NPR. The entire world of work can basically be divided into two kinds of people, the managers and the managed. And those of us who've spent our days toiling in the managed class have probably experienced our share of bad managers. I think a lot of people secretly feel like their managers are sort of extraneous to what they do. Yes.
Well, often they are. I mean, so just because management is necessary doesn't mean that everyone is doing it well. David Deming is a labor economist and dean at Harvard College. The reason why you say management can feel so bad sometimes is because bad coordination feels wasteful because it is wasteful. Would you say you're a good manager?
You know, it's funny. I would say that I'm an average to below average manager unconditionally. I think I've worked hard to become average. David's also been working hard to understand what makes a good manager. Like are there specific traits that can be measured in a scientific way that actually predict who will be a good manager?
And in a study published earlier this year, David and his colleagues found the answer is, yes, there are. And they aren't, which you might think. This is the indicator for planning money. I'm Adrian Ma. I'm Ricky Mulvey.
How do you identify a good manager with science? That's after the break. Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your turn without a scenario is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with your turn without a snobbery.
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Listen now to sources and methods from NPR. For businesses, managers can mean the difference between profit and loss. For employees, a manager can make work a great place to be or a terrible one. That's why there's that saying that people don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad managers.
Yeah. And for all that at stake, David Deming argues that a lot of companies really are not that great at picking managers. When a firm has a manager role to fill, David says they usually default to a couple of different approaches. They might promote someone who was a good frontline worker. The people who are good on the first rung of the latter, who are good individual contributors, automatically get thought of his management material.
The problem with that is that people who are great individual workers aren't always the best at running teams. Another way companies try to identify good managers is through interviews. But David says this is full of problems. The job interview is a pretty terrible technology for figuring out what people can do. It's like we sit here, we talk, I ask you a few stock questions about tell me about a time when and people kind of know what to expect.
That's probably a bad way of figuring out whether somebody's good at anything, including management. Because I think it loads too heavily on do I like this person and is this person the kind of person that feels to me like a manager? So it introduces bias? It can introduce gender bias. It can introduce all kinds of biases.
But it also is just a bad measure. If you and I bond at the end of the meeting or whether we like to play tennis at the same club, that might make me even unconsciously think of you as a better manager because you're more like me and I think I'm a good manager and so you should be like me. It's all kinds of like mood, you know, kind of affiliations, sense that people get that I think tricks them. When you think about it, a lot of hiring and promotion is just going on vibes. So is there a less squishy, more objective way to try and identify people who could be good managers?
That was the question David and his colleagues set out to answer with an experiment. So they started by recruiting a few hundred people and having them take a series of tests which were designed to assess three types of skills, economic decision making, emotional intelligence and fluid intelligence, which is just a fancy word for creative problem solving skills. And after these skills assessments, participants were divided into three person teams with half of the teams being randomly assigned. We said, okay, there's three people coming in, we randomly assigned you, you two, you're the workers, you get to be the manager. For the other half of the teams, participants were actually given a choice.
They were asked on a scale of one to ten, how much do you want to be the manager? The person who gave the highest answer, the one who most wanted to be a manager, got to be the manager. Then all the teams were given a variety of puzzles and problems to solve. The manager was in charge of delegating tasks and motivating the workers. So it's like, you know, Adrian, I need you to pull your weight here, like you're doing the puzzle task and you're behind everybody else, you know, or like noticing that Adrian is struggling with the puzzle task and put him on the other one and put him on the more, let's say no offense, some more capable worker on the one you were doing.
Do you feel called out, Adrian? Are you good at puzzles? I am terrible at puzzles. So I guess that makes David a perceptive manager. Afterwards, the teams were scored based on how well they did.
If they just run this exercise once, it would be hard to know whether the person in the manager role really made a difference. If they did well, maybe they just got lucky and were paired with employees who were really good. That's why David ran the exercise again and again, moving the managers from team to team. And it turns out that when you assign people to this, like we can really pull out the individual effects. So some people really are better at this.
In other words, like I put you, I make you the manager of four or five different teams and you are always making the team worse or you're always making it better. So reveal time, which traits ended up being the most predictive of managerial performance? For instance, did the people who were most eager to lead make good managers? Turns out, no, on average, self-promoted managers did worse than managers who were randomly assigned. You know, Ricky, I think it was Plato who said that people who really want power are not fit to wield it.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Me and Plato were on the same way. Maybe you're hearing this and thinking about every bad manager you've ever had and congratulations. Now you have some scientific data to back it up. What's going on here?
David says is a classic case of toxic overconfidence. We found that the people who are really wanted to be managers were much more likely to overestimate their own abilities. So they thought they were better at the individual tasks than they were and they thought they were better management than they were. And so they were just, they were just over confident. You know, it's people who are likely to say, yeah, nine, ten, I definitely manager just think they're better than they really are.
They also tended to be men. So yeah, make of that what you will. These self-selected managers also tended to score lower on a test of emotional perceptiveness. Basically how good they were at reading other people's emotions. So what traits made for good managers?
You know, the ones who made every team they were on better? Well, it wasn't a participant's age or their gender, education or work experience. It wasn't their confidence or their personality. The best predictor of a high performing manager was a high score on their initial tests of economic decision making and fluid intelligence, which makes sense because basically it's saying they were good at deciding how to allocate resources and create a problem solving. Now of course, one thing to find these results in a lab experiment, but David wanted to test this idea in the real world.
So he reached out to a large South American grocery store chain, which gave its store managers the same tests. And we found, yes, that basically people who score higher on our management test, when they move to a different store, that stores sales and profits go up. Really good managers were better at keeping check outlines moving and making sure they didn't run out of certain items. They also increased sales by about 5% per month, which he figures adds about $200,000 a year to a store's bottom line. David's study, by the way, was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
And he says, the big takeaway is that you can predict who will likely be a good manager based on measurable traits that are often overlooked. Having a disciplined and careful way of selecting managers in your organization really matters. Like if all you're doing is picking the people who always raise their hand for opportunities, you're not necessarily getting the best people. In fact, you may be getting worse people than average. And also there are a lot of people who are totally happy to stay in their lane and be an individual contributor, but might actually be a good manager if given the chance.
So reading eagerness to serve as a signal of skill is a mistake. Does this mean companies should start giving a manager version of the SAT? It's just imagining a world where the next time that I go to seek a promotion, I'm given a test to identify which shapes don't belong in a pattern or something. I might be kind of insulted. I'm like, I'm trying to do this job and you're showing me triangles.
So that's why we gave the IQ test almost like something to compare our other tests to. I don't actually think that employers should be giving IQ tests. I mean, I think you can do better. I would give a test that's more related to the thing you have to do. And what about the emotional intelligence?
Would you support that? I would, but that's for different reasons, which is I think that emotional intelligence, what I would call social skills, the ability to work well on a team and work well on others, is the most underpriced skill in the entire world, basically. I think it really matters for being a good worker, being a good manager, being a good person. So Ricky, have you ever had any bad managers? So before we started recording, I said I've never had a bad manager.
But that's because I realized that I just you live had a trauma compartment of my brain that I didn't want to revisit. You've repressed the one bad manager in your whole work history. This episode was produced by Cooper Katz and Kim and engineered by Jimmy Keeley, who was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, kicking Candida's or editor and the indicators of production of NPR. American journalist Austin Ties vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him.
And now we finally have some answers. This is the person that Austin was in. Oh my God. We found Austin's file. Listen to Where Is Austin Ties from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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