exec­ut­ive Man­agers in Aus­tralia (and other coun­tries) are males.^1.

So, if more Exec­ut­ive Man­agers are male, does that imply that males are more pre­dis­posed to being Exec­ut­ives? The simple answer is, ‘No”. This type of reas­on­ing is a com­mon logical fal­lacy known as post hoc ergo prop­tor hoc, which is a pop­u­lar device among politi­cians. In this case the fal­lacy lies in the assump­tion that the fact that most Exec­ut­ive Man­agers are male (post hoc) is proof that they are exec­ut­ives because of their gender (ergo prop­tor hoc). While the absurdity of this extreme example may seem obvi­ous, less obvi­ous fal­la­cies go undetec­ted in the work­place. It seems that crit­ical think­ing is less likely to be engaged when encoun­ter­ing many of the pop­u­lar per­son­al­ity tests.^2.

Many dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity tests are used around the world to sep­ar­ate people into cat­egor­ies. The inten­tion is to sug­gest a beha­vi­oural or career pre­dis­pos­i­tion; an example being those cat­egor­ised as ENTJ — “The Exec­ut­ive”, the clear implic­a­tion being “ENTJs Make Bet­ter Exec­ut­ives”. In some cases research is claimed, but rarely cited, to demon­strate that par­tic­u­lar ‘types’ are found in par­tic­u­lar pro­fes­sions or roles imply­ing that people of a par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­ity pro­file are most appro­pri­ate for that type of role. This post hoc ergo prop­ter hoc ration­al­isa­tion is as unjus­ti­fi­able as the state­ment “Women Do Not Make Good Exec­ut­ive Man­agers”. It is this type of ration­al­isa­tion that can under­mine the decision-making pro­cess of any man­ager which, in turn, under­mines their effectiveness.

A lucid man­ager will be more effect­ive if aware of decision-making traps

On a daily basis man­agers are faced with many decisions and each manager’s effect­ive­ness is, in a large part, determ­ined by the effect­ive­ness of their decision-making abil­ity. A lucid man­ager will be more effect­ive if aware of decision-making traps such as post hoc jus­ti­fic­a­tions; par­tic­u­larly when the faced with the ques­tion, “Do you think we should use a per­son­al­ity test?”.

When con­fron­ted by this ques­tion it is far bet­ter for a man­ager to chal­lenge their own beliefs and to pos­sibly even embrace hard truths by ask­ing whether per­son­al­ity tests are merely a reas­sur­ing fable.

1. For fur­ther inform­a­tion check the 2008 EOWA Aus­tralian Census of Women in Lead­er­ship which reports that only 10.7% of ASX200 Exec­ut­ive Man­agers were women des­pite women com­pris­ing 44.9% of the Aus­tralian Labour Force. [↩]
2. See also our pre­vi­ous post, The Lies we Tell and a reflect­ive essay on the use of per­son­al­ity tests, Know Thy­self. [↩]