Organizational research on what leads people to be selected as leaders has shown consistently that charisma, defined broadly as the ability to come across as confident, warm, and big-picture focused in interpersonal interactions, is among the most predictive factors for being promoted. It also happens to be one of the weakest predictors of leader effectiveness when carefully measured against outcomes. This gap between who rises to the top and who excels as a leader is not a methodological artifact. It’s how our organizational selection systems work, and the impact they have on organizational performance is large and widely misunderstood.
Charisma is one of many leadership competencies studied by academics and practitioners alike. On leadership emergence: the Project leadership research literature. One review of research on leadership emergence found that individuals rated as charismatic were much more likely to be rated as leaders by their colleagues and bosses, and more likely to be chosen as leaders than were individuals who were judged to be just as (or more) competent on analytical problem-solving tasks and interpersonal communication and were simply less charismatic in their presentation.
On leader effectiveness: Research indicates leaders with these traits produce satisfied followers, who in turn evaluate these leaders more positively. This study shows a strong correlation between charismatic leader behavior and follower attitudes, but weak or non-significant correlations between charismatic leader behavior and key organizational outcomes: profitability, productivity, turnover, and quality of decision making.
Charisma reliably predicts leadership selection but not leadership performance because selection itself reliably weeds out poor performers while rewarding those who can present as competent in the contexts where promotions are decided. Those contexts — job interviews, pitches to senior leaders, annual reviews, strategic planning meetings, hallway conversations with people who make organizational decisions — are where charisma shines. They are not, generally speaking, contexts that reveal whether someone is analytically rigorous, comfortable with conflict, good at delivering bad news, or able to stay focused on unpopular but important details.
Job interviews don’t make visible the skills that matter. They make visible the ability to perform well in a job interview. Same thing with strategic planning meetings, hallway conversations with executives, etc. Our selection environments are set up in a way that surfaces skills that are made visible by charisma and obscures skills that are much harder to detect until you’ve hired someone and given them real responsibility.
Leaders who rise through these systems and are promoted because they excel at meeting the requirements of the system, not necessarily because they would excel as leaders, grow organizations that look just like the ones they came from. Leaders select leaders they understand — leaders who’ve impressed them in a presentation or an interview, worked closely with them, or otherwise come across as competent and confident. Leaders who are better at interacting with existing senior leaders than their predecessor might be, but who are not necessarily any better at the skills that drive organizational performance. Organizations end up with selection systems that reward charisma and believe they’re selecting based on substance.
To the extent that we actually select leaders based on performance rather than interview skills, we do so through a fog of what scholars have called the romance of leadership. Organizations systematically attribute variance in their performance to the quality of their leadership — both good outcomes to the skills and vision of their existing leaders, and bad outcomes to individual leadership failures rather than structural conditions or market realities.
When leaders take charge of an organization in favorable conditions, and those conditions lead to positive outcomes, we attribute those outcomes to their abilities. They’re seen as great leaders. When leaders take charge of an organization in unfavorable conditions and those conditions lead to negative outcomes, we attribute those outcomes to their inadequacies. They’re seen as poor leaders. From an organizational leader-fitness standpoint, it’s pure noise. But from the standpoint of how we select our future leaders? That attribution becomes the signal.
Great leaders who win during good times are charismatic leaders whose specific competencies — many of which are indeed qualities that make leaders better performers in selection systems, such as communication ability and general self-confidence — come to define the selection criteria for the next leader. Did her charisma cause that outcome? Did someone else’s charisma prevent her predecessor from achieving similar outcomes despite facing similar organizational challenges? Did anyone besides her succeed under those conditions with less charisma? Organizational selection processes are not designed to answer these questions. They attribute success to her leadership, select her successor based on similar traits, and move on.
So how do you hire less-charismatic idiots? Structural changes to the way organizations select leaders can reduce the weight that charisma carries in the decision-making process.
Written structured interviews with standardized competency questions make it harder for charismatic candidates to “wing it” and excel in an interview without actually having the underlying competencies they talked about. Work sample tests that ask candidates to perform the actual skills they’d be expected to perform on the job, rather than interview-focused skills like presentation ability and answer crafting, have been shown to significantly improve predictors of future performance. Blind evaluation of candidates’ analytical work removes the halo of confidence/experience that candidates bring to their interaction with evaluators. 360 review processes that solicit feedback from people who have seen candidates lead on the job, not just people who are responsible for choosing their next leader, can supplement the upwardly-biased picture organizations get from traditional interviews and leadership nominations.
We’ve known how to do this for decades. The confusion that arises from talent selection processes that systematically prefer charismatic presenters to strong performers is itself a product of those selection systems. Organizations that have promoted their way up are unlikely

