Are Humble Leaders Ever Genuine?
A news boy dressed in vintage knickers, newsboy hat and fake long Pinocchio nose stands with a fake ... [+] newspaper in the middle of a field in Utah, USA. He is trying to sell you fake news. getty  Scientific research suggests that people hold implicit leadership theories, which determine their informal and intuitive views on what good and bad looks like in leaders. Importantly, even when these beliefs are inaccurate, they will influence how people vote, and whether they pick one leader over another. This in itself is a big enough reason to pay attention to cultural and social stereotypes on leadership. For example, if most people think that leaders should be confident, aggressive, and tough, it is understandable that incompetent men over-index in leadership roles. However, there are times when lay beliefs about leadership will actually align with the scientific evidence. For example, if you ask the average person in the world whether it is preferable for leaders to be humble, you can assume that they will be in violent agreement with you. This is in line with what we have known for two decades now, namely that the best performing leaders are much more likely to be humble than arrogant. Unsurprisingly, those who are aware of their limitations, self-critical, coachable, and eager to learn from others, have more potential for leadership. Sadly, these same traits tend to make them less ruthless and charismatic in political elections, which explains why so many heads of states could easily fit the profile of a narcissistic rather than humble leader. In fact, an interesting question that emerges when we think about the natural tension between the desire to be in charge and occupy high status positions on one hand, and the tendency to be humble (and have an ego that is smaller rather than bigger than your actual talents), is whether leaders are ever truly humble, in the sense that their ambitions and aspirations may ordinarily suggest some grandiose and megalomaniac tendencies. Many political leaders, such as Trump, Putin, and Berlusconi, dont even bother faking humility, which is no problem for their followers. After all, every social interaction requires deep impression management and performance, and successful individuals, including leaders, are far less authentic than we think, in that they manage to create a desirable public persona that incorporates cultural norms about what people want and dont want to see in others. For compelling meta-analytic evidence on this you may want to consider the substantial psychometric overlap between measures of emotional intelligence, and measures of social desirability. What this means in non-technical terms is that we think of someone as a high EQ person if they seem calm, rewarding to deal with, and non confrontational in social interactions. In other words, theres a great deal of overlap between being a boring conformist, and being labelled emotionally intelligent. To be sure, there is a much darker interpretation of EQ which allows for savvy impression management, interpersonal manipulation, and Machiavellian tactics of deceit. After all, if you can read people like a book (the original definition of social intelligence, 90 years before HR and journalism popularized EQ as a hot leadership competency), you should be able to act in ways that adhere to their preferred models of good leadership. You probably dont need me to tell you this, since we have all been in social and professional situations where high status individuals deliberately fake bad, in the sense that they engage in artificial self-deprecation, unrealistic modesty, and over-the-top self-criticism. If you ever lived in Britain you will have learned to admire the art of showing off by making fun of yourself - the more brutally critical you are with you in public, the higher your status; and the more you self-congratulate, the more pathetic and inappropriate you will seem. All this makes perfect sense: it takes real confidence and entitlement to focus so much of your energies on pretending to be poorer, unluckier, uglier, or less interesting than you actually think you are.However, contrary to what people think, it is not really that important to be genuinely humble, not least because we are not really able to tell with any degree of objectivity whether someone truly means their humble brags or not, and whether their self-views are actually in sync with reality. In fact, by definition, if humility requires being better than you actually think, then we cant rely on your self-views as the ultimate parameter or benchmark to assess your humility. In that sense, we may be better off ditching motives altogether, especially if our goal is to detect whether you are trying to fool others, or may have fooled yourself already, and focus instead on your presentational style. Sure, we wont trust you if you seem fake, but in a way we should still prefer someone who makes an effort to come across as humble, even if they fake it, to someone who is genuinely arrogant, to the point of being utterly disinterested in being nice, listening to others, or showing a minimum awareness of their limitations: because they have no awareness at all, and too many limitations (including their lack of awareness).