Psychological profile of a leader

The research that you are looking at in the US about the successful presidents and what they have in common was interesting because it was looking at I think where they get their energy from, where they get their drive. And the question which has been asked is do they sometimes use the drive which is associated with being a successful president or a successful business leader and does some of this have something to do with what we call psychopathy or psychopathic tendencies.

But what is it we are referring to by saying psychopath? Because in ordinary everyday language that actually carries a negative connotation. Is that the case in psychological notions?

Someone who is slightly socially disconnected might be a psycho to you, someone who is perhaps unusual, slightly out of the normal. Sometimes it is people who are unusually confident. So, there are certain aspects in this American model of psychopathy. There are quite a lot of different dimensions within it some of which are underlined characteristics, some of which are more day-to-day behaviors. And you can have some underlined characteristics where people are perhaps very independent, they don’t really care too much about what other people think, they are very confident. They call it fearless dominance research and those qualities seem to go along with somebody who has pretty high energy and can be a very effective leader.

But the other aspect concerning the antisocial personality disorder which is really the kind of characteristics which are much more criminal, which we associate more with a criminal behavior, those are the ones which the public I think would think of as being psychopathy. And those characteristics are not associated with the successful presidents.

Dai, tell me, when we are talking about psychopathy, both in its positive and negative connotations, isn’t it something which also contributes to a dictator’s personality? Are dictators psychopaths?

When people are talking about terrorists and freedom fighters, it does depend on whether they are your allies or your enemies. If to talk about Saddam Hussein, quite a lot of Iraqi people would actually say – we respect him because he is strong, we don’t like some other things he does, but he is strong – whereas other countries would see him as an enemy and they would have a whole list of negative statements about him.

The same thing goes the other way around. If you are asking people about what they think of American President, it depends from whether you ask someone from the Western country who would maybe see the President as being very successful, or from the Middle Eastern country, for example Afghanistan, who may think quite the opposite. So, what makes good political leaders partly depends on the situation that they are in and the people who are looking at them.

Don’t you think that perhaps what you are talking about could actually be applied to all leaders in the Western hemisphere?

I think it could be. I think the characteristics which they are taking out basically are certain characteristics which give people a lot of independent energy but at the same time the result of being confident and independent is that they make confident decisions and may take action and so they are seen as being effective leaders and presidents. And in terms of American presidents, they also have to be skilled at getting the support of the Congress, and so they have to have social skills to win a lot of support. It is not just the question about being very confident about, say, deciding to start a war but it is actually that they need to have a skill to bring people with them. So, they need to be respected which is not the same as somebody who is perhaps a bully or a dictator who is overconfident of their own decisions and that they make decisions against the advice of other people.

But if we look at the leaders in this list, there is Theodore Roosevelt and number ten is George W. Bush. The two personalities, at least for a lay person, not to a psychologist, they look very different. So, do you think that perhaps in our times there is another factor which comes at play which is political technologies? Because I’m not sure there was such thing like political technologies at the time of Theodore Roosevelt. And he actually put his country out of the awful crisis and brought it to a victory in the World War II, as we all know. And this is definitely not the case with George W. Bush, but still he too seems to be leading the list of so many US presidents.

I think that there is a danger in this research of making it look too simple which is simply saying that strong people are effective and weak people are not effective. Just because they are strong it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are actually making good decisions or that they are actually able to think strategically. There are dimensions which this research doesn’t look at at all in terms of personality.

Like what for instance?

About strategic thinking and so on like that, which are very important in terms of successful leadership behavior. As a work psychologist I’m cautious about this particular research. It is just focusing on a very narrow area of behavior, as though that this is the most important magic factor for a new president.

From my own work and experience there are other factors, from the leadership research for example in the oil industry, in Shell, which is that some of the most effective leaders are people who have a very, very good balance between thinking strategically and tactically. So, they actually have the ability to think like helicopters, if you like, that they can move up and take a very high view of a strategic situation, like a battlefield commander. But then, if they see a problem, they are very good at moving quickly to answer a question about a very practical problem which needs to be sorted straight away before you move on. And the most capable leaders in that industry were people who were very versatile and they were able to move easily between the strategic and the day-to-day.

That kind of skill and personality style isn’t mentioned in this particular kind of research. This research is very interesting in terms of where people get their energy from. And it is rather saying that the people who don’t care too much about what other people think about them, that they tend to get more results. I think that’s true in some situations. It would be true in a wartime situation because you need urgent decisions and sometimes very hard and cruel decisions, but people will respect the need for that kind of decision because the whole situation is so desperate.

Dai, I also remember you were telling me that different situations require different leadership skills.