Laurence Peter published his principle in 1969. Fifty-three years later, the research literature continues to confirm it. Employees are routinely promoted to positions that require skills they do not have, based on demonstrated excellence in positions that required different skills. The result is organizations populated, at every level above entry, with people operating at or near their threshold of incompetence.

The original formulation was satirical in register but serious in substance. Peter and Hull were describing something that practitioners recognized immediately and that subsequent empirical research has confirmed repeatedly. A 2019 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics examined promotion patterns across 214 companies and found that the best-performing individual contributors were consistently more likely to be promoted into management than their less individually productive peers, and that this promotion pattern was negatively correlated with subsequent team performance. The best salespeople, promoted into sales management, produced teams that performed worse than the teams of managers who had been less exceptional as individual contributors. The finding was robust across industries and organizational types.

What the original formulation missed, and what subsequent behavioral economics research has clarified, is the mechanism by which this happens. It is not simply that organizations fail to assess the skills required for higher-level positions. It is that the skills most visible and most legible to the people making promotion decisions are precisely the skills that predict success in the role being vacated, not the role being filled.

A technically excellent individual contributor is visible as excellent along the dimensions that individual contribution makes salient: output quality, problem-solving speed, domain knowledge, and the capacity for sustained independent effort. What is not visible, because it is not required in that role, is the capacity for motivating others, tolerating ambiguity, delegating effectively, delivering unwelcome assessments to people one is responsible for developing, and managing upward with the combination of candor and political awareness that organizational effectiveness requires. These are the skills that predict managerial success. They are systematically invisible during the period when promotion decisions are being made.

The problem is compounded by the social dynamics of promotion decisions. The people making promotion choices have typically observed the candidate performing in the current role over an extended period. They have developed a concrete, evidence-based assessment of the candidate’s competence along the dimensions the current role requires. The assessment of readiness for the new role, by contrast, is necessarily speculative and abstract. Under cognitive load and time pressure, decision-makers default to the concrete over the abstract. The candidate who is demonstrably excellent now is promoted over the candidate who might be more suited to the new role, because demonstrated current excellence is legible in a way that projected future suitability is not.

This is further distorted by what researchers have called the halo effect: the tendency to attribute positive qualities broadly to people who have demonstrated excellence in specific domains. The exceptional engineer is assumed to have the interpersonal and organizational skills that management requires, not because there is evidence for this but because excellence in one domain generates a general presumption of excellence. The halo effect is well-documented in laboratory settings. Its organizational consequences are underappreciated.

The organizations that have most successfully disrupted this pattern share a structural feature: they have separated the criteria for promotion from the criteria for current role performance and built explicit assessments of the skills required for the destination role rather than the origin role. This is not complicated in principle. It requires only that organizations accept that excellence in one role is not evidence of readiness for a different role, and build processes that reflect that acceptance. Assessment centers, structured behavioral interviews focused on managerial competencies, trial periods in acting roles, and the formal separation of individual contributor and management career tracks are all interventions with empirical support.

Most organizations have not implemented these interventions at scale. Most still promote their best salespeople into sales management, their best engineers into engineering management, their best clinicians into clinical administration. The research on the consequences is unambiguous and has been for decades. The practice continues because the alternative requires organizations to tell their best performers that excellence in their current role is not sufficient qualification for the next one. That conversation is difficult. The organizational cost of avoiding it is substantially higher than the cost of having it, but that cost is diffuse and delayed in a way that makes it easy to discount. This is itself a form of organizational self-deception: the substitution of short-term social comfort for long-term organizational effectiveness.