Yesterday my brother asked me what makes a good manager. There are probably people with a lot more managerial experience who can provide a more practical answer, but I want to make two points:
First, there are different kinds of leaders
Obvious, right? But I want to say something slightly less obvious, which is that leadership types can be understood in terms of Big 5 personality traits.
So imagine that we have a model of leadership where a leader observes a system and then tries to make some interventions to improve some metric of whether the system is functioning properly. The kinds of things a leader will perceive and the kinds of interventions they will want to make depends on personality:
A hero (extrovert) might see a motivation problem and try to motivate the team by communicating a vision, or expressing hope, confidence, competitiveness, willingness to sacrifice, etc.
An innovator (open/intellectual) might see a problem with the way the system is designed, and look for ways that it needs to adapt.
A smith/engineer (conscientious) might see an efficiency or consistency problem, and try to figure out a way to get the trains to run on time.
A shepherd (agreeableness) might see a morale problem, and look for ways to improve the fairness and make people feel safe and valued.
A knight (neuroticism) might see where people have violated the norms of the community (i.e., a moral problem), and use guilt to bring people in line.
All of these could potentially be real issues for an organization, so I don’t think there is any one leadership style that works best. In many cases, all of these problems exist to some degree, and the problem is prioritizing interventions. However, we should recognize that no leader is going to be a completely impartial. We see what we are inclined to see, and we act in ways we are comfortable acting. Our brains are very good at constructing a narrative and making sure that everything we see is consistent with that narrative.
Thus, a leaders personality is both a blessing and a curse. Our personality is what enables us to see issues in the first place, and to connect problems to solutions or interventions. But it also blinds us into seeing everything as a nail perfectly suited to our hammer (brain-hammering!)
Anyway, I think you get the point. A good leader or manager is the one making the right interventions that will achieve the system objectives. Different organizations have different needs, and every leader is inclined to be more sensitive to some things than others. So moving on to…
Second, there are different kinds of objectives
Consider two different objectives: maximizing the welfare of a group, and maximizing the productivity that can be extracted from the group. The difference is similar to the labor vs. capital divide, or the difference between representative and colonial governments.
Typically, whether the leader identifies with the group determines whether they are seeking the welfare of the group or whether they see the group as a means to an end. Some leadership strategies make more sense in one context than the other.
Perhaps the most obvious example is shepherd’s tendency to address fairness issues. If morale is low because of perceived unfairness, the most straightforward response might be to adjust the distribution of benefits (usually in a way that results in more equality, although not always). This can hurt the productivity of a group even if it increases morale (and overall welfare). Shepherds probably have a tendency to identify more strongly with the laborers or common troops than those who have other dominant characteristics.
In any case, the effectiveness of the leadership strategy is relative. People have often accused certain investors (e.g., hedge funds) of buying businesses, extracting as much as they can from them, and then gutting them, leaving the employees high and dry. But really, all capitalist firms are built on an extraction model. That is, management has explicit obligations toward ownership, and not necessarily towards labor.
My personal opinion is that this is the best model we have for interactions among strangers. So, for a typical capitalist firm we should measure the effectiveness of management based on whether they produce profits for ownership. However, as I have discussed in other contexts, this isn’t the only possible model of a firm. In a family business, the welfare maximizing model is more appropriate.
Now, you might think that this difference is going to result in a competitive edge for capitalist firms. They certainly predominate in our society. The reason for this is it looks like capitalist firms (or at least the products they produce) are often preferred by consumers (i.e., unbiased 3rd parties who are neither ownership nor labor). Think of the success of Walmart vs neighborhood coops.
This is getting beyond the scope of this post, but let me just mention that I think there are really good reasons for the emergence of the capitalist firms structure, and it isn’t going away. However, I also think there is room for other models, and that in some circumstances they will be more productive than capitalist firms.
So, back to the question of what makes a good leader. My answer is that it is both relative and conditional. It is relative because good leadership should be evaluated differently based on the objective one is using. It is conditional because all leaders have different personalities (i.e., leadership strengths), and all teams have different needs. And of course, when evaluating a teams needs, we are all going to see the situation through the lens of our own personality. So maybe we will always come to the conclusion that good leader is someone whose interests are aligned with ours, and who has a similar personality to our own.