Yes.

Could you expand a little bit on that?

Certainly in a wartime situation like in Britain during the war when Churchill was seemed to be perhaps the personality which was needed to lead the nation in that particular environment. And he had a lot of confidence and certainly he would come pretty high on this fearless dominance I think, with the phrase which they found was the most effective but slightly psychopathic tendency. But with the end of the war that kind of style was completely not acceptable to the country for reconstruction. And what was needed were the leaders who were far more humanly aware and who understood the needs of the population, and who were able to carry the country with them in a peace situation, in a way which is about cooperation.

This is quite important in terms of leadership style and assertiveness. In a war situation you need higher control leadership where people can make very hard decisions very fast. But in a peacetime situation that person will be called a bully and in a war situation he might be a hero.

Don’t you think that this kind of research, and this is not the only research of that kind, analysts, what they are trying to do is perhaps create a certain typological case of a successful, in this case, president. But how fair is the attempt? I mean do we really need to work out some standards?

I think it is very useful. I like the way they have done the research because I think they had the psychologists who were trying to make an assessment of the personalities of these presidents, but I think they also compared them with the help of historians and economists who looked at how successful their period of office had been.

And in terms of what I would call psychohistory it is really interesting. We have such rich information from the history, if we look at it in these kind of ways, to say what worked and what didn’t work, what went wrong and how this could be useful if we have a similar situation in the future, how can we do it better next time.

That was very important in another area like the Cuban missile crisis and when we nearly had the III World War because of some very dangerous group thinking in the American Government. And they made a lot of miscalculations because they had too much belief in their own projects.

Whom would you personally describe as an impressive and successful leader, in the historic perspective naturally, not necessarily now?

The most impressive one that I’ve ever met or nearly met was Filed Marshal Montgomery who was the British Army leader in the World War II. And when I was having my army training many years ago, he came along and gave a lecture to us and he said there were three kinds of leadership – leadership through status, simply because somebody has got high ranks of an office; leadership through fear which is by bullying people; and leadership through respect. And he said when you are in a really dangerous severe emergency situation where everything is bad the only kind of leader would be the most effective is who will get the most effective support and performance from their troops, it is the leader who leads because of respect.

Of respect!

Respect. So, the point about leadership isn’t just about making clever decisions. Leadership is very much about the ability to involve hundreds of other people who will actually implement those decisions and who will give advice, and who will create operation effectiveness. So, you have the head of a government, you have many different areas, you have military, finance, industry, education, culture – in all these different areas the most skillful leader is the leader who can actually inspire other leaders of those different territories to do the best in their area but who can also inspire them to work together as a team, to cooperate between different pieces of the economy so that you have a really healthy nation which is working in positive harmony.

Is it true both about elected leaders and, shall we say, short term leaders and long term leaders? Does it also apply to someone like monarchs?

A monarch defies all of these principles because you have no control over the recruitment of them. You are stuck with the one that you happen by some historical accidence to get. Genetically there is a likelihood that they are not very intelligent because they often got suffered from inbreeding. But I suppose successful monarchies, but again you need to have a historical context, in a modern situation, now, where populations are educated and where there are likely to be very sophisticated political processes the idea that a monarch can have total dictatorship, total control doesn’t exist in too many places or if it does it only exists for a short time.

I’m thinking about Idi Amin who wasn’t a royal monarch but who actually defied what I just said because he lasted for much too many years. How ever he was allowed to stay in control of his country for so long is a different thing which is sometimes if somebody has totalitarian control, if they do control by fear, which Montgomery said, they can create almost a magic bubble around them where people find it impossible to challenge them.

And where people come to be fascinated with them. Is something known like a Stockholm syndrome, is it relevant in those situations?

I suppose it might be, when these people who are so brutal can actually maintain the loyalty of some of the people who work closely with them because once they are working closely with them, they don’t have any choice, so they really have to make the best of what happens.

My hunch from what we are saying is that the idea of having a very long term leader may have been functional in other past periods of history when social evolution and events moved very slowly. But in the modern society where events change so fast, there are huge changes because of technologies, international trade and everything like this, the idea that one individual can be a perfect leader for 50 years or something like this is pretty dangerous I think.

When the leaders do this, they tend to be people who are very undominating. A successful ones would be I think somebody like the Dalai Lama or like Queen Elizabeth. In a way they are kind of very quiet gentle people who command on respect and maybe they are allowed to stay in their position because they operate in quiet ways but they don’t try to control the whole situation and let other people control it, but they maintain some degree of personal integrity and from that they get respect. So, they are allowed to stay in their position for a longer time.

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